Why do I need a DDC?

Just to keep things straightforward and simple without repeating Epic Games(which explains it way better than I can), having a primed DDC will help significantly decrease your build times. The larger your project is the bigger the time savings are

Example:

The Third Person Template takes my build machine about 10 minutes to build without a primed DDC. About 2 minutes was building the actual game and the other 8 minutes was cooking content which is stored in the DDC. When I primed my DDC, my builds then took 2 minutes.

The Setup

Filling your DDC is a fairly straightforward task. The most challenging portion will be figuring out where you want to store your DDC and how you plan on connecting with it inside your build.

Just like my previous posts, I use a combination of ue4cli and ue4-docker. You can achieve the same results just by building your game while connected to your network share

net use Z: \\%SERVER_NAME%\ddc /user:%DDC_USER% %DDC_PASS%
ue4 package Shipping

This config is connecting to my network share that stores my DDC content. The DDCUSER and DDCPASS variables are the username and password to the network share. Once I get that setup all I need to do is run the ue4 package Shipping command. This will just build the game like normal and while it is cooking, if content is missing from the DDC it will be added.

I run this build twice a week to speed up cook times on my personal and build machines