Landscape · 3 min read
Woods and vegetation: planting the island
Rail Island paints trees, not individual plants. You choose a woods type and brush it onto the island; the game decides which trees grow where, how tall they are, and which way they face.
The built-in woods
Eight woods types ship with the game, and each one is a recipe rather than a single tree: a density, and a list of species with a height range and a share of the mix.
| Woods | What it is |
|---|---|
| Pine Forest | Tall pine, the default cover of the upper hills |
| Oak Woods | Broad-leaved lowland woodland |
| Mixed Woods | Conifer and broadleaf together |
| Scrub | Low bush on ground too steep for trees |
| Palms | Coastal palm, for beaches and warm shorelines |
| Tropical Forest | Dense, mixed, humid lowland cover |
| High Mountain Forest | A treeline of small pine and spruce with bush, below the snow line |
| Park | City greenery — aspen, birch and oak over low bush, thin enough to keep the lawn visible |
Species
- Pine
- Spruce
- Oak
- Birch
- Aspen
- Willow
- Palm
- Bush
- Dead tree
Woods on a new island
A new island does not start bare. The create screen has a Woods selector — no woods, sparse, scattered, woodlands or dense forests — and that setting decides what share of the land comes up forested. What it does not do is sprinkle single trees evenly: the generator works from a large-scale forest field, so you get big continuous woods and big open clearings, the way a real landscape is organised.
Painting with the brush
The Vegetation subtool lives in the Terrain group, next to Rise, Lower, Level and Terrain paint. Pick a woods type — or Clear — set a brush radius, and drag across the island. Painting is blocked wherever something is already built and wherever the water gate refuses, but erasing works anywhere.
