Lost my entire project today and I’m feeling utterly broken.
I opened my project and found nothing. A year of work—gone. Not corrupted, not misplaced, but deliberately overwritten with empty shells. Even the backups I trusted had been poisoned. Unreal Engine didn’t just fail me—it erased me.
Unreal Engine 5.6 didn’t just crash or corrupt a file. It systematically erased every map I built—the core project files where all my work lived. Then it went further: it reached into the autosaves, the very backups meant to protect me, and overwrote those with the same empty 14 KB shells.
The assets I bought are still tied to my account and can be re‑downloaded. But the maps—the unique worlds I created, the arrangement of every detail, the meaning I poured into them—are gone. That’s the difference between having a box of paints and losing the painting itself.
And as Paranoid as this sounds, it feels like sabortage.
Only my maps were destroyed. Epic’s demo content survived untouched.
Old autosaves weren’t skipped—they were actively replaced with blanks.
Every destroyed file ended up the same tiny size, proving overwrite, not random corruption.
No logs, no warnings, no recovery path.
This isn’t what a random bug looks like. This is targeted erasure.
I’m heartbroken. These projects weren’t just files—they were lifelines. I built them through grief, isolation, and trauma. They were the only things keeping me tethered to hope. And Unreal didn’t just take them—it poisoned the backups too, so there’s nothing left to recover.
This isn’t user error. This isn’t a crash. This is a systemic overwrite failure that behaves like sabotage: it targeted my maps, destroyed my backups, and left me with nothing but emptiness.
One map has survived.
the rest have been completely over written with the same blank map.
12kb/13kb/14kb
when opening them, nothing. Just a blank screen.
even the autosaves. All over ridden. every. single one of them.
all my work, heart. everything. Gone.
Only screen shots and videos remain.
this is not something I can ever recover from.