Addressing the lack of proper forests in 7DTD

[Arma Rex]

With the release of 2.0, the world seemingly is less populated with a natural environment since the decision to relegate trees into groves. I find this change to be both unrealistic and only serves to show a worse landscape, as the game does not look good when in flat, empty, plains.

I realize this was a move to optimize the game, so understand why it was done. It nevertheless feels like reductive logic to simply reduce the tree count and cluster them in bunches, rather than optimizing the tree models to allow for dense forests.

Could this be done in the future? Or is it a pipedream given the limitations of the code and game engine?

 

[InfiniteWarrior]

I find this change to be both unrealistic and only serves to show a worse landscape, as the game does not look good when in flat, empty, plains.

I find it preferable to the relatively evenly spaced trees, which made the landscape look exceptionally artificial in comparison. The real problem, I think, is the lack of variety in plant life. There are only so many ways the RWG mixer can place grass, a few flowering plants and trees.

The Better Biomes and Urban Decay mods add much more plant life (and interest) to the landscape, but maybe go a little overboard in asset count, hindering performance (and player movement in/on vehicles, to be honest). It's a delicate balance to strike, but I wouldn't mind seeing a few more varieties of both plant and animal life in the game. No idea what Unity can manage or how much is too much given the performance issues the game already has. I'm frankly impressed it doesn't look like Minecraft given just about everything in the game world is comprised of destructible blocks.

I distinctly remember Joel saying the real challenge was to make it "look pretty." I guess so and only wonder if the tiling can possibly be better blended in Unity. I wonder, too, if that couldn't further be alleviated with just a little fog to slightly obscure distant vistas.

 

[Riamus]

I also think it looks better and more realistic in 2.x with the clumping of trees. I think the disconnect for people is that it's called a forest. It has never been a forest even though they call it that. It is a lightly wooded biome and not a forest. If you look at it that way, it looks realistic. The old way the trees were just looked fake. Trees don't grow so evenly like that. They tend to group together if it's not a true forest or heavily wooded area. You'll still get some trees that stand alone, but that is more of an exception.

In any case, they're not going to do a dense forest because of performance issues, especially with consoles being in the mix. It just isn't ever going to happen in vanilla. Considering that, I am happy with the lightly wooded format with clumps of trees that can make it difficult to see through and allow for enemies to be hidden behind them, which never happened previously with the trees spaced so far apart.

If you are on PC and want to see if your computer can handle a dense forest, you can mod the probability of tree spawns to be higher so you get a denser forest. Or you can use a mod that adds more variety of plants and trees and maybe that'll feel better to you without running into any issues with performance.

I wouldn't mind have more kinds of trees and plants in vanilla - mods that add those are nice. But I don't think we need to have dense forest everywhere. I prefer being able to drive where I need to without having to follow roads. It was bad enough with the old wasteland just trying to drive across country with all the iron everywhere. Thankfully that was changed. Trees would be just as bad if made really plentiful. As it is now, there are areas that are dense and there are areas that are more like a field. I've lived in places that looked very similar to that, so I'm fine with it.

 

[8_Hussars]

I wouldn't mind have more kinds of trees and plants in vanilla - mods that add those are nice.

Perhaps for variety in Vanilla, there could be multiple "groves". The default Forest Grove, a dense Coniferous "grove", a deciduous "grove", and a mixed (boreal forest) grove.

 

[Riamus]

Perhaps for variety in Vanilla, there could be multiple "groves". The default Forest Grove, a dense Coniferous "grove", a deciduous "grove", and a mixed (boreal forest) grove.

I probably wouldn't notice, but others might. The vanilla trees just blend together, whether deciduous or coniferous.

 

[Syphon583]

Yeah, hard disagree. The new "clumping" system is way better to look at. As others have noted, people hear the word "forest" and expect large, thick, wooded areas. I do wish there were stamps that included thicker areas, but I think the main issue faatal has been trying to avoid is performance. The trees have been vastly improved this release and it shows- this is best performance boost I've seen since I began playing. While improved, though, adding back in a ton of trees would likely negate that performance gain.

