How do I disable Zen

Development Platform & Builds
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Ok, I figured it myself and it was very satisfying.

Disclaimer: This is not suitable for Enterprise, company or people working in teams (using shared cache for large to huge projects).

Since I am developing as an indie, I don’t have a network or cloud cache and don’t need zen even if it make build time shorter. Waiting a few more minutes, worth my time than troubleshooting the engine or editor for hours.

Do not add overrides in your environment variables, command line or shortcut starting the engine (it won’t work when you put a project shortcut on your desktop anyway). Remove any of those if you already added one, if you leave them there, this solution will not work, since it relies on engine using its default cache configuration.

  1. Go to your engine folder, wherever you have installed it (mine is on drive F)

  2. Find BaseEngine.ini and make a backup (in case you have ruined it or later realize you did need zen server). It is in Engine/Config folder wherever you have installed it mine was in F:\Unreal\UE_5.4\Engine\Config\

  3. Replace everything under [InstalledDerivedDataBackendGraph] with everything under [InstalledNoZenLocalFallback]

  4. Change first line that says Root to Root=(Type=Hierarchical, Inner=Pak, Inner=CompressedPak, Inner=EnginePak, Inner=Local). This will remove Zen from list of the things to forcefully try before giving up and using local cache.

  5. Probably you will need to add bUseZenStore=false under [/Script/UnrealEd.ProjectPackagingSettings] as mentioned here Version 5.4 does not start, it gives an error. Help me fix it?. This doesn’t seem to be needed, as it started showing a strange message in the logs that bUseZenStore is deprecated and should be set to false which was already false.

And for me editor started from both project and editor’s own shortcut.

Note: Probably this will make some build processes slower, but I’m happy with not having 60Gb in my drive C, not having to worry about complicated process to recover cache etc. If cache breaks I’ll just delete the *.ddp file, go make a coffee and when I come back a new one is created. It is most probably Compressed.ddp inside your project or engine folder.

Note: [InstalledDerivedDataBackendGraph] is the default cache that engine will look for when it is starting. [InstalledNoZenLocalFallback] is the section which engine will look for when you add it to -dcc parameter to your command line or environment variable. There are a few more similar section right under that (Zen Only, Cloud Only, …), which is out of my fixes scope, but you can read those configs yourself.

Hope it helped

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