Might be ue5 being a broken mess then.
All of my foliage actors are loaded at all times so I can have my trees visible from the other side of the map. All my other foliage like grass, ferns, bushes etc are culled at about 15-30 meters away from the player.
All I know is that when I run the packaged game, it takes hours to load. Unless I use world partition to load only a small number of foliage actors at a time or if disable collision on the foliage instances.
When my foliage has collision enabled, overlaps are set to “off”, collision response to all channels is set to “ignore”, collision type is set to “query only” and the static meshes for the foliage only use “simple collision”. I only need them to have query collision on so I can interact with them via raytraces etc.
But disabling collision is like a miraculous cure.
I’ll look into the potential of an engine bug with the collision testing on load like you suggested. Most of the foliage is generated by procedural foliage spawners and they do do a “collision with world” check when you generate the foliage, so maybe its bugged out and trying to generate again on load or something stupid.
Thanks for the idea.