Natural Diversity

[Bartender]

There's a great many other things that have priority over modding in general I'm afraid [img]<fileStore.core_Emoticons>/emoticons/wink.png[/img]/emoticons/wink@2x.png 2x" title=";)" width="20" />, though I have been spending a conciderable amount of my free time on this.




Concidering Natural Diversity, I have made big progress on something that has been on my mind for quite a while:




One issue I had with vanilla Banished is that it has only one habitat type: forest. Many of my new herb meshes are actually meadow plants, that need lots of sunlight and would not be found in a forest at all. What's more is that some of the resources, namely roots and onions, tend to grow in meadows rather than in forests as well. In conclusion, I wanted to add meadows to the natural world of Banished. Today, in some kind of freak accident of messing around with the code (I still don't quite know how and why it works, but it does), I have managed to do exactly that.




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I'm still fiddling with the spawnrates, but the idea is that the world will have patches of meadows, forest and intermediate zones. meadows will then spawn herbs (meadow meshes), onions and roots, while the forest will spawn herbs (forest meshes), mushrooms and blueberries.




Other than an increase in diversity of the landscape, this also gives some opportunities for interesting game mechanics. For gathering huts, which resources they can gather depends on wether there is forest or meadow in their influence zone. For herbalists, which areas are best for them to gather herbs in will depend on the season, as annual herbs grow only in meadows (in summer the meadows will give higher yield, in winter the forest will give more).




Lastly, the grasses that populate the meadows give me the chance to solve another tiny thing that annoyed me in vanilla Banished: many of the basic buildings have thatched roofs, but thatch as a resource does not exist. When harvested, these new grasses will give the 'thatch' material, which is used for construction of all buildings with thatched roofs.