"How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun."
- Walt Whitman 'Starting from Paumanok'

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER...RIGHT HERE!

Welcome to the first VELDT expansion!  Greener Pastures is a retexture for VELDT.  The mostest hyper-realistic and ultra immersive HD texture experience you'll ever- wait, hang on, I've got the hyperbole cranked up to the 'Nexus' setting, gimme a minute...

...OK that's better.  Where VELDT presents a palette of muted duns, tans, and beiges, representing a temperate grassland in late summer or fall, Greener Pastures is lush, green, vibrant, and flowery as a meadow in early summer.  While working on VELDT, I encountered a bunch of fantastic grass textures that just didn't look right shoehorned in among all the dry late-season seed-heads and straw.  So I set them aside for another series of projects, the first of which you see before you here.  As with its parent, Greener Pastures features a series of more or less unique biomes throughout the Commonwealth.  The green grassy northern pampas looks very different from the reed swamps in the south and the flowery meadows scattered across the center of the map.  The Glowing Sea is itself extensively (and suitably strangely) revegetated.  Speaking of the 'Sea, there is an optional ground retexture of the Glowing Sea designed for use alongside BOREALIS, which turns the Seascape from icy glacier to fertile bog.



TELL ME WHAT IT DOES THE WHO!

Please read the VELDT page first.  I'll wait.

...

OK, this is VELDT, but green. 

Greener Pastures also has an entirely optional ground retexture designed to work alongside BOREALIS.  The Glowing Sea is changed from glacier to bog, and the flurries of snow BOREALS places here and there in shady patches throughout the Commonwealth have been swapped out for mosses and lichens.  The patch includes landscape LOD, but will require that you generate your own object LOD, if you're into that sort of thing.  Learn all about it here (but please don't pester me with LOD questions, this is another grass mod, not a LOD mod). 

In addition, there is an entirely optional 'performance'-grade substitute plugin for VELDT.  Lots of people like to use green grasses with tree replacers, which can be taxing on the system.  The (kinda-sorta) performance-friendly version cuts down on the crazy heavy grass in areas I noticed slowdowns when Greener Pastures was running alongside other flora mods.  It looks fine, potentially even better in certain areas, but it lacks a certain 'oomph' that the super-dense original VELDT plugin provides.  I recommend you try the original first, and if you find it too slow, then swap in this replacement.  This replacer will also work fine with the original late-summer VELDT textures, if those are more to your taste.



I DON'T KNOW HOW MODS WORK TELL ME HOW TO MAKE IT DO THE THING!

1. Download + install VELDT and all of its prerequisites.  Follow all of the instructions.

2. Download + install VELDT - Greener Pastures

3. (OPTIONAL) Download + install BOREALIS, then download + install the VELDT BOREALIS PATCH

4. (OPTIONAL) Try out Greener Pastures with the original VELDT ESP.  If you experience slowdowns (and aren't running your game like a chump with a bunch of loose files) download + install the VELDT - Greener Pastures Performance ESP.

5. (OPTIONAL) Try out Greener Pastures with one of the original VELDT alternative ESPs.  You might get a couple more FPS and/or a very different-looking set of scenery.  Experiment!

6. Double-check to make extra sure nothing is overwriting your Greener Pastures files.

7. Take some pictures in-game and post them here.

8. If you like it, endorse it!  Tell your friends and your internet-friends how much you think this is the bestest most ultra-immersivest series of bits and boops in the history of digital grassdom!  My download points all go to charities (minus a tiny percentage to certain contributing texture artists) which sure as %$@* need all the bucks they can get in these trying times.



DUMB ANSWERS TO DUMB FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS!

It's not doing what I want it to do!
Read the VELDT page.  Do what it says there.  Try doing it differently this time.  Use an internet search engine to search the internet for a solution.  Innovate.  Experiment.  Ask a friend.  Ask a stranger on the internet.  Try all possible solutions before commenting with a troubleshooting question.  (By all means feel free to share solutions to frequently-posted problems- you proactive troubleshooters are the unsung heroes of the modding scene.)

