Nanite vs. Traditional LODs: Best practices for a solo horror project?

Development Programming & Scripting
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Hi everyone, I’m a solo developer working on a horror game in UE5. I’m using an RTX 4060 Ti (16GB VRAM) and I’m a bit confused about when to stick with Nanite and when to manually set up LODs.

  1. For indoor environments with lots of small props, is Nanite always the better choice over LODs?

  2. Does using Nanite for everything significantly increase the disk size of the final build?

  3. What is the most efficient way to handle LODs for non-Nanite objects (like foliage or transparent meshes)?

Any advice for a beginner would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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For a solo horror project, the best practice is usually:

Use Nanite by default for static environment assets, and keep traditional LODs for things Nanite still does less gracefully, like some foliage, masked/translucent materials, heavy mesh deformation, or special gameplay objects. Nanite is designed to handle very high-detail static meshes with automatic fine-grained LOD and occlusion culling, so it saves a lot of manual LOD work. (Epic Games Developers)

A good horror-game rule is:

  • Nanite: walls, floors, props, furniture, statues, rubble, modular environment pieces

  • Traditional LODs: characters, animated/deforming meshes, some vegetation, and anything using tricky masked/translucent material setups a lot (Epic Games Developers)

Why this works well for horror:

  • horror levels usually benefit from dense detail, close-up assets, and strong atmosphere

  • Nanite helps you get that detail faster as a solo dev

  • but horror also needs stable performance, so avoid assuming Nanite solves everything—materials, lighting, shadows, and post-process can still be the real bottlenecks (Epic Games Developers)

Simple recommendation:
Start with Nanite for most static world geometry. Only build manual LOD workflows for assets that are animated, shader-heavy, foliage-heavy, or clearly causing performance issues in profiling. That is usually the best time-vs-quality tradeoff for a solo project. (Epic Games Developers)

If you want, I can also give you a very practical asset checklist like “when to use Nanite / when not to” for horror production.