Unreal Engine cook logs can mislead: notes from 37 controlled runs

A developer packaged a small Unreal Engine test project and deliberately broke it in controlled, repeatable ways across Unreal Engine 5.4.4 and 5.8.3. They ran 13 clean baseline builds and 24 sabotaged runs covering six failure scenarios, such as a plugin crashing during startup and a duplicated plugin. The logs showed that the final error line is often misleading, and that the real cause sits earlier in the output. Most failures in the test (12 of 16) stopped before the cook even began, which the exit codes reveal. The author notes this covers one project on one machine with synthetic failures, so it reflects how Unreal reports errors rather than how often they occur in practice.