UE5 - World Partition - Massive Map Sizes?

One way to solve a problem is to sidestep it. Remember: there is no spoon

Take yer normal 2k landscape, RVT, etc and just-scale the landscape by 5x whatever times. If you can accept that you will lose some of the fine-grained detail this will work; it’s the same 256 components I had at 2km by 2km but now it’s 5x bigger on a side and in the world. This would be a 10km by 10km area.

Use Heightmesh/Nanite-Landscape deformation at the small-scale for your bumps, rocks, etc. You won’t really need these in the height-information. These details can scale with the UVs of your textures/shaders so they can be independent of the underlying gross-featured landscape, thus you can make all the small bumpy-stuff very dense if you so choose. In other words scaling the landscape doesn’t scale-up the details necessarily, you can claw that back in materials.

You CAN have both worlds if you are flexible.

If you are using the Heightmesh, I would recommend against using World Partition, for the landscape at least. Functionally it does work with the rendering to the RVT, and everything else downstream but as the distant, streamed meshes are less-than what the actual landscape is, you get funky shadows where they are not supposed to be. You can use WP but take the landscape out of it (which if you are using heightmesh should not render landscape in main-pass anyways…).

More like
“You can have both worlds if details do not matter and you do not need a 1:1 accurate result”.

The reason why it works is that instead of having 65535 components on screen, when you scale up by 5 its very likely that a huge amount of them get occluded entierly.
(Not 65535/5 likely much more than that. On a 2km landscape you barely ever see more than 300 components save for flat under developed maps).
This would indeed improve performance.

But you’d have to put in meshes for just about everything, and use decals to apply forest paths and the like.
Whatever you save performance wise ends up spent in both development time and rendering meshes…
Not sure if it’s worth the effort when you can easily go the extra hour and just use meshes alltogether…