Future-era forest/irrigation "Biopods"

I did not make the basic graphics for these, I just cut & pasted.

The hydroponics graphic (dome with crops inside) is by bhiita.
The SMAC city graphics were converted and posted by Pounder, from some that were provided by Ozymandias.
I used Rhye's forest terrain files (found in Rhye's of Civilization) as the "background" on which I pasted the Biopod images.

I call these Biopods. In the mod I am building (a variation on Rhye's of Civilization-Expanded, with a future era added), these replace the Forest tiles. I give them 3 food, 1 shield, and 1 commerce, and they are only available (with the "plant forest" worker action renamed as "build biopod") in the future era, with terraforming technology. Regular forest appears on my map as preplaced LM (landmark) Forest, so there will actually be two kinds of "forest" in the mod.

Here is a screenshot:

Looks good.

When a worker harvests the forest, will that be a kind of recycling, as shields are sent to the city when the Biopod is dismantled.

Yes, I forgot to mention that. Dismantling the biopod for salvage will return some shields, the way I am using them. I am renaming the "clear forest" worker action as "clear forest/scrap biopod." I need both mentioned, because there will still be forests in the game in addition to these.

Wow thats cool. that could be useful for the Moo mods too. DEA's and such. Great work.

Very clever stuff. They look really good too.

Wait, you replaced forests alltogether or you added a new terrain/improvement?
How did you do that? I have been trying to figure out how to do that for a mod for months now and nobody seems to know.

Colonel Kraken is the one who taught me how to do it. He made a thread explaining how in the Creation and Customization general forum two months ago. Here is the thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=115394

What I did was use these Biopods as "forest," so that the "plant forest" worker action would function as a "build biopod" action. I then made all "real" forests into a Landmark type of terrain. These have to be manually placed on the map, so it works just fine with my mod since it is a scenario with a world map, not a random map.

Colonel Kraken advises that if you want to do this in a random map game, you will probably want to replace Marsh or Jungle with Forests, and just eliminate the terrain type you are replacing forest with. Forests are essential to the game, but marsh and jungle could, arguably, be combined into a single "wetlands" type of terrain. After all, they use the same worker action for removing them.

how uberly cool... now just to tell the roads to work properly with them!

Brilliant additions to the game ... well done