That’s a lot of tris for what is essentially a cylinder.
Reduce the geometry like by 90% or whatever percentage you can without loosing details.
Aim for like 200 tris to a trunk.
Each Branch a max of 500 - verts, not faces.
It’s a horrible idea because you won’t be able to have more than 50 trees or so as skeletal meshes without a major performance drop.
You can double down on horrible when you consider the fact that really, the trees only have to bend and move when the monkey or enemy or whatever else is near.
If you only need 50 trees, you may be able to swing it.
If you need performance, you have to let each tree transform from an instance to a skeletal mesh based on proximity to whatever other actor.
I have a plugin that does this this foliage, but it may not cut it for your use case.
http://mosthostla.com/gamedev/dynofoliage/
You can check out the videos for a general idea of how it functions though.
You would then just replicate something similar in behavior to get performance out of it.
Getting monkey or whatever to move it’s a separate AI discussion of its own.
I would suggest coming back to it when you have the base going so that you can try out different suggestions for it.