I’m looking into creating a rather simple space combat game in UE, and I’m at the moment wondering how I would do the starfield (3D). I’m thinking that creating it in a particle system might be a large resource-drain, as it won’t just be a few stars around the ship, but rather quite a large amount of stars. I’m not really sure what other ways there are (procedural billboards perhaps?)
I’m still fairly new at unreal engine, so complex ways to do this might not be the best for me 
imho the best way still is to have the stars be part of the skybox texture, this is the least performant way of getting stars going. you could use a gpu-emitter and emit a few 100k small white dots as well, and if you did it seeded the stars should always be on the same location. the thing is, do you really want tiny stars move past your ship, making your ship look like its 1000x the size of a star
I’m embarassed… I never considered the realism in it, but now I do see that it would be incredibly unrealistic, haha
Maybe just using LOD should be enough? I mean from a certain distance on a plane with a simple alpha texture on it should be more than enough and uses almost no resources.
And when you approach the star the LOD will automatically change to an actual 3D object adding more and more details the closer you get 
//EDIT: and of course still have a skysphere with stars on it to make it look like there are even more stars
its ue4 4.7.2 [FREE PROJECT] Interstellar Gargantua Black Hole - Community Content, Tools and Tutorials - Unreal Engine Forums but it might be nice to check it out