What other mods were used in the pictures?
Landscape textures are from BOREALIS or Vivid.

Trees (or lack thereof) are from BNS or Barren Wasteland or the vanilla game.

Weather and skies are from a WIP update to NAC.

ENBs used are Film Workshop and another WIP update to PRC.  (Different visual setups will make the colors, light balance, etc. appear differently.)

Clothing, armor, etc. are from all over the place- sources too numerous to list.

How bad is the FPS hit?
That depends entirely on your machine, how well you take care of it, what other flora mods you're using, how many bells and whistles your ENB/ReShade setup is ringing/tooting, and how many loose files and dumb tac-ops Barbie/aesthetically questionable porn-suit mods you have installed.  (For the record, I've got a ton of that garbage and it runs fine on my definitely-not-a-large-hadron-collider machine.)

The textures themselves are mostly small, 512 to 1K, with a few extra-sharp
flowers at 2K. Those shouldn't drain your framerate much, if at all.

The lower you set iMinGrassSize, the denser the grass and the slower your
performance.  The opposite is true the higher/sparser you go.

Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

I haven't read the mod description, but I guess it maybe describes the mod?  Does this mod do the things it says it does?


I have a question I can probably figure out for myself- it it cool if I ask anyway?
Probably can't hurt to ask.  Probably.

Awesome.  I know this is, like, a grass mod so does that mean it changes the grass?  And can I use it with other mods that change grass?
Yes, this grass mod mods grass.  No (well, mostly no) you cannot have more than one grass mod display itself at once.  Whichever grass-changing mod loads with priority in your mod manager of choice will display in game- the other(s) will not.  See above.

Will this be available on console?
If you make it, it will be.  Holler at me if you would like to perform the port yourself.

I don't like it!  Make it how I want it!
No.

So does VELDT put a bunch of grass inside buildings and on floors and stuff?  That's lame.
Yeah, sometimes.  The Bethesda crew, in their infinite wisdom, did not utilize different underlying ground textures for indoor and outdoor spaces within exterior cells.  A building outside could have gravel, or dirt, or asphalt on top of gravel or dirt underneath its roof, even when that building also has a floor.  Grass placement is done by landscape texture.  In order to have nice weedy, not artificial-looking roads (because it's been 200 years since anyone patched a pothole- if there's stuff growing in the woods there's gonna be stuff growing the the city, a.k.a. the woods-with-buildings) gravel, dirt, and asphalt ground texture types have had grasses assigned to them.  Which means those same grass types will sometimes show up under a roof here and there.  But if you've ever explored an abandoned structure in a weedy or woodsy place, you may have noticed that ground-floors with broken roofs or open windows tend to have all kinds of stuff growing in them- especially if they're miraculously still standing after a couple hundred years.  If it still bugs you that there are plants growing in places inconvenient to the civilized eye, see below.

I love the concept, but could you just change this one thing?
No.  Make your own patch to meet your own individual aesthetic.



CREDITS!

Many thanks to all of the generous modders and artists who have graciously allowed me to use their work in my mods.  A fair few of the textures in VELDT are fully original, but most are wholly or in part the result of the imagination and work of other folks.  It's entirely possible that in the whirlwind of compiling and publishing I've unknowingly missed someone here.  If you recognize your own work in VELDT, please hit me up about it and I'll add your name to the credits.  If you really don't want to be a part of the VELDT project, please consider the benefits of the Cathedral approach to modding- but if you're still adamant about non-participation I'll remove and replace the offending files.  If you're feeling in a human kind of mood, send the following fine folks some love.  In no particular order, many thanks to:

Spiffyskytrooper
Silverfox600
T4gtr34um3r
Vurt
Pfuscher
Doodlezoid
Velanimus
L00ping
Winedave
Rob Tuytel / Texture Haven

Remember kids, if you like it, endorse it.

"Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own."
- John Prine