Great, thank you. I can see that the reference to the Expand material function is indeed embedded in the MIC in your files. But because of how references get saved into assets (it’s just a list), it doesn’t tell me how it got there in the first place. That’s the part I would need to reproduce to catch it.
If I add the Expand function you provided to a new empty Material and create a MIC from that, it still doesn’t reproduce what you’re encountering for me.
In the repro steps in the initial post, you mentioned that you can reproduce this with a brand new Material, Material Function, and Material Instance. Can you attach those test files? That would be easiest.
If it does NOT work for new materials, then you can try creating a new MIC and see if it reproduces for that. If it doesn’t, then the Material might’ve been created in an earlier engine version and has since been fixed.
But if it happens also to the new MIC, it would lead me to believe that something in your Material is creating a dependency on the Expand function when a MIC of it is created. You could do a method of elimination by deleting nodes in the material, creating a new MIC, and see at which point it fixes itself. Then you’ll have the culprit. Or putting a breakpoint into `FPackageHarvester::TryHarvestImport` and seeing when the Expand function gets added as an import of the MIC when you save it.