The Short Version; I built a tool that will get you and your horde workstations from zero to compiled engine in an single tool run, and it is freely available here; GitHub - SometimesYouNeverKnow/Unreal-Engine-Dev-Configurator
The Long Version; I was having some serious UBT errors and realized it could be as simple as my dependency chain in my dev environment across the different machines in my horde build so i built myself a configurator to simplify the process and take care of a lot of the work that it takes to set up a working dev environment repeatedly and in a standardized way that will successfully compile unreal and unreal projects without having to muck about in any of that horrible thinking stuff that nobody seems to have time for anymore. at this point i’ve got it boiled down to running a .bat as administrator to give you options for checking your dev environment, correcting insufficiencies in your vs 2022 setup and other tooling. From there, there are options to trigger a full engine build along with engine dependencies and effortlessly get yourself to the point where you’ve got your build registered with epic games launcher and horde is all happy and things just sort of work. It is, of course, highly experimental and being presented to you here on the basis that i thought it was useful enough that it might make someone elses life easier, and i’d like to welcome testing and feedback. there is full documentation in the repo and it is MIT licensed so you can do whatever you want with it.
As it stands, this is tooled for ue 5.7, based on epic’s current recommendations for setting up a build, which is why vs 2022 was chosen over 2026 or any other environment, but the way it is set up, you can tweak the profile easily and adjust settings as you see fit. i’ve still got more changes i’d like make to the tooling for setting up your derived data cache and horde, but this is a work in progress that i just put a bit of time into as made sense to simplify my own life. Use with caution. its not perfect, but for me it worked beautifully for me so far and it might do you some good too.