I see that this is a change that we should have communicated better and prepared you all for and I apologize for that.
The reason for the change is based on everything we’ve learned in the last year while updating Fortnite to make the most of UE5 features. With Public Beta coming we wanted to be sure people were authoring content in the most optimal way for how Fortnite works today and the direction it’s going. That means having Nanite enabled for better rendering performance on platforms where other high-end UE5 features are available (Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps). As our internal UEFN projects grew in complexity we began to see a lot of performance issues without Nanite being enabled.
In the static mesh editor you can use “Show Nanite Fallback” to see the traditional LOD meshes and settiings, and you can change the Preview Rendering Level in the main viewport to do the same.
More notably is this where the prop maintains its vertice count at an insanely far distances
This is fine. Nanite renders more efficiently and manages detail itself so its expected that you may see more detail at long distances than with traditional polygon meshes.
Here are screenshots of Nanite Enabled plants:
This does look odd. Would you mind sharing the uasset of this mesh?