Regardless of where it’s ran, a synchronous operation is a blocking one, meaning you can’t do anything else until it is loaded. The construction script runs every time an actor is moved or when a property is changed on it. Technically soft ptr is always better because if a texture property on a tombstone is soft, you can still load and manage a tombstone without loading the texture by default. In any case it’s a memory saver and should normally be the default. With the async loading snippet I provided you can also specify a priority for the loading process which is very useful. For UI this should usually be “high” and for level objects “normal”.
Nice work on the stones, I like the sun shaped details.