Forest Replanting Mod

Well, this is just a tiny modification I did for myself.
Maybe some others want to use it as well.

I missed the ability to plant forests in the game, so I modded it back in.
It works this way: Upon researching Guilds, your workers will be able to build the "Tree School" building. Once completed, your city will have to work the tile for ~25 turns, after which the Tree School will convert into a forest tile.
It's far from perfect and far from finished (a lot polishing to do), but it works and has no critical bugs. (Minor ones, though, like some Civic speeding up forest growth).

I'm working on the bells and whistles and on bugfixing, but atm my local copy is completely non-working. (Stupid picky Python )
So I thought I'd just post the raw version for the time being.
Have fun.

Edit: Updated the Mod for the first time.
Changes:
- Changed the "english for runaways" translation "Tree School" into "Tree Nursery"
- Changed the icon for the "Build Tree Nursery" job to a picture of a forest.
- Did a cleanup and a rename on the files in the TXT directory to reduce filesize and make it easier for people to use this modification along with others.

Edit: Second Update
Changes:
- The mod wasn't actually working after the first update. BIG thanks (and apologies) to buffy66 for pointing this out! Fixed now.
- When a Tree Nursery matures into a Forest it will now be announced in the game log. Thanks to HawaiiFive-0 for figuring out how to get the addMessage statement to work.
- Made a minimal adjustment to the XML so the game will now say "Will turn into a Forest in x turns"
- included a readme with rudementary instructions
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rezaf

I think this is a brilliant idea. Simple and clever.

indeed, would be great if you could build a building that would raise the chance of new special ressources. Like a tree school could somehow raise the change of getting an extra spice tile or corn or whatever...gj so far

I missed the forest replanting feature too, since I have a very bad habit cutting down all the trees However, don't you think 25 turns is a bit too much for that to happen? Maybe you could shorten the time down to maybe around 10-15 turns? That should keep the lumberjacks like me from exploiting this mod too much.

Cheers,
Uluk

Heh, I started with 40 turns, but toned it down to 25.
I also started with Biology as the required tech.

I might further reduce the time later, but I don't think it should go too fast.
I encourage everybody to post his thought about that matter in this thread so I can consider them for the next version.
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rezaf

Great idea! I really miss being able to plant forests as well.

Aye, it should be "tree nursery". My guess is that rezafs native language is german or of germanic origin. A tree nursery in german is called 'Baumschule' which translates into "tree school" if using a word to word translation .

Good mod, I was missing that option. The first time I played I had all my forests cut down by the time the lumbermill was available .

25 turns sounds reasonable. I don't like the idea of requiring a special building to do so, however. Planting trees is a knowledge thing--it should be a worker action after reaching a certain tech. People have known how to plant trees since long before they had tree nurseries.

Ariks is right, Tree School was a "english for runaways" type translation.
I'll rename it to tree nursery in the next version.

ritterpa: You say 25 turns is OK but there shouldn't be an improvement involved. You ARE aware that, if this was made a worker action requiring a certain time, more workers would speed up the process. Plus chopping down the forest will give your city resources to speed up their current production.
Having the improvement involved was done to balance this out.

But for you and everybody feeling that way ... I will likely release another mini-mod soonish which will feature Civ1 style worker actions, allowing direct planting of forests as well as other terraforming (Plains->Grassland, Tundra->Plains, Snow->Tundra etc.). Technically, this will STILL involve improvements, because CIV doesn't allow anything else yet, but they will disappear (be replaced by the target terrain) as soon as they're built.
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rezaf

Great idea I miss the tree planting too. Expecially last night with barbarians hording into my part of an island.. I had 1 archer on a hill to block them desperately but I really wanted to get trees on the hill to give me a nice additional defensive bonus...now i can!

rezaf said:

[...] if this was made a worker action requiring a certain time, more workers would speed up the process. Plus chopping down the forest will give your city resources to speed up their current production.
Having the improvement involved was done to balance this out.

Click to expand...

And that's exactly this mod's stroke of genious, in my opinion.

One suggestion - in the XML/Text folder, you should delete all the entries that you haven't modified, and just leave the ones specific to this mod.

Perhaps even give the files a different name. When the game loads, it loads all TXT_KEY entries from the XML/Text folder, no matter what the name of the file is, and it will still load the standard game's XML/Text folder, and then just ignores the TXT_KEY entries that are duplicated in your modded files.

This little change will make it easier for you to update the mod, and easier to integrate your mod into other mods (which I'm sure lots of modders will want to)

hmmm, make a burn forest mod too, as i recall forest fires are also benefitial becuase the seeds spread or somethin and make the forests larger in a couple of years, they also had burning trees or somethin like that in ToT

How about making the development of a tree nursery go faster after the research of recycling? Or isn't that possible?

mmm... so it was missing, thought I was going nuts

I do know that forests & jungles can grow by themselves (have it happen on my games quite abit)

Good work

rezaf said:

ritterpa: You say 25 turns is OK but there shouldn't be an improvement involved. You ARE aware that, if this was made a worker action requiring a certain time, more workers would speed up the process. Plus chopping down the forest will give your city resources to speed up their current production.
Having the improvement involved was done to balance this out.

Click to expand...

That's a good point, especially this being exploited later on as workers often have little to do.

Would there be a way to set it up like a cottage improvement, where it starts as a nursery, grows to an orchard, then finally matures into a forest? That would be pretty friggen neat.

That idea of developing villages is brilliant and now the three farm. What if somebody make castles and stuff similar? For example worker builds fort and then city works on it and it grows stronger and better?

LittleRedPoint said:

That idea of developing villages is brilliant and now the three farm. What if somebody make castles and stuff similar? For example worker builds fort and then city works on it and it grows stronger and better?

Click to expand...

That's not really how things worked with defenses. I never built fortresses in earlier Civ games, I find them utterly useless. So maybe I'm prejudiced.

ritterpa said:

Would there be a way to set it up like a cottage improvement, where it starts as a nursery, grows to an orchard, then finally matures into a forest? That would be pretty friggen neat.

Click to expand...

First you oppose ANY building being involved and then you want two instead of one?
What would the additional orchard level achieve, in your opinion?
It would be easy enough to make it that way, but I don't see why I should...
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rezaf

rezaf said:

First you oppose ANY building being involved and then you want two instead of one?
What would the additional orchard level achieve, in your opinion?
It would be easy enough to make it that way, but I don't see why I should...
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rezaf

Click to expand...

I was opposed to a city improvement building being built. Maybe I misunderstood initially and you had always intended on the building to be a terrain improvement building...

The orchard would delay the time before a forest would be full grown and simulate growing time. It couldn't be planted and harvested right away, but the worker could plant it and go on to do other things while it grows.

edit: yeah, I re-read the OP...man, how could I get that wrong? I failed reading comp 101 right here..

edit2: well, you did edit it this morning, so maybe you clarified there...

I like the idea. But isn't it unbalancing because of the possibility to re-chop the forest? And does the AI know how to use it?