Hmm… before I found this thread, I made each tile into a blueprint actor, but boy did that tank performance (probably because all meshes in them are now movable instead of static)!
So now, I’m researching how to “bake” all the static meshes out of each tile blueprint actor down to a level “module” consisting of a number of tiles, and then instance them into a larger world.
But is the best answer still to have each tile as a level? And then have levels upon levels? Sorry, using the wrong terminology here, because I haven’t looked into this area of Unreal Engine yet, but it sounds like an extreme amount of levels and I’m unsure how colliders and blueprint logic will work across them (I’m going to have more than 4000 of them at once… depending on how culling will work for this).
EDIT: Ok, made a super simple Editor Utility Widget to copy all staticmesh actors from the blueprint actors to the level, and went from 14k draw calls to 500. 