The Flora Editor Reconstruction Mod
Remember how I said I might make a "short-ish post" exploring this mod? That was a lie. Since installing the mod, I've spent hours just making plants and fungi and other uncategorized sessile organisms, and there's no way that I'd be able to do it justice with just one or two paragraphs or pictures.
If you know much about Spore, you know that it ended up having a lot of scrapped and cut content. One such scrapped feature was the flora editor. The idea was that, much like making creatures, players would also be able to make flora to populate and decorate the environment. Unfortunately, that never made it to the final game, beyond a very buggy and incomplete version of it that's hidden within the game's files. The Flora Editor Reconstruction mod builds off of that and intends to recreate what could have been.
Join me, if you please, for 5 minutes as I make a simple plant and demonstrate the basics.
Unlike the other editors, you can't access the flora editor from the Create menu. To get there the first time, you have to look at the Maxis creations in the Sporepedia, pick one of the flora, and select Edit. You can either edit the Maxis creation, or you can click New Creation to start with a blank slate. In this video, I made a Small Tree, the "medium sized" flora.
If you start with a new creation, you'll see a little orb on the ground. That's the root, and it serves as an anchor for everything else.
The rest of the video is fairly self-explanatory. For the most part, the controls are just like the other editors--you click parts to select them, drag them away from the creation to get rid of them, change the size with the mouse wheel, copy with ALT, and rotate using Tab. Almost all of the parts have morph handles, allowing shapes to be changed for a more unique appearance. Placing parts, however, can be a little finicky, and takes some getting used to.
In the video, Paint Mode includes a color wheel along with the regular Spore color choices. This is not added by the Flora Editor Reconstruction mod, it is the work of the Enhanced Color Picker mod. There is also a tab on the right with a paintbrush icon. Again, this is not added by the Flora Editor Reconstruction mod. This is added by the Advanced Creature Paint mod.
As a side note, I was not initially expecting ACP to work with this editor, and I cannot properly describe the absolute delight I felt when I discovered that I could indeed use it to color parts individually and that my plants wouldn't be restricted to a three-color palette.
Towards the end of the video, it tells me that I need at least 3 fruit nodes to save the creation. This is true of Shrubs (small flora) and Small Trees (medium flora), but does not apply to Tall Trees (large flora). Personally, I would like to create smaller flora that doesn't have fruit, but I understand why it's forced: if you play the game as an herbivorous creature, you need fruit to survive, and if all the flora that generated on the planet happened to be fruitless, you'd be shit out of luck!
Since there are three types of flora, there are technically three editors.
However, they all have the same parts. The only real difference is their size (and the Tall Trees not requiring fruit nodes). Each editor has a height limit, and I discovered the limit for the Tall Trees when I made this one too tall.
The 2D background tree is a good reference for the size limit--if that's an intentional part of the editor design, I commend the mod makers for including that. I believe the circle on the ground in this editor is more or less the same as the one in the creature editor, so that also helps provide a sense of scale (pictured below).
Speaking of the creature editor, this mod includes the option to add all of the flora parts to the creature editor, as well (featuring a cameo from our old friend, Gary, The Example)
One unique feature of the flora editor is that parts of the creation can be underground. This is a feature in Maxis-made flora as well, so that they look less awkward when they generate on a hill--they have roots that extend downwards and make it look like an actual feature of the terrain.
I experimented with this feature a bit, and made this. On the surface, it looks like several different plants in a cluster, separate from each other. But if you move the camera underground, you can see they're all attached to one root system! I can see this being utilized for all sorts of funky designs that include multiple plants in one creation, especially when used with Advanced Creature Paints. Below is another example of this technique.
Finally, the best and most exciting part of this mod (in my opinion)...
... is that player-made plants appear in the game! It's a very refreshing and much-needed change to the environment of Spore, and in a way, it almost makes it feel brand new again. The world feels alien, and that's exactly how it should feel.
I don't know if there's any more major development planned for this mod, but I'm curious to see if anybody will make add-ons for it. Something I'd like to have is support for other creature paint mods; I'd love to be able to use paints from Dark Injection.
Flora Editor Reconstruction is perhaps the most exciting and intriguing mod I've played with in a long time, as it adds an entirely new level of creativity and customization to the game, and I highly, highly recommend it.
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