Eco Machina

What's in this version

Realistic tree rendering — stable

Trunks and branches are rendered as tapered, connected segments. A Heavy Path Decomposition (HPD) algorithm picks the trunk at every fork by the biological “most weight hangs above” rule, giving each tree a readable main-trunk → main-branch → side-branch hierarchy with 16 thickness steps from trunk base to twig tip.

Two kinds of connectors keep the geometry continuous:

• Wood-to-wood connectors sit inside fork blocks and bridge the parent’s spine to the secondary children, so branching points read as one continuous mesh.
• Foliage connectors link the branch tips to the canopy as X-cross billboard quads carrying branch-silhouette textures, alpha-tested for sharp edges.

Per-species HSV bark-tinting samples each species’ bark texture and produces matching twig colors — birch reads light and grey, oak warm brown, redwood deep red.

Vines and shelf mushrooms attach to the tapered branch geometry: vines drape along the real branch curves with proportional scaling, shelf mushrooms sit flush against the trunk surface.

Mod compatibility is built into the design. Eco Machina is species-agnostic and applies the same treatment to every wood/foliage block regardless of which mod added it. Atlas-page-aware mesh routing handles multi-atlas mods (resin overlays, custom bark sets) inside the tapered pipeline. Bark-tinting picks up modded species’ colors automatically — no per-mod configuration required.

Dynamic tree growth — in development

Trees that grow gradually over time, with stages derived from vanilla growth rules and reactions to available space, obstacles, and seasonal conditions. Currently opt-in behind a config flag and considered experimental until stable.

Root systems — planned

A complete root system per tree, modeled per species with three archetypes: taproot (deep central), lateral (shallow plate), and heart (mixed). The visible parts are root flare at the trunk base, surface roots on slopes and cliff edges, and root-over-rock paths when a tree grows on thin soil over stone.

The rest stays underground — but when a player digs through soil that contains root volume, the exposed roots become real, mineable tapered-wood blocks. Soil itself is never touched or converted; the root system lives alongside the terrain, not in place of it.

Living ecosystem — planned

Natural reproduction via seeds and saplings, competition for light and space, aging and natural death, seasonal effects like leaf drop and regrowth. Long-term work on the roadmap.

Tree Visualizer

A browser tool that lets you draw a tree on a grid and watch it get decomposed into chains in real time. Switch live between Vanilla (raw blocks), Long-Path (the legacy algorithm), and HPD (the new one). It’s how the algorithm was tested during development — useful if you want to see why the trees look the way they do.

Try it here: factorial-seven.com/eco-machina-visualizer

Settings

Eco Machina ships with an in-game settings dialog. Press F9 to open it. The dialog only shows settings meant for players — developer tools stay hidden unless you’ve explicitly enabled them.

• Render World Tapered Meshes — The master switch. Turn off to disable all tapered-tree rendering and fall back to vanilla cube logs. Default: on.
• Auto-claim vanilla trees — When you move near a vanilla tree, Eco Machina takes ownership of it for tapered rendering. Without this, only worldgen-claimed trees get the treatment. Default: on.
• Worldgen preclaim (new chunks) — Claims trees during world generation as new chunks are created. Trees are ready for tapered rendering immediately, without waiting for auto-claim. Default: on.
• Auto radius (view distance) — Eco Machina’s working radius automatically follows your in-game view distance. Turn on if you change view distance often and want the mod to track it. Default: off.
• Manual radius (chunks) — How far out (in chunks) Eco Machina maintains tapered tree rendering when Auto radius is off. Higher = more trees rendered at once. Default: 2.

Experimental

• Tree growth lifecycle — Opt-in for the experimental dynamic-growth system. Trees grow gradually over time instead of instantly. Requires a server restart to apply. May cause unexpected behavior until stable. Default: off.

Compatibility & Design Principles

Eco Machina is built with maximum compatibility in mind:

• Render-only — vanilla blocks stay vanilla underneath, no save migration
• Existing worlds work without any conversion step
• Multiplayer-safe (server authoritative, deterministic)
• No global world scans or heavy per-tick updates
• Vanilla tree interactions preserved (felling, drops, tool behavior, attachments)
• Mod-compatible by design — species-agnostic, multi-atlas-aware

If something looks vanilla, it behaves vanilla.

Known Issues

Known limitations and edge cases. They don’t block the mod from being used, but you might run into them:

• 2×2 trunks on cliff edges — large 2×2 trees on cliffs may render incorrectly, especially with short trunks or significant height differences below the cliff edge.
• Tree-conversion misses — occasionally a tree fails to convert to tapered meshes during chunk loading and stays as vanilla cubes until the chunk is re-loaded.
• Vines on tilted branches — vines on diagonal or tapered branches align correctly on the vertical axis, but don’t yet adjust their height to follow the branch’s tilt.
• Mushrooms on diagonal trunks — shelf mushrooms don’t yet align correctly to diagonal wood blocks.
• Beehives — don’t yet snap to branch geometry and can appear to float next to the wood instead of sitting on it.
• Chunk loading — chunks may occasionally take longer to load.

If you run into something not listed here, please report it — the Support & Feedback section below has details.

Development Status

The rendering layer is stable and ready for general use. The dynamic-growth and ecosystem layers are still in development and currently behind opt-in config flags.

Expect:

• visible progress updates
• rapid iteration on the experimental layers
• occasional breaking changes on the growth/ecosystem side during development
• a stable render baseline you can rely on in the meantime

How the mod is made

I’m a trained Media Designer (Mediengestalter Digital + Print) with a background in graphic design, 2D and 3D art, animation, video and audio editing, web development, and the software architecture that ties all of that together. Programming was never my main craft — so I use AI coding assistants the same way I use Blender for 3D meshes, Affinity for textures, or my audio software for sound: as a tool to execute ideas I’ve already designed.

The concepts, the architecture, the visual decisions, the specifications, and the dev journals are all made by me. The code is the implementation layer. Every feature is preceded by a written specification, every significant decision is captured as an architecture record, and every working day is logged in a public dev journal — the work behind every visible improvement is fully traceable.

A longer write-up on this is on the Ko-fi page if you’d like more detail.