Factorio Forums

Hello! This is my first post on the Factorio forum.

I'm always thinking of ideas for mods while playing most games, Factorio included. Recently, while playing with the Tree Expansion mod on, I got to thinking about a mod that changes the lifecycle of trees. Starting new trees out as saplings, then eventually allowing trees to grow larger than in the base game as they age. Trees could even become huge, or maybe huge trees could be added for variety.

I posted to share this idea and see if it's technically possible within the game. While writing, I considered that the trees change visually as pollution increases. Could these changes be used to display a growth cycle instead, by replacing the images? Not sure how the big tree would work, maybe a whole new tree could be created and added.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think.

Technically possible, I believe so, yes. Though, in time, it may start becoming taxing on the UPS of the game. Unfortunately, trees don't appear to have any events tied to them (their stage_index progression - the losing of leaves - doesn't trigger anything that I'm aware of, and in my tests is unreliable as well).

In order to work, it would have to index all existing trees when added, and then continue to index any new trees it generates as it goes, only removing the trees once they reach the final stage that it will step them through. In order to save on UPS, it could index them based on the game.tick that it needs to next take action on them, thus only looping on the exact trees that need processing on that tick, plus any other actions it needs to do outside of this (like spawning new trees).

The biggest hurtle, to someone like me, though, is graphics. I believe I could do the coding (I just got through doing something not too different with a Tree Sapling mod), but getting graphics for it all....

Edit: I realize I may have left the impression that I would do this mod, and just want to state that, at the moment, I won't. There are still a few hurdles for this that I'm not sure about at this time, but I also wonder about how close other mods may come to what you want? Have you tried Noxys Trees or Treeees? Neither do growth from sapling, but both have some different die off mechanics and different methods for determining tree spawn. I use Noxys, haven't gotten around to trying Treeees. My one reservation of Treeees is that it only does 1 tree per surface per time interval, so you need to adjust the time interval as you play, whereas Noxys has a built in scaler that will adjust the number of trees as more of the map is revealed.