How to Reduce Unreal Cook Times With an Asset Audit

A long cook is often cooking content you do not ship. An asset audit trims it. Here is how to find and cut the dead weight.

How to fix it

1. Find unreferenced assets

Use the reference viewer and asset audit tools to identify assets nothing references and exclude them from the cook.

2. Right-size heavy assets

Cap texture resolutions and compress audio so the cook is not processing 4K art for a mobile build.

3. Use cook allowlists

Restrict the cook to maps and assets actually shipped so test and scratch content never enters a release cook.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.