Unreal Custodian
34Reclaim the build caches your Unreal projects quietly hoard — without touching anything you authored.
The story
A few years of Unreal projects on one machine means tens or hundreds of gigabytes of pure rebuild artifacts — Intermediate, Binaries, DerivedDataCache, cooked content, staged builds. The Windows box this was tested against held 539 projects, 14 engines, and 2.0 TB of reclaimable cache with 17 GB of headroom left. Custodian finds all of it and tells you exactly what goes, what shrinks, and what it will not touch, before it touches anything. Content, Config, and the .uproject always survive.
Highlights
- ✦Standalone Mac and Windows app, or the same thing from the terminal — no Python required either way
- ✦Disk pressure is the trigger, age is the ranking — no naive '14 days untouched, delete it' rule
- ✦Freshness measured twice, because mtimes lie: filesystem times plus Unreal's rotated editor logs
- ✦Trash and Recycle Bin by default; --permanent only when you're actually out of room
- ✦clean is a dry run unless you pass --apply, and report has no destructive flag at all
Docs · live from GitHub wiki
Unreal Custodian
Reclaim the Intermediate, Binaries, DerivedDataCache and cache folders your Unreal Engine projects and engines have been quietly hoarding — without touching anything you authored.
On two test machines: 96 projects / 224 GB reclaimable on macOS, and 539 projects / 14 engines / 2.0 TB reclaimable on a Windows machine that had 17 GB free.
Start here: [[Quickstart]] · How it decides what's safe: [[Safety-Model]] · Config format: [[Configuration]] · Common issues: [[FAQ]] · What's next: ROADMAP.md
Pages
- [[Quickstart]] — install, first report, first cleanup
- [[Safety-Model]] — disk pressure vs. age, the never-delete list, the engine-install rule, freshness measured two ways
- [[Configuration]] —
.ueclean.jsonreference - [[GUI]] —
custodian.guiwalkthrough - [[FAQ]] — Trash vs.
--permanent, "why is my project skipped", Windows without Everything, symlinked plugins
Credits
Project discovery is built on Marshall's (@nocxr) Unreal Project Launcher — index-first discovery via Spotlight/Everything rather than a filesystem walk. See the README credits for the full story.
More in Unreal Engine
Blueprint Auto Layout
Pin-aware auto-layout for Unreal Blueprint graphs. Or as it should be called: ANTI-PASTA.
ue5-testflight
Fully autonomous UE5 → TestFlight pipeline for iOS, visionOS, and macOS. One command.
unreal-mac-getstats-fix
Runtime fix for the UE editor crash-on-launch on macOS 26 Tahoe. No source rebuild.
Want this level of depth on your own project?
The classes teach the same production techniques these repos are built with — scar tissue included.