So somewhere along the line, I got to thinking about the reality people would face in the world of the Capitol Wasteland. The first thing that stuck out in my mind about the game being wrong in some way is the trees. Radiation being in the area simply isn't a good enough reason for the DC area to be a desert. Hiroshima has a green garden at Ground Zero, where the bombs fell. In our own world, Chernobyl is a green paradise. As it turns out, radiation is not as bad for trees as people are. Without man's influence, nature takes back over, no matter what kind of legacy man has left... to a point.

Looking around for some mod to take care of this, I found only one kind of tree mod out there, and it takes it in entirely the other direction. They make the game look like Oblivion. Green, peaceful, beautiful, serene. This wouldn't do either. So I've taken it upon myself to make a new mod which creates a realistic picture of what the world would look like after the bombs.

In the initial fireblast, all of the trees would be dead. Their husks would be embedded with radioactive particles and would not decay possibly for millenia. But the seeds would survive. According to USDA studies, the most common tree in the DC area is the Beech. Their hearty nuts would not burn up in the fires. Many of the seeds might have been sterilized by the radiation, but of course not all of them. In addition, not all the trees would be dead. Many of them would die but some would live, however scarred.

The ground would mostly have been baked into glass, but certain areas of fertile non-irradiated soil would have made it through, as Oasis proves.

Putting this together with a few hacked up speedtree models and exports, I give you this: Trees of the Capitol Wasteland

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/824/sandstorm.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/851/rarewastelandforest.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/846/closeupe.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/580/screenshot16l.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/810/paradiselostl.png/

Now, I want to remain as close to lore as possible, so as you can see this mod by no means makes all of the Wasteland into a green paradise. Quite the opposite. With only a few exceptions, the trees are not healthy. The smaller trees are Beech, fresh 100 year growth from the time after the smoke cleared on the now Wasteland. The taller, more ragged trees, on the other hand, are pre-war relics. Their irradiated branches are mostly dead, but still they cling to life.

You can also see that many of the trees are NOT alive. I do not plan on replacing them. Sometimes, dead is simply dead, and they will remain as a reminder of man's destructive nature.

What would you like to see in this mod? I want to remain as close to realistic as possible, yet also as close to lore as I can on as many points as possible. One thing I'm thinking of adding is squirrels. There is squirrel soup in the game, but no tree-rats? Unacceptable. Things like this are what I want to address in this mod.

What do you think?

They look quite good.