'Place many actors in the world that move in ticks' vs 'Have one actor move multiple actors in ticks'

How about… None of the above :cowboy_hat_face:

Not saying there’s an issue necessarily, but since you were looking forward to improving it, you can as well use a timeline to move your actors instead of Event Tick.

You can start playing the timeline on Begin Play, and reverse it when it’s completed. And to have them go back when they encounter an obstacle, you can connect Event Hit (the simulation should generate hit events tho so enable that, and just an extra info, only that isn’t enough for the hit events to be generated but I assume the other aspects would be all set in your case) to a Flip Flop node and then connect it’s A and B pins to the Play and Reverse pins of our new TL (which to which depends on the intial movement direction)