Knots & Rings

Knots & Rings is a lightweight visual enhancement mod that improves the realism of Minecraft’s trees by adding natural wood imperfections, connected tree ring cross-sections, and proper growth stages for saplings. This mod is designed for and anyone who appreciates environmental aesthetics and natural details.

Note: Optifine, Continuity, or Fusion are required for certain features like texture variants to work.

Features

Natural Wood Variation

Logs and wood blocks gain new textures featuring:

• New bark patterns
• Realistic knots and holes
• Organic variation that blends with the vanilla style

Connected Tree Rings

When a log block is alive, the end grain changes behavior:

• Tree rings connect seamlessly across adjacent logs
• Trunks appear as a continuous cross-section of wood
• Large trees have a pith and growth rings that vary in thickness
• Chopped logs in builds stay separate as usual

Tree Seeds ALPHA

Instead of saplings, trees now drop all kinds of seeds from their leaves:

• Oak leaves and their variants drop acorns
• Spruce leaves drop cones
• Acacia leaves drop seed pods... and more!
• Mangrove trees now have saplings as well as propagules
• All tree seeds can be composted

Living Wood?

Yes! Logs that are part of a tree are now alive and become nonliving when chopped down. As long as a tree keeps its natural leaves it stays alive. This behavior is used to determine when logs should "connect" their tree rings. Logs can also be manually split apart or heal back together.

Detailed Mechanics

If a log block is placed or generated

 (1) adjacent to naturally-generated leaves (which can decay and drop saplings), or

 (2) can find a path through adjacent logs which meet requirement (1)

it becomes alive and part of a contiguous wood cluster; otherwise it remains separate. A log is adjacent to leaves or another log if it touches a face, an edge, or a corner of the other block.

When a tree separates from its leaves (i.e. becomes a stump), it becomes nonliving but remembers it was part of a trunk, and thus remains connected. If a nonliving trunk is split with a pickaxe, all logs that were part of the trunk separate. If an individual log block us healed with bonemeal, it will slowly heal and join with all the separate logs it's attached to.

A stump left behind from chopping down a treewill keep its connected end grain, more naturally complementing forest and plain landscapes. Use a pickaxe on logs to manually split them into separate blocks. THe same can be done to stripped logs that form a connected trunk, though a word of caution: stripped logs cannot be revived!
Any placed logs not connected to a tree will behave as usual and remain separate, keeping builds and structures looking exactly as intended. Use bonemeal on the logs to manually connect them. This will allow the wood to gradually heal until it becomes fully connected. Bonemeal can also be used to heal explsed tree rings and grow bark over them.

Sprouting Saplings ALPHA

With the new seed items, saplings now grow in stages: seedlings, sprouts, saplings (default), tall saplings, and giant saplings (for 2x2 trees). The default saplings have been retextured, and now have natural variations, with stages larger than the default being 2 blocks tall. When growing giant 2x2 saplings, the tree now grows more realistically from a central stalk.

Natural Generation

Tall and giant saplings generate rarely near trees of the same type. Naturally generated saplings are "stunted" and cannot grow to trees on their own, but using bone meal can help them grow into trees.

Detailed Generation Mechanics

When a tree is generated, it has a 5% chance of generating a group of 1-3 saplings near it, in a square region between 2-5 blocks around the trunk. Each sapling has a 50% chance of being either tall or giant (2x2). If the ground is bad where a sapling attempts to grow, the sapling is not placed.

Pruning & Care

Saplings can also be pruned at any stage (except for the youngest, seedlings) with shears, similar to other plants like kelp and cave vines. Take care near the young seedlings and sprouts, as stomping on sprouts can cause them to decay and break, while doing so to seedlings will cause them to uproot. Stomping on a sprout in a 2x2 pattern that has grown to at least sapling stage will not affect the growth of the tree.

Compatibility

Knots & Rings is designed to feel like a natural extension to vanilla Minecraft, which means you can expect an optimized and performance-friendly implementation and unobtrusive, familiar gameplay changes. This mod should be 100% compatible with other mods and datapacks that modify structure and tree generation.

The behavior features of Knots & Rings should generally be compatible with modded wood types, but resources must be added to enable the features, and tree seeds must be added manually. If you would like to see support for another mod with custom wood types, reach out on GitHub!

External Mods Currently Supported:

• Regions Unexplored
• VanillaBackport (Pale Oak) ALPHA

Note: Resource packs that modify log or wood textures may interfere with the visual features of this mod.