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. And if none of the built-in woods look like the landscape in your head, you can build your own.
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.
Building your own woods
Your own woods types are made in the Creator, and making one is free on either plan. A woods type there is the same recipe as a built-in one — a density, and a mix of species each with its own height range — but it is saved to your own library rather than to a single island, so you can paint it on every island you build. Whatever you do paint, the island keeps its own copy of, so a map you export or publish carries its woodland with it. On the free plan everything you make in the Creator is shared with other players; Rail Island PLUS is what lets you keep one to yourself.
