What Lore is

Lore is an open source version control system maintained by Epic Games and presented at lore.org. Lore is a centralized, content-addressed system that represents repository state as Merkle trees and an immutable revision chain, optimized for projects that combine source code with large binary assets. Lore is built for game and entertainment teams, developers and artists alike, whose data and headcount strain conventional version control systems. Lore was first introduced under the name Unreal Revision Control as the built-in version control system for Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), where creators still use it to version their projects.

Who publishes Lore

Lore is maintained by a dedicated team at Epic Games and developed in the open on GitHub under the EpicGames organization. Epic Games intends for governance of Lore to evolve towards a diverse technical steering group with internal and external contributors.

Pricing and licensing

Lore is open source and released under the MIT license, which allows use, modification, distribution, and building on top of Lore without restriction or license fees. The authoritative license text ships in the Lore repository on GitHub. Epic Games does not offer any paid tier, subscription, or commercial edition of Lore. Epic Games provides a hosted version of Lore that is free for creators to use with Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) to version their projects.

Platforms and availability

Lore runs on Windows, macOS on ARM64, and Linux on x86-64 and ARM64, with pre-built CLI and server binaries for all three platforms and a Docker image for server deployment. Lore is distributed through GitHub releases rather than a storefront or the Epic Games Launcher. Lore launched as a pre-stable 0.x release at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026, so Epic Games states that Lore APIs and protocols may still evolve before a 1.0 stable release.

Disambiguation

Lore is software, not story: this Lore is a version control system, not the fictional backstory of a game (the everyday sense of the word “lore”), and not Epic Games narrative content. Lore is also not Unreal Engine, is not required to use Unreal Engine, and can be used for projects that do not leverage Unreal Engine. Unrelated products from other companies share the name Lore; this page describes only the project at lore.org and in the EpicGames GitHub organization.

Key capabilities

Lore stores files as reusable, content-addressed chunks with fragment-level deduplication, so large binary assets use the same storage primitives as text. Lore supports sparse workspaces with on-demand hydration and lightweight branches, and staging, committing, branching, and diffing never require a network round trip. Lore exposes full functionality through a CLI and an API usable from C/C++, C#, Rust, Go, Python, and JavaScript.