From Bunyan: New Trees: Ironwood or Marblewood
ScottKillen opened this issue · 30 comments
Suggested by @blargh555 here.
@blargh555
Actually, I looked it up and Marblewood trees are a type of acacias, so it'll have to be just Ironwood.
@blargh555
Oh, and Ebony would make a nice addition as well. I love the dark color of it's wood.
@blargh555 I will give it some thought I don't have any problem introducing a marblewood variety of acacias if it give is the marbled planks in your photo.
I like ebony also. I will give that some consideration as well.
I posted this originally somewhere else, where I had the idea, but I figured it would be more on-topic here. This was what I suggested about the marblewood:
Maybe there could be a rare variant of that, like the legend oak, but instead have a bunch of branches that shoot off of the thick trunk and then end up running straight up, really high, with no leaves.
This is the closest image I could find to show what I am thinking, but definitely not so many branches, and maybe less of thickness contrast between the trunk and the branches:
http://mariapilatowicz.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/1997-10-poland-07s1.jpg?w=374&h=526
And obviously it would be rather large...
...They could grow in wastelands, tundra, or possibly deserts, since they have no leaves, so it would add to the desolate feel of the whole thing.
I actually think this could look really cool and atmospheric.
added the extra tree types to the Terrain Feature WIP in oneone-whakaaro.
Can someone please consolidate the tree growth idea into another issue and close this one?
Consolidated growing trees into #193. Closing issue.
One type of tree I would love to see is a baobab; they are characterized by a very thick trunk (could be up to 10 blocks in diameter in-game) which could be hollowed out to make a house. They tend to grow in arid environments, storing water in that thick trunk to last through dry periods. They might fit well in the scrub land biome. There are types which have edible fruit, perhaps these could have a chance to drop from broken leaf blocks.
LCTrees has an ironwood tree that looks pretty cool...it grows in the desert and has a cool textured looking bark and nice green leaves. I'm not sure if it having the same name or not would cause issues or not. Maybe using the marble wood would be a better option?
I like the Baobab tree idea.
they are characterized by a very thick trunk (could be up to 10 blocks in diameter in-game)
Actually, the wiki gives stats of 7 to 11. Odd numbers work much better in this game -- 7's could be common, 9's less but still often, and 11's the rares.
Twilight Forest has code to generate wide trees, which we could copy use for research and inspiration, we would just have to make it wider (that has diameters of 3 to 5, which might be babies of this tree), and solid (TF has them pre-hollowed)
Hmm ... real life heights of 5 to 30 blocks ... dang, those trees in TF are not all that far from reality after all (just hollow, with an elven city on top :-).
Oh, this is just too good not to have in-game:
"Indigenous Australians used baobabs as a source of water and food, and used leaves medicinally."
Idea: The "hollow" trunk contains water source blocks! The leaves drop an item that can be turned into an object that can be eaten, clears status effects (poison :-), and stacks -- so these hard to find trees that show up in seasonal forests contain water, stackable poison protection, and food.
In fact, with a mod that would permit wood to be pressed into fibers/paper, and a "paper armor", this one trees gives you food, fiber, paper, armor, water, cave spider protection, weapons, tools, etc -- it's all you need!
Oh, one more odd tree that might be nice to add in: the banyan. It has a habit of sending branches out nearly horizontally and then setting roots down from them which then form secondary trunks. A single tree can end up looking like a whole grove of trees. The low branches would be a nice place to use horizontal logs in living trees. It could generate in jungles & mini jungles.
More than that, what if you had a tree that tried to spread, just like cracked sand?
Imagine a tree that would attempt to have its leaves decay; if a sapling generates, it would "root" in the nearby wood of any tree, and on growth would attempt to spread off to the sides, and then down. If it finds a different type of wood, it replaces it as a spreading infection -- if I understood that tree correctly, it entwines around other trees to choke them and replace them.
Over time, this would become a giant tree, spreading horizontally, with a full canopy that blocks out all the light, making a dark land in the daylight.
Now, give it no food from the leaves. Make the color as ugly of a wood color as you can. Perhaps this wood can only be used to make sticks, not wood planks (log structure is too weak to make planks from). So you could get charcoal, or sticks, but no planks. No food, and it wipes out all other more useful trees.
Self planting saplings? Sure. But maybe you don't want those saplings to plant in, and replace, so many other useful trees.
Didn't the mod Nature Overhaul do this? I had always wanted to use that mod but it conflicted with to many others (although I haven't tried it in some time)...but the basic concept was that the trees actually had life cycles. http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/191599-v11-nature-overhaul-v18/
It would be very cool to have something like this...it would make the biomes seem even more alive.
Very interesting. I never saw that mod.
That's a fairly significant change to minecraft. Right now, in vanilla, there is no change over time. EB adds cracked sand and (soon) permafrost, which gives ground change over time, with something that has an initial "problem" behavior, that with the new version will have benefits to counter the problem, as well as natural counters. On the first page of that mod was the recognition that fire would be a natural counter to the widespread spread of a forest.
This idea adds the idea of a specific tree that spreads differently than other trees, based on a real life tree that spreads in that different manner.
Should all trees grow, and spread as a function of time? Maybe.