Mods like better biomes and urban decay are great if you want that experience, but not everyone's rig can handle it. I've always been a supporter of letting TFP build a base game that modders can expand on and the option is there for players to utilize mods to tailor their experience.

 

[iejen]

As a Dutch person this is the most realistic forest I have ever seen. We plant our forest in straight lines so the tree placement ingame feels more real than life

 

[warmer]

The Better Biomes and Urban Decay mods add much more plant life (and interest) to the landscape, but maybe go a little overboard in asset count, hindering performance (and player movement in/on vehicles, to be honest).

totally agree about better biomes. if it was tone down by a 1/3 I think it would be about perfect. Urban decay is awesome. love the extra bodies/gores and crashed cars

 

[Balun]

@Arma Rex Just go around planting tree's like a ■■■■, then you can make a forest just like what you want. Unless they changed it where you need a farm plot or something

 

[Riamus]

There was also a tree mod that I tried that provided a lot of trees and plants without going overboard with density. It works well and looks good. I did disable seeds from all those different trees and plants because having a dozen different tree seeds and a dozen different plant seeds was crazy, and I removed a couple things that didn't fit the location (elephant ears and bamboo), but it was really good. No idea if it has been updated for 2.x, and I forget the full mod name and author name unfortunately.

 

[ElCabong]

I cut down trees in the biome and plant the seeds near Jen's place.

I'm sure her dog appreciates it

 

[Riamus]

Ok, I checked and it was just called Dashu Trees by Dashu. I think it is probably available from the archived forum.

 

[Arma Rex]

There was also a tree mod that I tried that provided a lot of trees and plants without going overboard with density. It works well and looks good. I did disable seeds from all those different trees and plants because having a dozen different tree seeds and a dozen different plant seeds was crazy, and I removed a couple things that didn't fit the location (elephant ears and bamboo), but it was really good. No idea if it has been updated for 2.x, and I forget the full mod name and author name unfortunately.

I think I recall what you're talking about, it might be HDHQ, developed by Dust2Death. The performance with that mod was pretty good from what I remember.

@Arma Rex Just go around planting tree's like a ■■■■, then you can make a forest just like what you want. Unless they changed it where you need a farm plot or something

That's a tedious "solution" as it stands, and if I recall at least from previous versions, trees planted by the player tax performance even more.

Yeah, hard disagree. The new "clumping" system is way better to look at. As others have noted, people hear the word "forest" and expect large, thick, wooded areas. I do wish there were stamps that included thicker areas, but I think the main issue faatal has been trying to avoid is performance. The trees have been vastly improved this release and it shows- this is best performance boost I've seen since I began playing. While improved, though, adding back in a ton of trees would likely negate that performance gain.

Mods like better biomes and urban decay are great if you want that experience, but not everyone's rig can handle it. I've always been a supporter of letting TFP build a base game that modders can expand on and the option is there for players to utilize mods to tailor their experience.

People see that the biome is called a "pine forest" and expect that name to fit the definition of a forest. I get the performance hit of multiple trees, believe me, I'm not arguing that they don't effect performance, but I have to imagine they could make the trees optimized. I don't know, I'm not a programmer so I can't really say definitively if it's possible, not to mention how bottlenecked Unity is as an engine too, which could be a major contributer.

 

[BFT2020]

There are two dense tree sub biomes in the pine forest biomes. You can increase those values to make them occur more often compared to the other ones. They are labeled in the xml file as Dense large trees and Ring of small plants around dense large trees. If you lower the frequency on all but the Dense large trees while increasing it, you would probably start getting a lot more trees in the pine forest.

 

[Samcharles]

Trees being too dense would be bad imo. Enemies would become harder to see and imagine trying to drive through those trees.

 

[Syphon583]

but I have to imagine they could make the trees optimized

I'm not a programmer either, but IIRC, trees have already been optimized quite a bit just this last release, which is part of the reason performance has improved so much for many players.