How to create a seemingly endless world?

I am trying to understand a couple of things about making huge worlds in UE5.
I created a landscape in my level and decided that it is too small. I opened up another level, and in the landscape editor, I maxed out every setting that affected the landscape’s size. It seems it’s taking a lot of resources to create it, and edit it. My RAM was at 100%.

I am trying to make a huge world. There won’t be a lot of stuff in there, like foliage or other meshes.

How do I bypass the limits of the editor when creating a huge landscape?
What settings should I use to reduce performance cost?
Do I need world partition enabled?
Is generating chunks of landscape at runtime possible? And if so, is it expensive to do so performance wise?

Currently, I have simple landscape with a material and some noise that dictates the height. If I try to simply add a square to the landscape, the whole world goes flat.

I am trying to create a seemingly endless world. How can I achieve this?

Create the landscape. Then rescale it on the details (eg. 200 on all dimensions to make it twice the size).

This is how you get bigger landscapes. The quality of the landscape will reduce as you scale it so there is an acceptable limit.

They are bringing nanite to landscapes in 5.3 so you’ll get some detail back from scaling.

How do I resize the texture so I don’t lose that much quality? Do I just increase the amount of tiles?

You need a smart landscape material.

They are called landscape auto materials. They combine different textures at different scales, but they go beyond that and can add rocks and foliage. There are some free ones on the unreal marketplace and tutorials on YouTube for how to create one from scratch.

Scaling landscapes any which way other than on Z is a horrible idea for performance.
If you do it, you should take note of performance changes before/after and find ways to mitigate them.

An infinite landscape (using the unreal BS excuse of a tool for landacapes) is not possible.

Using meshes on the other hand, you can do pretty much anything.

Runtime-procedural world generation is definitely possible and not necessarily expensive, but it requires a very well thought out system to work. Not something a novice can do, unless they want to learn and sink several months into developing it.

Your best alternative would be a marketplace plugin - there are many, you need to check what looks best for you based on your needs.

Plausible alternatives to infinity, would be non-euclidian geometry - packman style;
Once you reach an end, the next bit looks exactly like the other and seemlessly cycles you back/forth the 2 points.

Large worlds, which seem infinite, on the other hand are quite possible if you switch back to engine versions that actually work (.18, .24/25 for instance).

With landscape tiles of the largest possible size at 8km with the least amount possible of components (2x2) you will get rather poor baseline performance, but will be able to get a lot of landscape impostors on screen before HLODs even have to come into play (250km^2 in one batch is my record size anyway, which isn’t all that).

Unfortunately, it is not really feasible to develop like so on a non developer computer (32GB ram at the very least if you can’t max it out, latest CPU with at around 4ghz 8 to 16 cores for load splitting, 3090/4090 gfx).
And even with a proper computer, there will be issues…

I am facing a challenge in creating expansive worlds within UE5 and would greatly appreciate some guidance and insights from experienced users. Here’s the situation: I have designed a landscape for my level, but I find it to be too small for my vision of a vast world :slightly_smiling_face:. To overcome this limitation, I decided to create a new level and maximize all landscape-related settings to achieve a larger size. However, I noticed that this approach consumes a significant amount of resources, and my RAM utilization reached 100%.

Landscape size = number of component = number of drawcalls.

The bigger the size, the more the components, the less performance.