How do I get a project to show up in the Project Browser?

I’ve got a project I’ve been working on a for a while and for some reason, even with the new update, it never shows up in the recent Projects list in the Project Browser. I have to browse to it to open it every time. This wouldn’t be a big issue, but this has a side effect in that I’m not able to choose this project as one to add things to from the Marketplace.

So, how do I get this project to show up in the Project browser so I add things to it from the Marketplace?

I’m in the new UE5 and the project was imported into Preview 2 of UE5 from UE 4.27.

Thanks.

So, by default, the launcher will ONLY see projects in the <Documents>\Unreal Projects\ directory. This is something I find deeply annoying.

Thankfully, there is a way to change it!

On Windows, you can navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\EpicGamesLauncher\Saved\Config\Windows\GameUserSettings.ini and open that in a text editor. You’ll see a line in the [Launcher] section like:

CreatedProjectPaths=C:/Users/<you>/Documents/Unreal Projects

If you have things in, say, D:\Source\AwesomeGameStuff, then you can change the file to read:

CreatedProjectPaths=C:/Users/<you>/Documents/Unreal Projects
CreatedProjectPaths=D:/Source/AwesomeGameStuff

Next time you run the launcher, et voila, it will also find any projects in D:\Source\AwesomeGameStuff.

On macOS, the file you want will be ~/Library/Preferences/Unreal Engine/EpicGamesLauncher/Mac/GameUserSettings.ini – the change is otherwise the same.

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That all makes sense. However, if I have projects in K:\OneDrive\GameDev\ it should show me all projects in that folder, correct? because that’s where the project is, yet it doesn’t show up as a recent project.

I’m going to add the path directly to the project and see if that helps. Thanks for the info!

EDIT - Yeah, so that didn’t work. One thing I noticed is that, of all the paths set in that config file, this one is the only one with spaces. However, the spaces were added by Unreal when I imported the project into UE5 Preview 2 from 4.27.

The path to the project is K:\OneDrive\GameDev\Abducted426UE\Abducted426UEShop 4.27 - 2 5.0

The config file has paths to set to both K:\OneDrive\GameDev\ and K:\OneDrive\GameDev\Abducted426UE. All other projects in both paths show up fine and one of them has spaces so the spaces don’t seem to matter. The project in question works fine when opened manually, it just doesn’t show up in the Project Browser. I have found that it does occasionally show as option to add stuff to from the marketplace, but not always. Haven’t found a pattern there yet.

I wonder… if you rename it to not have the dash in the name, does that change anything? Spaces are, in my experience, fine… but I can’t recall ever using a dash in one.

My only other guess would be something keeping it from parsing the .uproject file, but I would assume in that scenario you would not be able to launch it by clicking on that, and it sounds like you can.

See I would think that as well, if it weren’t for the fact that it was Unreal that renamed it to include the dash when doing the conversion from 4.27 to 5.0.

Although as I think of it now, the name is kind of long and I did get a warning when loading a demo project about names being too long…So tonight I’ll see if maybe the name or path are just too long for it to be happy with.

FWIW, I did just manage to seemingly break the project listing by creating a project name longer than 25 characters (though I have no idea if that was the actual reason or just pure chance after I created and deleted enough projects in a row). Yours appears to be 31, so that might well be the reason?

If not, I dunno; I’m out of other ideas beyond “launcher’s haunted”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well. I’ve renamed it and it’s well under the 20 character limit I’d gotten the warning for but it still doesn’t show up. So, it could be that the launcher is haunted. Hehe

If I make a new project, can I import this one to it? Or import the existing levels and everything they use/contain?

Just loaded a project from the Browser that still gives me the 20 character warning. So, even though that one is longer than 20 characters, it still shows up in the browser. This is so weird.

I found out how to do it!
Simply click “Launch” on the Unreal version you have installed, and then when you get to the screen where you can create your own project, click browse, and there you can locate the .uproject file. Easy peasy.

Natigate to:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\UnrealEngine\5.4\Saved\Config\WindowsEditor
replace 5.4 with a version of the engine that your project is created with
then open EditorSettings.ini file.
Add path of a folder that your project folder located in, for example if your .uproject file is inside
C:/Parent/ProjectName
add
CreatedProjectPaths=C:/Parent under [/Script/UnrealEd.EditorSettings] section