In UE 5.6. InstancedFoliageActors randomly get marked as changed / dirty without any changes by the user?

Development World Creation
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1

After we upgraded our project from UE 5.4. to UE 5.6. we have a problem with git version control. When a team member pulls the latest changes via git and afterwards starts the Unreal editor: they unexpectedly have a lot of random InstancedFoliageActors marked as changed / dirty.

This is a huge issue for our production, because if every team member gets this prompt to save the “changed” / dirty InstancedFoliageActors , everyone gets merge conflicts without having modified / painted any foliage files themselves.

This has already lead to dozens of work-hours lost and basically means that no one of our 15 team members can work on foliage right now. Because the foliage changes will inevitably get wiped by git merge conflicts.

Is there anything we can do to stop the engine from falsely marking the InstancedFoliageActors as changed / dirty?

Screenshot 2025-10-14 160029
Screenshot 2025-10-14 160029641×530 41.3 KB

Please find attached a screenshot of the issue. Prior to taking this screenshot the latest changes were pulled via git and the editor was started. But no changes were made to the project / map in editor. Then the editor was closed and these file changes pop up with the request to save them.

2

This is definitely not a source control issue but rather a specific setting in your project that needs to be debugged.

Are you building from source? Then you can take a look at the function UObjectBaseUtility::MarkPackageDirty and set a breakpoint to see what makes the files dirty. You also need to deoptimize the UObjectBaseUtility.cpp file.

It will be still a little trial and error.

To prevent merge conflicts you could also take a look at Anchorpoint when you work with Git. It has a file locking option and also allows you to revert modified actor files without closing Unreal. I am one of the devs of it.