Credit to Ryan Mattson, our Lead Level Designer!
Spoilers ahead! If you haven’t played through the game, or are still early in it, you may not want to read further.
In this note I talk about resources and their locations.
We were excited to introduce regrowing trees recently, and in our excitement we assumed the ruleset governing tree regrowing would be discoverable with little confusion. The community seems to have discovered most of the rules, but we thought that writing up a clarifying note would help fill in some gaps. The rules for tree regrowing are:
- Trees have a “stump” that looks like the image below.
- A tree will regrow as long as the stump is intact.
- If you want to permanently destroy this tree so it never comes back, destroy its stump.
- The stump cannot be destroyed during the cutting down of the tree. Only after it has been cut down will the stump be vulnerable to destruction. (Bears don’t destroy stumps, for anyone who’s been curious.)
- Trees will regrow as long as they are outside the build radius of a hearth.
- Stumps are not destroyed by hearths, just disabled.
- If there is a hearth nearby trees you want to regrow, you can deconstruct the hearth so they will come back.
There are two kinds of regrowing trees in the game:
- Elven wood is found in the Elven Quarter, in the campaign. In sandbox, it can be in other areas inside the Elven Workshops, Elven Refuge, and Elven Gardens.
- Ubâsam wood is found in the Lower Deeps. Predominantly in the Grotto Expanse, it’s also spread throughout other areas in the Lower Deeps, with strong concentrations in the Drainworks, near the Belegost Forge, and around some of the smaller connective-tissue locations you navigate through. In Sandbox these would be in the Flooded Deeps, Cavern Deeps, and Pilgrim Deeps.
If the location a tree grows can be affected by an earthquake, it can regrow.
- What this rule implies, but doesn’t outright state, is some trees are not affected by an earthquake and do not regrow.
- In the Elven Quarter Promenade, the vast majority of trees can regrow. However, in the Lower Deeps, it can be a bit more confusing. There are a number of fungal trees not affected by earthquakes, which means once those trees are cut down and the Ubâsam wood is collected, those trees won’t regrow. Not all of them, though. Some trees do regrow. But it isn’t necessarily clear just from looking at them which are which, and this appears to be the source of some confusion.