I was actually thinking more along the lines of trees, rocks, and so on. There was a lot of talk about the new huge landscape support. The core of that is just the ability to have really giant heightmaps, as far as I can see, but the “kite” demo also shows lots of trees, foliage, and even some animals. So I’m wondering if they have some magic for managing huge numbers of actors that aren’t the heightmap. Thanks again for the advice.
The trees and rocks in the Kite demo are using the built-in foliage system. You can read more about that here: Open World Tools in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation
Other than that, there is the InstancedStaticMesh component, but there’s currently no nice editor features to support it so it’s a bit of a hassle to use.