Dynamic Trees

Project Goal:

Project Features:

Trees:

• Grow progressively from seeds to mature trees over time.
• Grow in natural ways loosely modeled after real world trees and tend to grow in unique, believable ways.
• Grow around obstacles in a natural way.
• Are not just reskins but grow using different algorithms per species.
• Have growth rate and mature sizes that are biome, temperature and rainfall dependent.
• Drop seeds at random that can potentially plant themselves.
• Won't grow in darkness. Leaves not connected to an outer tree branch or starved of light will die. Outer branches without leaves slowly rot away.
• Will die and rot in a dark place (some species produce mushrooms when they rot).
• Walking on leaves blocks is slow and sinking. Falling on to leaves prevents fall damage and destroys the leaves.
• Vanilla Tree Fruits(apples, cocoa beans)
• Thin branches can be climbed like ladders.

mature oak tree

Rooty Soil:

Potion Interactions:

• Biochar Base[]: Base tree potion for brewing
• Potion of Depletion[]: Depletes soil completely so tree stops growing
• Potion of Defoliance[]: Kills tree by destroying it's leaves and leaving it to rot
• Potion of Burgeoning[]: Quickly grow a tree
• Potion of Fertility[]: Fully fertilizes the soil
• Potion of Persistance[]: Stops tree from changing(Dynamic leaves are changed to Vanilla leaves). Completely depletes the soil.  The tree will no longer grow, die in the dark, or drop seeds.
• Potion of Transformation[]: Changes an existing Dynamic tree into another tree species

Seeds:

• Take the place of vanilla saplings.
• Are randomly dropped from trees(rate is adjustable in config file).
• Have a chance of self planting if setting on a dirt/grass/podzol block and has a clear view of the sky above it.
• Crafted from a vanilla sapling and a dirt bucket.
• Can be used to create vanilla saplings by crafting with a dirt bucket.

Saplings(Oak, Spruce, Birch, Jungle, Acacia, and Dark Oak) and their respective seeds. 

Compatibility:

• Worldgen can be disabled to allow Vanilla trees to still spawn and function normally.
• All drops from growing trees are vanilla leaves, sticks, and logs. Growing tree parts are not obtainable in survival. Shears only obtain vanilla leaves.
• Rooty soil drops plain dirt when harvested or left without a tree it will return to plain dirt.
• Vanilla textures are used for wood and leaves making it compatible with resource packs that change wood or leaves textures.
• Seeds can be crafted from vanilla saplings and vice-versa.
• Fire spreads and burns at the same rate as vanilla tree fires.
• Works in multiplayer.

 Forests:

at the edge of an oak forest

oak forest by the plains

a savanna sparsely populated with acacias

spruce forest(worldgen needs work)

spindly birch trees in a dense forest

the canopy of the tall jungle trees produce a dimly lit forest floor

Harvesting:

• Cutting the tree at it's base will fell the entire tree.
• Thicker branches take longer to harvest.
• Whole branches can be removed from the tree without disturbing the main body of the tree.
• Harvesting results in vanilla logs and sticks the number of which is calculated as the total volume of wood in the tree or branch.
• Fortune enchantments on axes are actually useful and work to increase log yield.
• Leaves grow back when destroyed if outer branches are left undamaged.
• Trees fall over when harvested(disable-able special animation effect).  

The Woodland Staff:

The woodland staff is a multi-function tool intended for use in creative mode(can't be crafted).  In the most basic usage it can be used to copy a tree.  Right click on any dynamic tree with the staff to pull it's JoCode.  Next, right click on viable soil to recreate the same tree.  The tree is also rotated based on the player direction.  If the player right clicks a tree with the staff while sneaking then only the tree species will be copied, leaving the JoCode unchanged.  In this way you can for instance create an acacia tree that is shaped like a tall jungle tree.  Another feature for the Woodland Staff is that any JoCode pulled from a tree is also copied to the system clipboard as text.  This enables a player to share tree models with others easily.

Add-Ons:

Under the hood:

• Trees grow using a combination of a cellular automata algorithm for leaves and branch network logic for trunk and branches.
• No tile entity rendering is used. Rendering is done with BakedModels for better performance with large numbers of tree nodes.
• Leaves are only updated with updateTick() so chunks are re-rendered when dirty no more than with vanilla crops.
• A DropCreator interface is used for creating seed drops and other items. New drop creators can be registered by other mods to expand existing or new tree behavior.
• Growing leaves blocks use 4 species sub-blocks to a Block using metadata encoding for conserving BlockIDs.
• Worldgen uses a custom variation of Adaptive Incremental Stippling(AIS) using the PoissonDisk Distribution for high quality and non-overlapping tree placement.

Project Scope:

• Seasons. In autumn the trees turn fall colors, in winter leaves fall off completely and regrow in spring. Plans are in the works for the serene seasons mod.

Examples of out of scope features:

• Species of trees not implemented in vanilla Minecraft(such as those in Forestry, Pam's Harvestcraft, Natura, Biomes O' Plenty)
• Creature entities, mobs, and/or particles(ents, squirrels, monkeys, fireflies, bees, etc)
• Fruit(other than vanilla Minecraft tree fruit products: apples, cocoa beans)
• Dungeon loot(pointless for this mod)
• Tree villages, villagers and/or trading posts
• Swings or other gadgets commonly attached to trees
• Magic, energy systems, XP drops, enchantments
• Tools and/or apparel(in survival, admin tools might be okay)
• Grafting
• Tree genetics and/or pollination , such as that in forestry
• Automatic fertilizers, detectors, or any kind of machine for interacting with the tree

     Features like these will never be implemented.  I'm not suggesting that these are bad ideas or wouldn't be fun but they are indeed outside the scope of what this project is meant to accomplish.

Those wishing to implement out of scope features are welcome to do so in a separate expansion or compatibility mod.  Popular mods tend to experience scope creep and featuritis. Ultimately you end up with jet packs, metal ore trees, nyan cats, flaming super death cactus swords, and 15 kinds of creepers.  I won't have it.

FAQ:

Compatible Mods:

• Better Foliage:  Leaves blocks will be enhanced as expected (does not work with trunk rounding feature, this won't change)
• Better Beginnings: Can't chop down a tree with your bare hands, tools work as intended.
• Optifine: I know, right?  Can you believe it?
• Quark: The grass color of the Rooty Dirt Block and the dynamic leaves foliage is changed by Quark's greener grass option.
• Passable Leaves: Dynamic Tree leaves become passable when this mod is installed.

Incompatible Mods:

• Tree Chopper:  Tree Chopper interferes with the Dynamic Trees harvesting algorithm.  The only workaround is to remove Tree Chopper at the moment.  If you are only using Dynamic Trees for your trees then you don't need it anyway since you'll get the results you're looking for without it.  I've put an issue on their github page but have not received a reply.

License, Permission and Modpacks:

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