Build Unreal Engine from Source

Install Visual Studio Community 2019 & 2022

As the very first thing I recommend installing Visual Studio Community 2019 & Visual Studio Preview 2022.

Visual Studio Community 2022 serves the sole purpose of building Unreal Engine, as it is noticeably faster in that than Visual Studio 2019.

Visual Studio Community 2019 will be your actual IDE to code in, as Visual Studio 2022 isn't Unreal Engine ready yet.

Both feature the same installer, this setup is enough for now.

Visual Studio might recognize missing components automatically at a later point, in that case it will install them for you trouble-free and very easy.

Download Unreal Engine Source

Decide whether you want to download Unreal Engine 4 or 5.

Unzip them to one of your hard drives, my Unreal Engine 4 folder is named UnrealEngineFourPreview & my Unreal Engine 5 folder is named UnrealEngineEarlyAccess.

But you can name them whatever you want as long as the name is between 6-24 characters.

Build Unreal Engine

Inside your folder click the folder-path and replace it with cmd, press Enter.

Type Setup.bat

Type GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2019 or GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2022

Open the generated .sln file with Visual Studio 2022 Preview.

Now a warning of this look could appear

Click install and install the missing components

Press Clean

Press Build

Set as Startup project

Press Debug