UE5 procedural foliage takes a lot time to load

Hello, i have landscape 8x8km and for now i spawning foliage using procedural foliage spawner, i have 20 spawners to simulate it in resonable time but when i trying to play the level it takes 13 minutes to load, after that everything is good. I tried to build game and exe file takes +/- 10 minutes to load, and i wondering if for that big landscape should i paint foliage manually, does it make level load faster? Or is there any other efficient way of handling foliage in ue5?

Hey there.

Don’t know if you ever came up with a solution for this but I have the same problem that I’m currently trying to work through myself.

My map is 8km squared and covered in a super dense forest with even denser undergrowth.

Load times even in a packaged build take hours due to the number of foliage instances. The strange thing that I have noticed though, is that if collision is disabled on the static mesh foliage, load times are cut down to seconds.

My static mesh foliage are set to “query only”, ignore all collision channels, and have overlaps disabled, so it’s not like they should be doing anything that would explain this massive difference in load times.

But there is an astronomical difference in load times between collision enabled and collision disabled. If I load the map with collision disabled it loads fast, but when I then decide to enable collision after a little bit of a delay, I get a super long stall, just the same as when I load the map with foliage collision enabled.

I haven’t solved this mystery yet but hopefully someone out there knows what’s going on.