Why does Unreal 5 insist on bringing back stuff I deleted?

Everytime I delete something from the outliner, I SAVE, and come back in and the same things I deleted are back again. Why is this happening, it is truly annoying. To top it off it is cluttering up things. Is this a known issue or is there something I am doing wrong with deleting things. I mean it seems pretty straight forward… Click the Actor, etc. and hit delete… Please help.

Hi Xoremus,

A curious problem.

Are you able to reproduce it in a new project? If you want to give me a list of steps to reproduce I’ll give it a shot on my end.

Cheers

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Thank God. I’m not the only one. Thought I was crazy. Move an object? No problem, saves fine. Delete it? It may come back, according to some set of mysterious rules I can’t work out. Delete it a second time, it may work, may not. What the heck, epic?
Are you using the firstperson starter project? I thought that might be related to the issue but I’m not sure. One thing that might help sometimes is, when saving, go to the map in content browser, right click and save from there.

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I havent had this issue for a bit. I believe I may have solved it by doing the following: turned off ‘save content’ in Edit → editor preferences ->loading and saving. it was wasting a huge amount of space on my HD with the saved/autosaves/game folder in my project. Basically making copies of huge meshes I was working on just in case of crashes I guess. I don’t need that. I deleted that, and also everything else in the ‘saved’ folder except for the folder named config. There was a ‘world partition’ folder in there that I was suspicious of, too, because I know that is related to the saving process. In the project I disabled world partition. I hope this fixed it for good… time till tell.

World Partition is doing this for me. I delete something but it comes back when I reload the cell.

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Same here. Haven’t figured out how to fix it yet. Maybe we just gotta wait for EPIC to fix it.

This may sound obvious, but also make sure you don’t 2 instances of the same project open as it will prevent file saves.

This keeps happening. I’m on 5.1.1.

Previously I couldn’t delete a Landscape. Even if I first deleted the streaming proxies, which allows you to delete the landscape itself (it’s not even an option otherwise), the landscape would still re-appear when loading the level. I just ended up modifying the landscape to be empty (i.e. using the landscape tool “Delete”, to remove all the pieces) and renaming the landscape “IndestructibleGhostLandscape” or something. I eventually just started a new level entirely for this and other reasons.

This time, the issue is happening to all sorts of actors and assets
A level instance, an empty folder in the world outliner, another landscape, and some random static meshes. All come back after deleting them, saving, and then loading up the level again. It’s even happening to assets I deleted from the Content Browser. I’m talking about some of those static meshes I mentioned trying the delete from the level. I also deleted the assets from the project entirely. They still come back when loading the level.

Update:
Feels stupid that this is what I had to resort to, but deleting the files with UE closed from file explorer / cmd worked. The files did not return. Of course, if you have a lot of files it can be a bit of a pain, but here’s how I did it:

  1. Select everything I want to delete in the world outliner in UE
  2. Right click and copy Actor(s) filepath
  3. Paste into Notepad++
  4. Close UE
  5. In Notepad++ Find and replace all "G:" with "del G:" (obviously use the start of your particular path here, mine were on the G drive)
  6. Find and replace all “/” with “\”
  7. Find and replace all “.uasset” with “.uasset /f”
  8. You should now have a ready to run script that will delete the listed files (i.e. the lines should be “del [filePath] /f”)
  9. Save as .bat and run it
  10. Done.

I had this happen with Landscape actors in the original 5.0.
I haven’t had it happen in any later versions including 5.0.3.
In 5.0 I had to create a complete new project to fix it.
In my case, it appeared to be an issue with the OFPA system, I verified that it isn’t deleting anything in those External_Actors folders.
So anything I deleted was still there.

Possible solutions:
If on Windows, set Unreal Editor to run as administrator.
Unreal’s revision control feature can cause this, check its setup.

I’m getting the same problem. It goes like this: Delete an actor, close out the editor, open editor, it may be there, maybe not, it may be their a few restarts later. Super weird. This is from a completely blank game, no starter content.