Eco Machina

Realistic tree rendering — stable

Trunks and branches are rendered as tapered, connected segments. A Heavy Path Decomposition (HPD) algorithm picks the trunk at every fork by the biological “most weight hangs above” rule, giving each tree a readable main-trunk → main-branch → side-branch hierarchy with 16 thickness steps from trunk base to twig tip.

Two kinds of connectors keep the geometry continuous:

• Wood-to-wood connectors sit inside fork blocks and bridge the parent’s spine to the secondary children, so branching points read as one continuous mesh.
• Foliage connectors link the branch tips to the canopy as X-cross billboard quads carrying branch-silhouette textures, alpha-tested for sharp edges.

Per-species HSV bark-tinting samples each species’ bark texture and produces matching twig colors — birch reads light and grey, oak warm brown, redwood deep red.

Vines and shelf mushrooms attach to the tapered branch geometry: vines drape along the real branch curves with proportional scaling, shelf mushrooms sit flush against the trunk surface.

Mod compatibility is built into the design. Eco Machina is species-agnostic and applies the same treatment to every wood/foliage block regardless of which mod added it. Atlas-page-aware mesh routing handles multi-atlas mods (resin overlays, custom bark sets) inside the tapered pipeline. Bark-tinting picks up modded species’ colors automatically — no per-mod configuration required.

Dynamic tree growth — in development

Trees that grow gradually over time, with stages derived from vanilla growth rules and reactions to available space, obstacles, and seasonal conditions. Currently opt-in behind a config flag and considered experimental until stable.

Root systems — planned

A complete root system per tree, modeled per species with three archetypes: taproot (deep central), lateral (shallow plate), and heart (mixed). The visible parts are root flare at the trunk base, surface roots on slopes and cliff edges, and root-over-rock paths when a tree grows on thin soil over stone.

The rest stays underground — but when a player digs through soil that contains root volume, the exposed roots become real, mineable tapered-wood blocks. Soil itself is never touched or converted; the root system lives alongside the terrain, not in place of it.

Living ecosystem — planned

Natural reproduction via seeds and saplings, competition for light and space, aging and natural death, seasonal effects like leaf drop and regrowth. Long-term work on the roadmap.

A browser tool that lets you draw a tree on a grid and watch it get decomposed into chains in real time. Switch live between Vanilla (raw blocks), Long-Path (the legacy algorithm), and HPD (the new one). It’s how the algorithm was tested during development — useful if you want to see why the trees look the way they do.

Try it here: factorial-seven.com/eco-machina-visualizer