Tree growth revamp

[Bihlbo 29]

I really love the fruit trees, and as far as tree growth goes I think they work far better than the vanilla mechanics for tree growth.

In Minecraft growing trees is trivial. Even without a mod it's easier to grow a large tree than it is to grow some wheat. I'm not arguing it should be hard, but something harder and more interesting than trivial would add to the immersion and believability.

1. All saplings grow into a tree 1 log high and covered in leaves, like the ground-cover "bushes" found in jungle biomes.

2. Once a sapling turns into a tree, the type of tree it is determines its next level of growth. A faster-growing tree is going to have a higher chance of growing its next log and layer of leaves. The speed of growth for trees should be unpredictable, even within a species.

The rate of growth should probably average about 1 log per game day for a tree with average growth speed.

3. Pre-gen trees don't grow. They've been growing for untold decades before you got there, so they are done. Trees grown from saplings - whether you placed them or they were generated on their own - are the only ones that grow.

4. When a tree first grows it generates a random number that determines its maximum volume or height, and how much branching it does. Different species have different volumetric ranges. Fully-grown trees should have all the characteristics of pre-gen trees of their species, including variety.

5. Girth variety becomes possible. When a tree first grows if it has space (5x5 centered around the sapling would be my guess) it has the option to thicken its trunk, depending on species. Instead of growing 4 trunks at once, it grows one, then at a certain volume it has the option for more growth to occur to the side of the base. Eventually, after at least four times the amount of time it takes another tree to reach the same height with one trunk, the species for which it is an option could end up with most of its height consisting of a 2x2 trunk.

Those sequoia? Maybe they can grow out to 3x3 if you give them enough decades. Maybe they just don't stop growing until they run out of space, which is something you can engineer if you like tree-tending.

* What this gives you is not just more believable trees, but options on how you farm them. If you want a lot of pine but only have a couple of saplings, maybe you only let them grow to about 3 logs high then harvest all the leaves for more saplings while they are easy to reach. Maybe you just want logs, so you cover a huge area in spread-apart saplings and come back a YEAR later for massive amounts of logs.

* The downside to this idea, other than it probably being a lot of work to code, is that growing trees have to calculate things, which is another drag on the server. I wouldn't plan on trees checking for growth more than once per MC hour, but if you have a lot of people in SMP planting a forest this could still get to be a noticeable drag. If I knew more about coding java I'd know if this is unrealistic or not, but it might be a pretty small drag.

[gatts205 39]

There was a rather extensive talk about tree growth in the terrafirmacraft2 section of the forums. It may be useful to read through it for more ideas. After all even though terrafirmacraft2 is not going to be made many of the suggestions within (although not all) could still apply to the first. The link to that thread is below.

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/3373-trees-roots-and-growth/