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Not sure how feasable this is but... would regrowing/expanding forests be a good idea? If left to their own devices, forests could then slowly grow outward, potentially recovering from a forestfire.

General idea is that forests:
- Will not regrow in areas beyond moderate pollution.
- Will only regrow in the "greenish" tiles.
- Will not regrow unless other trees are within a certain range, and only if no more then a certain amount are in range.
- Do not grow on areas occupied by player structures or player tile improvements, Biter nests, or areas occupied by any other entity.
- Would grow randomly and very slowly.
- Growth would occur by placing a new "tree" with low health, which would then gradually move to maximum hitpoints. (which already happens, damaged trees autoregenerate HPs)

Additionally, Biters blocked by trees should start to attack them to get rid of them, if the Biters are on a mission to go somewhere. Forests are not walls.

This would make wood a slow renewable fuel source.

You can try it out with this mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/aster26/ ... eExpansion

Greetings steinio

I'd like to see regrowing trees as base game mechanic.
While NaturalTreeExpansion works, it will never be as efficient as a c implementation.

steinio wrote:You can try it out with this mod

That mod is OK, but not great. The problem is that trees just grow evenly densely everywhere they can grow. So, there won't be trees on sand, but after a while, the other tiles are completely covered in trees, which doesn't fit the game's map generation, or what you would expect that type of tile to be able to support for trees. i.e. The mod doesn't take into account distance from water, or differentiate further than sand / not-sand (grass, sandy-grass, etc).

I like the idea for Vanilla.

I think little details like these are what make a game great.

My idea is that regrowth would be very slow and mostly for ambiance. After you cut some trees you get a new item "sapling" which can decrease pollution (or whatever trees do) but just 50%.

Once you destroy a tree saplings start to grow back but slowly. If a forest had 100 trees, after an hour of playtime (to get a reference) you get 10 saplings, after another hour these 10 saplings become trees but you get an extra 10 saplings.. So after 10 hours you get an area reforested. Times could be adjusted obviously..

At the very least, the surviving trees should turn green again after a while. To take a real life example from my own country, Eucalyptus trees are well known for sprouting all over their trunks after a bushfire (and their leaves are very flammable, too).

Heck, you could have seedlings show up where a burnt forest was, them taking the form of invisible seed sprites spawned whenever a tree goes up in flames, which then take on a sequence of appearances and eventually get replaced by a fully-grown tree after enough in-game time has passed.

I point here to this old suggestion: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1759 Game Of Live: Biomes/Land generation/changes

What I mean is simply this: There are growing and descending algorithm types of GOL.
See for example http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Life_without_death or http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/HighLife
... and so on. There are endless possibilities for algorithms.

The idea is this: Combine pollution-level with the chosen algorithm in an area and - voilla - you have natual looking growth/death of trees.


Also added this and the other thread to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342#p133677 Events (Environmental Disasters and Weather) / Biome-Types

The devs do occasionally take very popular ideas from mods and make them part of the base game.

If you don't like how the existing tree growth mods work, write a better one. Show everyone how awesome it is, get people to play with it, and maybe the devs would be more willing to add it to the base game.

Has there been any development in this regard? I wanted to post the idea about the biomes growing back and lo and behold I see an even better idea incorporating game of life algorithms.

You may like my Fish and Wildlife Service

I think there are a few out there. I forget which one I have installed atm, though don’t know if it was updated for 0.17, either (I’m still on 0.16 stable).

Would love to see things like this become core, regrowing (and recovering) trees, breeding fish, etc.

Totally agree with this kind of ideas. I've also made a similar suggestion : viewtopic.php?f=6&t=63245

I use such a mod currently and (what has been said somewhere above): With this idea there is also the need to be able to automatically cut trees.

I would like for example an idea, where you can program roboports to automatically destroy items within their build-range (a filter). You can program in trees, rocks, ...


And suddenly Factorio becomes Siedler II, when you filter out: Enemy-items like walls, laser, gun-turrets, mines etc. Just place a roboport near enough to the enemy and the robots will do the rest.

Or you can automatically place items: Place stone brick in built area. Or you can shrink the area: Place stone-bricks 3 tiles around any building. Would look quite nice. Simple defence: Place a wall at -1 fields around the construction area, Remove wall within -2 fields around the construction area, and the bots built automatically a wall withing construction range.