I’m reporting a catastrophic failure in Unreal Engine 5.6 that resulted in the complete loss of over a year of work. This was not caused by user error, crash, or manual overwrite. Unreal silently erased multiple and files—none of which were open—without warning, without autosaves, and without any recovery path.
Technical Summary:
• Unreal Engine preloaded levels into memory without opening them in the viewport
• Phantom dirty flags were triggered—likely by plugin scans or internal indexing
• Autosave ignored these levels because they weren’t visibly active
• On shutdown, Unreal overwrote every level with blank 14 KB shells
• No backups were created. No autosaves exist for the affected maps. No rollback is possible
These were my main game levels. I did not open them. I did not modify them. Unreal did—and it erased them without consent. The autosave system failed to protect them. The shutdown routine destroyed them. And the engine provided no warning, no safeguard, and no trace.
This is not an isolated bug. It’s a systemic pipeline failure.
Unreal’s save logic allows phantom edits to trigger destructive overwrites. Its autosave system is blind to non-visible activity. Its shutdown behavior lacks atomic protection for critical assets. And its file handling offers no forensic trace when things go wrong.
Personal Impact:
I am a solo developer working in total isolation. I live with severe depression, anxiety, and trauma. I am housebound, living on support, and have battled addiction and grief for years. My projects—Titanic Historia and Historia Luminara—were not just creative outlets. They were lifelines. They helped me survive the loss of loved ones, the collapse of friendships, and multiple mental health crises.
Unreal Engine 5.6 erased a year of that work. Not through a crash. Not through a mistake.
Through silent overwrite behavior that ignored visibility, ignored autosave logic, and left no backups. I didn’t just lose files. I lost memories. I lost meaning. I lost the only thing keeping me tethered to hope.
This was my backup project. The original version had already been broken by Unreal 5.6. I wasn’t using complex systems—no Blueprints, no character controllers, no experimental features. I was simply building environments. And yet, Unreal purged every level. It makes no sense—unless this overwrite behavior is by design.
I once had 100 crashes in one day. “Access violations” and errors that made absolutely no sense. Unreal crashes for no reason. There’s no connection between them. Anything and everything can crash—using the sequencer? Crash. Opening a material? Crash. There’s no pattern. It’s chaos.
I’ve spent thousands on the asset store over the year. I put all my heart, loss, and grief into every part of my game world. I took the time and care to craft everything—every little detail. And Unreal 5.6 overrode all of it. Every single level. Gone.
My reconstruction of the RMS Titanic—all the decks—gone. Wiped. An empty map. Everything, gone.
And why does it feel like sabotage? Because the only levels affected were my work. All the demo levels, all the example content? Fine. My work? Gone. I appear to have one map left over.
I keep trying to tell myself, “No, Epic wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t design a game engine that could do that.” And yet here we are.
The assets are fine. The merged assets are fine. But everything else—wiped out.
I can’t tell you how broken I am. There is no wording or reply you could ever give that can justify or excuse having my entire project wiped out.
Just now, I tried to migrate the only surviving map. Unreal crashed instantly. No warning. No error. No log. It simply shut itself off. This wasn’t a graceful failure—it was a silent exit. And it happened during the transfer of the last remaining piece of my project. The corruption isn’t isolated. It’s systemic. Even the fragments Unreal left behind aren’t safe. When only my levels are affected, when only my work is erased, when the engine crashes only on my content—it stops feeling like a coincidence.
you most likely won’t hear from me again.
dont think I can recover from this one.
