MegaLights has shuffled from Experimental to Beta, which means creators can now chuck a ridiculous number of dynamic shadow-casting lights into their scenes and still keep the frame rate on life support. The whole point is to get softer, more believable shadows from complex light sources like area lights, so worlds look richer without artists wanting to leap out a window.

The engine also picks up nicer directional lights, clearer translucency, shadow casting on Niagara particles, and hair shading that no longer resembles a plastic wig. Epic insists that out-of-the-box performance is improved, which should cut down the hours spent manually beating noisy lighting into submission.

Nanite Foliage is the star turn, even if it is still tagged Experimental. Nanite used to sulk whenever foliage appeared, but a new geometry system powered by Nanite Voxels now lets the engine spit out millions of overlapping leaves, needles, and clutter as a solid mass from afar. It does this at stable frame rates without LOD pops, which is more than you can say for a lot of games currently limping around. Nanite Assemblies trim storage and memory use while Nanite Skinning handles moving parts like wind wobble.

Procedural Content Generation has been polished and is now rated production-ready with faster GPU performance and an Editor Mode that stops creators hunting through menus like lost tourists.

Substrate also graduates to a production-ready state, giving artists a proper system for layered, physically accurate materials rather than the usual witchcraft. Epic has even stuffed an AI Assistant into the Editor so users can ask questions, generate C++ snippets, or nudge it for instructions without wandering off into documentation hell.

There are heaps of fixes across Metahumans and animation tools if you fancy a long read, though the complete list of tweaks is so sprawling it probably deserves its own health warning.