Two Directional Lights, one Scene

as the title suggests I have a single scene with two directional lights in it… and from what I’ve been reading this is a problem. hopefully, yall have some suggestions.

I have built a blueprint that given a specific date and place, an accurate-ish model of where the sun and moon are in the sky and the phase of the moon is created. I use this model to position and angle two directional lights that mimic the sun and the moon.

in the editor, it looks how I would expect it to look. both lights going about the business of being the sun and the moon. Each one illuminating things, casting regular and volumetric shadows etc… But when I hit play to test the game one of the Lights stops doing any volumetric work at all(usually the sun).

after a bunch of poking about the interwebs, it seems to be that unreal just doesn’t like 2 directional lights at the same time, which is slightly confusing on two levels. First, it looks fine in the editor, so why wouldn’t it be WYSIWYG, and second, in the play mode the two lights “seem” to be doing all the other things just fine(illuminating and casting regular shadows).

I have tried a few solutions using one light only, but the moon is not simply up when the sun is down nor is it always down when the sun is up so a one light method is problematic at best.

so here are my questions:

is it true unreal only uses one directional light for things like volumetric shadows?

if this is true is there a way to set priority on a directional light so it does all the volumetric work?

does having multiple direction lights cause any inherent problems in unreal besides the obvious performance hit?

am I just missing something?

thanks in advance
-j