Rooted Forests

Rooted Forests — A Visual Overhaul 🍂

This mod changes the visual appearance of Vintage Story's generated and grown logs throughout its forests. Tree structure stays the same, vanilla behaviors stay the same; Rooted Forests simply complements the appearance of logs by giving them a little chiseled depth, with a matching rooted stump to complete the look.

With Rooted Forests, vanilla trees now have a more visually “alive” appearance, complemented by their rooted bases. Now you have something to visually admire for your deforesting projects, or while building your ideal cabin in the heart of the forest. Expeditions through dense forests can already feel like a chore sometimes, but now there's a little more to admire as you make your way through them. It's the small quality-of-life visuals like this that can make a huge difference. We already spend a majority of our in-game time traveling through them, so I hope this visual overhaul brings some joy with it.

Rooted Forests is also designed with player preference in mind. In-game commands (documented in the zip file) allow you to choose whether harvested logs keep their familiar vanilla shape or use the voxel-log appearance, letting you decide how far the visual overhaul extends beyond the forest itself. This mod does not interfere with vanilla mushroom growth on trees or resin-leaking logs; both retain their vanilla functionality. Essentially, mushrooms still grow on logs and resin-leaking logs still function normally. The philosophy behind this mod is simple: Vanilla owns the behaviors and lumber; Rooted Forests owns the visuals. Planted saplings also inherit this visual overhaul once fully grown. If you are curious about how the voxel logs & stump were designed, I created them in VS Model Creator. You are more than welcome to open the included JSON shapes in VSMC to see how they were engineered. 

Vanilla Mechanics:

Rooted Forests does NOT change vanilla tree-chopping mechanics, resistance, tool tiers, tree felling, drops, and the underlying log behavior remain vanilla.

The additional code is used to determine when and where the rooted base should visually appear. Debarked and quad logs are left untouched. The focus of this mod is the visual appearance of trees and logs, not changing how forestry works.

Note: After switching harvest modes, some already-placed logs may not visually update until they are interacted with or the world is reloaded.

 

Compatibility:

Tested on Vintage Story 1.22.3.

This mod is primarily a visual overhaul and may work on other 1.22.x versions, but these have not been fully tested. If you encounter an issue on another 1.22.x version, please leave a comment with your game version and any relevant error information.

Eco Machina is not supported alongside Rooted Forests.

Both mods make changes to trees, but they approach those changes through different systems and design goals. Supporting both together would introduce overlapping tree behavior and make issues, visual conflicts, and bugs difficult to reliably attribute to either mod.

Think of it like installing two different terrain overhauls at the same time: even if you could make them run together, both are trying to reshape the same part of the game. The resulting behavior would no longer represent either mod on its own.

For that reason, I would rather keep Rooted Forests focused, predictable, and accountable for its own performance than provide compatibility that I cannot confidently support.

This is not a criticism of Eco Machina. It is a beautiful mod, and one I have used before. This is simply a boundary between two mods that alter the same system.

 

Current Compatibility RF-0.1.2:

Terrain Slabs (Requires Place On Slabs)

 

Version note: The 1-click install shown on the main mod page may not always point to the newest release immediately after an update. If you need a specific Rooted Forests version, check the Files tab and use the 1-click install listed beside that release directly.

Roadmap: (Order may change as development progresses)

• Refining roots for 2x2 trees.
• Roots for redwoods.
• Root variations for standard trees.
• Exposed root overhang.
• Tree growth visual fix on terrain slabs.✅
• Compatibility with other tree-species mods within the scope of Rooted Forests. Once I finish / successfully implement the goals stated above, I'll be able to focus more heavily on mod compatibility without needing to constantly make structural changes to the foundation of Rooted Forests.

 

Mods seen in the screenshots:

Sheyder (lighting)

Terrain Slabs

Natural Foliage

Better Ruins

HUD Clock

 

Want to see more Rooted Forests photos? Google Photos - Rooted Forests

 

AI Disclosure

I want to be fully transparent about the AI tag and how Rooted Forests was created.

All of the voxel tree models and rooted stump geometry were designed by me manually in Vintage Story Model Creator (VSMC). The models use Vintage Story's existing textures, and I manually adjusted and placed the UV mapping for the new geometry.

I used ChatGPT throughout the project to help me understand Vintage Story's JSON structure and asset paths, identify errors in my JSON patches, texture/shape references, inspect files, & troubleshoot problems. ChatGPT also assisted substantially with the C# code used for the rooted-trunk generation system, which I compiled using Visual Studio Code and tested in-game. For C# developement, I use Vintage Story's DLLs & API as source material, using ILSpy to find relevant parts rather than relying on forced implementations or unnecessary workarounds. 

The mod's concept, models, UV work, visual design, testing, and final implementation decisions were done by me. Every feature was repeatedly tested in-game, including normal logs, horizontal logs, resin variants, naturally generated trees, and sapling-grown trees. Absolutely no AI is used for photo generation too. For any photo editing I use Lightroom.

This is also my first mod and my first real attempt at learning Vintage Story modding. Constructive advice is always welcome. :)