Diversified forests

I was thinking while trying to find a specific tree among many, perhaps forests needs to be fleshed out.

  1. Different forests could have different preferences for wildlife, trees, bushes

  2. Having forests diversified on a map-generation basis could allow for more content, including forest-but-weird specific things

Examples: Pine forest, Maple forest, fruiting forest, etc. Squirrels like hickory, birch, maple, and oak, from a quick search that’s oddly relevant. What trees do moose like? Do deer and the wolves that follow have a preference? Rabbits?

Going the second step, it would allow for “trifified”/fungal forest regions. An exceptionally rare “abomination” could have forests, with trees that are actually ents, or trees that stretch out their roots to harass you. There could be a fleshy/zombie forest where you get many chunks of zombified meat from picking plants. On that note, different kinds of forageable bushes. A cyborg variant could have metallic trees that drop metal chunks, and you could get scrap from foraging, besides cyborg enemies and small robotic critters.

  1. The different forests could have less-traditional setpieces, and themed variations. Maybe there was a log cabin, but now it’s made of zombie flesh and drives you mad and makes you nauseous from being inside too long. A “pulsating flesh mound” could spit out zombies nearby, or robot critters if a mill (with lots of motors and tools) was making them, with a themed “master controller” enemy to destroy/disable to shut it down.

It could need some tweaking, because fungus spreads fungus etc, but it could be a long-term (realistically unmaintainable) goal to limit the spread of malignant forests.

2 Likes

I actually really like this idea. Fungus forests I think can be left out though as they pretty much already exist.

I’ve heard this idea, and its called “Flesh Forest”.