Should there be some type of tree that grows differently than others, based on a real life tree that grows differently? Why not.
Well, I've asked for more trees in the past, so I'm certainly down with this.
Now, my one concern is this, if we add spreading trees and spreading ground, how big a performance hit are we likely to get? I actually use a pretty low-end PC myself, so I am keenly aware of how even small changes to performance can add up.
Mine is several years old as well. :P I would think since the spread is gradual it wouldn't create much lag...as opposed to forests of large trees with all the leaf blocks to load...but that's just my own uneducated guess since I know nothing about coding...lol
I doubt we would implement tree spread in the same way as cracked sand, etc. I was very fond of the way the Nature Overhaul altered saplings so that they took root just before spawning out.
This had some interesting effects:
- Unless you needed them for something, you could let sapling lie were they fell and your forest would sustain itself.
- Overabundant saplings were never a problem clogging up storage because you didn't feel the need to collect them.
- Tree canopies prevented overgrowth (as in RL.)
- You could watch a forest fire devastate a forest and then have the forest regrow before you eyes--those times were amazing in game experiences.
Really...if saplings can root and grow in there own, fire-spread is naturally nerfed and doesn't require so much of the tweaking we have seen in the latest snapshots.
Sapling entities waiting to root might cause some lag, so we could tweak things to do one or a combination of:
- reduce sapling drops
- maintain a limit on the number of sapling entities
- reduce the amount of time a sapling takes to re-root
- introduce some chance to that a certain percentage of saplings do not re-root.
I love the concept of a growth vs. fire dynamic. This would be particularly interesting in relation to the Nether biome(s) with all the lava & fires about.
@Annysia Leaf blocks control sapling drop rate, so they must be tweaked individually.
We could provide an API of some kind for mod interaction (but modders don't use these very much I find 😉)
We can alter vanilla saplings, but it is complicated and preserving compatibility complicates the task.
It would be so awesome if something like this could be done in ExtraBiomes. I've wanted to use the Nature Overhaul mod for a long time, but it conflicted with so many of the other mods I used that I was never able to.
@ScottKillen I completely agree that sapling drop would need to be looked at. The big trees like firs and redwood can drop over a stack of saplings in 1 tree.
So say for example I cut down a large fir tree...if I didn't pick up all the saplings that dropped would they they have a chance to root? Also, would the amount of saplings dropped only affect the trees in ExtraBiomes or would it affect all? Forestry has a bio generator now...and can be powered using bio fuel which can be made from saplings...so I can see where some people would want to have a lot of saplings in order to make fuel.
Would there be an option to make the tree spread work with other mods such as the trees and bushes in LCTrees or Pam's?
I'd be completely happy with it working just with ExtraBiomes trees...just wondered about the other mods. It's a shame more of them don't have your philosophy of open source and working together. Seems like it would make things much easier for everyone involved and not just the players.
The idea of saplings self-planting will not cause lag issues.
If you have trees that drops tons of saplings, they will be in relatively small areas. There might be 5 saplings dropped in a single block. On rooting, only one will root, and the rest will fail.
My idea is as follows:
- After being "alive" for 3 minutes, a sapling has a change to root.
- In order to self-root, there must not be a sapling in the 4 direct neighbors on the same height. (Hills can -- diagonal is not close enough to stop a self root).
- Standard rules of light apply -- if the light level is low, and no direct sky exposure, uproot. This means that once one tree grows, all the "underbrush" will die off come nightfall.
- Interesting effect of fast time and case #3 -- nighttime you have uprooting, and daytime comes before the 5 minute despawn. So fast time biomes the saplings just don't die off :-).
For a spreading tree, things get a little different. A spreading tree can be as simple as "The sapling can root in the branches/leaves of another tree. On growth, instead of growing upwards, it grows sideways and down". Suddenly, it's just a different type of growth -- plant on a wood log or leaf block, on growth find the wood block and branch from it -- it's no more or less lag than a normal tree.
Equally, cracked sand should not cause lag. It does not change the number of block ticks per second. It does not make more things happen, just makes what does happen more obvious.
Ohh ...
Warning: I didn't think of tree chop mods.
What happens if you have a "chop once, take down the whole tree" mod, combined with a tree that stores water inside of it? ...
Will those specialized trees just be one block in width or will they have branches that start at a certain height? If not, maybe implement something how the tree cutting mechanism works in LCTrees...or something similar. In order to cut a whole tree you have to have an iron axe or stronger...and you have to have at least 2 trunk blocks not touching anything else. So say for example a tree that is 2x2 you have to clear up 2 blocks and around til you have a 1x2 block...then chop and the whole tree comes down.
Actually.... I kinda think it would be funny to leave it so that when the player chops down a whole tree filled with water source blocks they would cause a flood. But maybe I'm a bad person. >:)
(edited for awkward phrasing)
That's the problem. Nothing else in the game is based around finite water.
What would you do if you had a normal axe and started chopping one of these trees down?
Now, maybe you want to only have a single source block, perhaps?
Perhaps a single source block (height 0) on the bottom, and "height 1" water elsewhere in the stack... if you take a big update, the others will drain out (at least, if I understand the flowing water update system -- only the source block will stay intact, and the rest will start to drain as you break down the tree)