Each Level can have unique settings applied to it from the World Settings panel. You can use this panel to do everything from making sure the right Game Mode is activated when you play the Level to adjusting how global illumination works for that Level.
To open the World Settings panel, from the main menu, go to Window, then select World Settings.
Default location of the World Settings panel. Click the image for full size.
The World Settings panel docks next to the Details panel in the editor UI by default. From here, you can now specify the settings for the current Level.
Use the Search box to quickly find a setting.
World settings are split into groups based on which aspects of your Level they influence. Some of these settings are general, such as those affecting the Game Mode and navigation. Other, more specialized groups of settings are used to configure your game's lighting, audio, physics, and so on.
You can adjust the following groups of settings:
Precomputed Visibility
Precomputed visibility volumes reduce rendering thread time at the cost of runtime memory. This helps optimize your game's performance when you work with smaller levels or target a platform where dynamic occlusion culling may be limited depending on hardware, such as mobile. It doesn't scale well for larger, more complex environments.
For more information, see Precomputed Visibility Volumes.
Game Mode
This is where you select and configure a Game Mode for your current Level. Game Modes define the rules of your game, such as players number, score, or win conditions. You can choose from existing Game Modes that come with the project template you used, or create custom ones.
After you select a game mode from the GameMode Override drop-down, you can configure settings specific to it.
For more information, see Setting Up a Game Mode.
Lightmass
In this section, you specify Lightmass settings, such as the detail and quality of indirect lighting and whether to use ambient occlusion (that is, simulating soft shadows from indirect lighting, which can add depth to your scene).
To learn more about Lightmass, as well as the different settings you can configure, see Global Illumination.
World
These settings affect core aspects of your game world, like level bounds, navigation systems, and the depth an Actor can fall to before it is destroyed.
For more information on different areas inside this section, see:
Physics
Use this section to override the World Gravity, which affects certain Z-axis actions, such as how high up a character can jump or the fall speed of objects.
You can also specify more advanced settings here, such as a default physics volume class and a physics collision handler class.
To learn more about physics in Unreal Engine 5, see Physics.
Broadphase
This section contains settings for Broadphase collision, which is a feature of NVIDIA's PhysX system. You can specify whether to use Broadphase client- or server-side.
Unreal Engine implements Multi-Box Pruning, which splits up the Broadphase into a grid of boxes whose settings you can control. The MBPBounds and MBPOuter Bounds sections control the bounds for the multibox.
The space inside MBPBounds is divided by the MBPNumSubDivs value to create the grid. For example:
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If MBPNumSubDivs = 2, this creates a grid of 4 cells (2 x 2).
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If MBPNumSubDivs = 3, this creates a grid of 9 cells (3 x 3).
If a physically active object falls outside the bounds specified by the MBPOuterBounds, it is no longer considered for collision. Enabling the Use MBPOuter Bounds option creates four specialized cells at the edges of the multibox grid.
To learn more about this system, see NVIDIA's documentation on Rigid Body Collision.
HLOD System
In this section, you can enable Hierarchical Levels of Detail (HLODs).
HLODs can replace multiple Static Mesh Actors with single, combined Static Mesh Actor at long view distances. This helps reduce the number of Actors that need to be rendered for the scene, increasing performance by lowering the number of draw calls per frame.
To learn more about working with HLODs, see Hierarchical Level of Detail.
World Partition Setup and World Partition
World Partition is a new data management and distance-based level streaming system that provides a complete solution for large world management. The system removes the previous need to divide large levels into sublevels by storing your world in a single persistent level separated into grid cells, and provides you with an automatic streaming system to load and unload those cells based on distance from a streaming source.
To learn more about World Partition and how to configure its settings, refer to the World Partition section of the Unreal Engine 5 Early Access documentation.
Navigation
Configure the navigation grid used in your Level.
VR
Use the World to Meters variable to adjust the scale of your virtual world. Increasing or decreasing this number will make the user feel larger or smaller in relation to the world around them. This setting is expressed in Unreal Units (UU). Inside of UE4, 1 Unreal Unit (UU) is equal to 1 Centimeter (cm).
Assuming your content was built with 1 Unreal Unit = 1 cm, setting World To Meters to 10 will make the world appear to be very large, while setting World To Meters to 1000 will make the world appear very small.
To learn more about scaling your VR experience, see VR World Scale.
For a general introduction to XR development in UE5, see XR Development.
Rendering
In this section, you can configure several settings related to distance field ambient occlusion, as well as dynamic indirect shadows.
For more information, see Distance Field Ambient Occlusion.
Audio
Use the settings in this section to configure default sound behaviors in your Project, such as volume, reverb, and fade time.
To learn more about audio and sound in Unreal Engine 5, see Working with Audio.
Tick
Ticking refers to running a piece of code or Blueprint script on an Actor or Component at regular intervals, usually once per frame. Ticking is generally enabled separately for each Actor or Component.
Unless your game is running legacy code that specifically requires the per-frame Tick() update function to run before the one-time initialization BeginPlay() function, you should disable this option to make sure that objects tick correctly.
To learn more about Ticking and Actor behaviors, see Actor Ticking.
AI
In this section, you can enable Unreal Engine 4's Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.
To learn more about this system, see Artificial Intelligence.
Cooking
Cooking is part of the process of building your game and deploying it to a platform, such as PC or mobile These settings affect how the content in your Scene will be included in your built game.
To learn more about this process, see Packaging and Cooking Games.