Conan Exiles Enhanced Servers, Five Months On: Iris, Native Linux and a 9 GB Idle Floor

The Enhanced server at a glance

Funcom announced Conan Exiles Enhanced on 23 April 2026 as a free Unreal Engine 5 upgrade built with Inflexion Games, and switched it on for Steam on 5 May. The client got the attention: new lighting, a smaller 68 GB install, Steam Deck support. The dedicated server changed more than its patch notes let on. Here is the current state, from Funcom's own posts and from the server build we installed today.

Iris networking and the performance story

The first four months were about catching up. Funcom's June community update named server performance and stability on official servers as "one of the main areas of focus since launch", and the June update improved loading of placed decorations from the database, which is exactly what hurts on old, heavily built servers.

The bigger change came with Update 2.2.0 on 15 September. It moved the game to Unreal Engine 5.8.2 and replaced the UE4 networking model with Iris, Epic's newer replication system. Funcom's explanation is worth quoting because it is the right mental model for a server owner: rather than repeatedly processing every replicated actor for each client, "Iris sends updates only when needed, reducing the server cost of managing large numbers of players and placeables". The same notes caution that Iris "doesn't remove all server performance limitations" given how much players build, and in the September community update Funcom said servers had seen "roughly half the lag they did before Iris was enabled".

That last caveat is the honest one. Placeables are the long-term cost of a Conan server, and Iris lowers the per-client price of each one without making them free. Decay settings and building limits still matter.

A few smaller server-side changes from the 2026 patch notes that are easy to miss:

• Hotfix 1.0.2 added an opt-in launch argument, -SendUnattendedBugReports, for sending crash reports to Funcom, and fixed IPv6 servers not appearing in the server browser.
• Hotfix 1.0.3 made -MULTIHOME send server browser registration over the same interface, which fixes listing problems on machines with several IPs.
• Hotfix 1.0.1 fixed loading of renamed mod pak files on dedicated servers and raised the default allowed ping to 300.

What an idle Enhanced server actually uses

Funcom's proposed PC client requirements for Enhanced list 16 GB of RAM on both the minimum and recommended tiers, with an SSD required, but there is no published figure for the server. So we measured one. On a 24-thread Linux machine, with a fresh database and nobody connected, the server process's resident memory went like this:

Two things to take from that. First, the floor is high: almost 9 GB before a single player, a single thrall or a single wall exists. Second, it was still creeping upward when we stopped it, so give a long-running server room to grow and restart it on a schedule. The merged map is a plausible reason for the size, since the Siptah content loads into the same world (the log shows the Siptah mod controller being loaded at map start), but Funcom has not said so, and we did not measure the UE4 server on the same machine to compare.

Our practical reading: 12 GB is a floor for a small private group, 16 GB is the comfortable number for a busy server with bases and thralls, and mods push it higher. The game is also sensitive to single-thread speed, as most Unreal survival servers are; our single-thread CPU piece explains why a fast core beats many slow ones.

The native Linux build the patch notes skipped

For years, the standard answer to "can I run a Conan server on Linux" was Wine. That answer is out of date. Steam's depot list for the server tool now carries a 64-bit Linux depot of about 4.3 GB on the public branch, while the same depot on the conan-exiles-legacy branch is empty. In other words, the Linux server arrived with Enhanced.

We pulled it with SteamCMD, forcing the Linux platform, and the install contains exactly what you would hope for:

steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType linux +force_install_dir ~/conan \
  +login anonymous +app_update 443030 +quit

./ConanSandboxServer.sh -log

ConanSandboxServer.sh is a three-line launcher that marks ConanSandbox/Binaries/Linux/ConanSandboxServer-Linux-Shipping executable and starts it. That file is a native x86-64 ELF binary, and a BattlEye server library (BEServer_x64.so) sits next to it. A user on Funcom's forum reached the same conclusion in August. We did not find a Funcom announcement about it in the 2026 patch notes, which may be why so many guides still talk about Wine.

First-boot notes from our run:

• Config files are generated under ConanSandbox/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/ (ServerSettings.ini, Engine.ini), not under a WindowsServer folder, so copy-pasted Windows paths will point at nothing.
• The world database is ConanSandbox/Saved/game_0.db, and the server writes a backup copy of it every time it starts. That gives you a short history on the same disk, but it is not a substitute for an off-machine backup.
• The server starts a Funcom telemetry thread and posts events to a Funcom endpoint. A request that has not finished does not hold the server up, but it shows up as HTTP warnings in the log at shutdown.

If you have been running Conan under Wine, the native build is the obvious move. It removes a compatibility layer from every crash investigation, and the Linux CPU and memory picture becomes the real one rather than Wine's. For how other games handle the same Linux question, compare our Empyrion on Linux notes, where Wine is still the only road.

The price of the merge: Siptah bases and one-way saves

The headline change for server owners at launch was the merge. Funcom's FAQ: "If you're hosting a server, both maps can exist on the same server at the same time." Players travel between the Exiled Lands and the Isle of Siptah without restarting, and access to Siptah still requires the DLC. Siptah communities paid for it. The island moved into the Exiled Lands world, its coordinates changed, and Funcom said plainly that "bases on the Isle of Siptah cannot be preserved in the UE5 update". Characters could be carried across with the Server Transfer Tool before the switch; buildings could not.

Exiled Lands servers got the gentler path: UE4 databases are "converted to separate Conan Exiles Enhanced save files when the updated server is run", and the live file becomes game_0.db. Two things still catch people out. Steam renamed the install folder from "Conan Exiles Dedicated Server" to "Conan Exiles Enhanced Dedicated Server", which breaks scripts with hard-coded paths. And the door only opens one way: "While UE4 databases will be readable by UE5, the reverse is not true." Keep the UE4 game.db somewhere safe until you are sure you will never need it.

Mods, the Legacy branch and who can join

Funcom says Enhanced "fully supports mods, but some might need to be upgraded". On the server side, Hotfix 1.0.1 made Legacy (UE4) mods ignored while initially leaving them in modlist.txt, and removed once active mods are changed. If a mod you depend on has not been ported, it simply will not load; check the log rather than assuming the server is broken.

The UE4 server lives on as the conan-exiles-legacy Steam branch ("UE4 version of Conan Exiles Dedicated Server"). Funcom is clear that on PC this version gets no additional updates, support, Bazaar access or official servers, so it is a museum, not a platform.

Who can join is the part that catches communities out. The client version must match the server's. Enhanced launched as a Steam-only upgrade, consoles stay on UE4, and Funcom's launch FAQ said Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store players stay on the UE4 version, with a later release there only under consideration. A mixed group with an Epic player cannot all share one Enhanced server. Decide which version your community lives on before you upgrade the box.

The authoritative reference for the transition remains Funcom's own Enhanced announcement and FAQ. Whatever you choose, keep copies of your world database somewhere other than the server; our piece on who owns your game save explains why that matters even more on rented hardware.

Related reading

• Game Server Sizing: RAM, CPU, Disk Per Game Type (With Real Numbers)
• Why Single-Thread CPU Performance Dominates Game Servers (And Which Chips to Pick)
• Empyrion Dedicated Server on Linux 2026: The Wine/Docker Reality
• Who Owns Your Game Save? Host Data Lock-In and Lost Worlds