It has been some hot weeks — Summer is in full scale and before some short holiday travels, here is another vonBiomes update. I took everything under the magnifying glass, touched every custom asset in the mod for optimization and spent long nights optimizing and extending the mod. And here it is: the new vonBiomes 20 with new looks, (hopefully for everyone) notable better performance, and a new biome!
Downloads:
Join up on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/vonSeiten
After download, please be sure to check out the mod options and re-save them.
Moreover, if you encounter any hiccups, please try to purge your game.ini file to clean out mod settings to avoid conflicts and duplicates messing up things like lower FPS. If you need help or advice, here is a Discord invite! I am happy to get together and check out your mod list and find out together what's going on :) Link: https://discord.gg/eaTa8zGbRf
Whats new?
New Biome: Shrub Desert
Cacti and shrubs — a dry and hot place with new plant assets and custom grass and vegetation. The Shrub Desert replaces basically the Deep Desert from older versions.
Biome change: Deep Desert
The deep desert biome has been cleaned out for fewer obstacles (and no vegetation). Wide fields, open ranges and a land of sand for your missions.
Early Access Biome: Agriculture Lands
I have started to make a new tile-set for agricultural lands with wheat fields, farms, greenhouses, harvesters and more. This biome is also already in there, with the first tiles already done. Yihaw!
Lighting extensions & fine-tuning
Lighting, Global Illumination (GI), Volumetric Fog and many more aspects of the Weather and Environment visuals have been fine-tuned, improved and vonBiomes brings a more advanced look than before. Have a look at the mod options, on a modern card, you can enable all extensions. (Global Illumination, Volumetric Fog, High-Quality Shadows, and leave Volumetric Clouds on)
On a 2070S card or equivalent, I disable the add-ons except Volumetric Clouds. Everything has been tested to run on around ~50- 60 FPS on the 2070S in 4K and maximum details. And even without Global Illumination, etc, it looks quite good. ;)
Quick note: Be sure that no other mod is overriding vonBiomes to get everything from the mod, otherwise (especially with other weather mods) this part of vonBiomes gets removed from the game.
If you encounter anything, please let me know! This is a major clean out and update, so there is always the possibility that something is breaking in random generation;) Especially the nights have been tricky. Let's keep our fingers crossed! :)
New Mod option: High-quality Shadows
A little improvement for shadows, with the mod option they are a little improved there with tweaking of Unreal Engine's settings.
Other minor updates:
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Rain: additional particle (heavy rain)
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Texture updates for optimization
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3000 clicks to change one thing everywhere
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3000 more clicks to change it back
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Enabling NIght and Dusk on vanilla Sulfur Biome
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Macchia: Grass update
After the holidays, I will check back and work on vonHUD's vonCommander. It needs still more polishing and love. Moreover, probably vonBiomes will get another update if things emerge that need adjustments. Busy summer. Thank you very much and all the best!
See ya in the sun!
- Jonathan