Stephen Swires

Stephen Swires

Game Developer, Programmer. Currently Associate Tech Director @ Blackbird Interactive.

Using Legendary for Unreal Engine Marketplace

4 minute read

A common pitfall of working with Marketplace content for Unreal Engine is that you require an actual engine installation for a compatible engine version in the Epic launcher to download content you’ve acquired from the Unreal Marketplace. There are a few situations where this can be especially frustrating:

  • You’re on a source build.
  • You’re using Linux for your main development environment.
  • You want to upgrade a third party plugin to the newest engine version.

This is where Legendary can help. Legendary is a command-line client for the Epic Games Store which allows you to download content you’ve purchased (or got for free in a giveaway). This is originally designed to enable downloading games you own on EGS then allowing you to play them on Linux or macOS through tools like WINE. However, a hidden feature of this CLI client is that it also allows you to download Unreal Engine content, which is itself hidden behind a command line switch when listing content.

It is important to note that Legendary will only allow you to download content you own, either bought or claimed for free. It is not a piracy tool.

Installing Legendary

You can grab the latest release on the GitHub release page where you can download an executable for your system, or if you have Python installed (and added to PATH) then you can also install it with pip install legendary-gl.

The first thing you’ll want to do after installing Legendary is to run the legendary auth command. This will open a web browser which will prompt you to login to your Epic Games account if you’ve not already done so. Once this is complete then you’ll want to copy the authorization_code given post-login and paste it into the command prompt. From here you should be ready to list and install your content.

Listing content

The most basic command to list all content you own on EGS and acquired Unreal Engine content is to run

legendary list --include-ue

This will give you a huge list of all the games and Unreal Engine content you own on EGS. Unfortunately, Legendary does not provide any of its own command line switches to filter any of the results, but you can use Select-String in Powershell or grep in Linux or macOS to filter out the results. For example entering

legendary list --include-ue | Select-String "Lyra"

should provide a nice tidy list of the Lyra starter game only:

[cli] INFO: Logging in...
[Core] INFO: Trying to re-use existing login session...
[cli] INFO: Getting game list... (this may take a while)

 * Lyra Starter Game (App name: Lyra_5.0 | Version: 5.0.2-20293145+++UE5+Release-5.0-Windows)
 * Lyra Starter Game (App name: Lyra_5.1 | Version: 5.1.0-23058290+++UE5+Release-5.1-Windows)
 * Lyra Starter Game (App name: Lyra_5.2 | Version: 5.2.0-25360045+++UE5+Release-5.2-Windows)

For anything we want to download we should keep a note of the “App name” field in the results. In the case of Lyra for UE5.2, this will be Lyra_5.2.

Installing content

Now we have our app name, we’re ready to install something from the Marketplace. The simplest way to get started is to run the install command:

legendary install Lyra_5.2

This will install Lyra for 5.2 inside ~/Games (ie. %HOMEPATH%\Games on Windows), however there is a little bit of control you can have over this:

# Install to a specific directory
# This will install to C:\Unreal\Lyra_5.2
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --base-path C:\Unreal

# Force a redownload
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --force

# Verify an existing installation
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --repair

When content is installed, running legendary install against a piece of content will also download updates if they’re available.

Downloading a subset of content

With Legendary, it’s also possible to download only a subset of the content. This is useful if you’re interested in one thing (a specific asset, or one of the various plugins in Lyra) or you’re low on disk space. You can see a listing of files by trying the following in PowerShell:

# List all the files in Lyra
legendary list-files Lyra_5.2

# List all the source code from the Lyra game module
legendary list-files Lyra_5.2 | Select-String Source/LyraGame/

# List all plugins in Lyra that aren't modular gameplay plugins
legendary list-files Lyra_5.2 | Select-String Plugins/ | Select-String "GameFeatures" -NotMatch

With this information, we can construct our command to install a part of the Lyra starter game:

# Download LyraGame module source
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --prefix Source/LyraGame/

# Download Lyra plugins (excluding modular gameplay)
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --prefix Plugins/ --exclude Plugins/GameFeatures/

# You can also chain --prefix and --exclude parameters
# In this example we download the Source and Plugins folder
legendary install Lyra_5.2 --prefix Plugins/ --prefix Source/

Summary

You should now have a basic grasp of using Legendary to download Unreal Engine Marketplace content. The commands shown work just as well for sample games as they do for plugins and assets. Feel free to reach out to me for any feedback or anything you want clarifying.