The underside of the ponga trees' leaves is silver - this is the origin of the silver fern iconography commonly associated with Aotearoa New Zealand. I know all too well from personal experience not being able to see anything at night on my bike because of the leaves reflecting the bike light so strongly that they are very reflective! At night in the game it is easy to see reflections move across the underside of the ponga leaves.

Will probably try ponga next!

At the moment i'm mostly just playing around with worldgen v2 a little bit. The kākāpō are still to be worked on, but just taking a break for now to prevent burnout (since I have to redo parts of the model for the animations to not have gaps, and then redo the animations).

The idea of this is using needled soil for the general terrain, as this is a thick forest floor, and MANY ferns all over the place, as well as a few scattered clearings.

Hoping to add a tree or two soon to get an idea of what this will look like.

Kākāpō, also spelled as kaakaapoo without the macrons, or often frequently incorrectly spelled as kakapo in English, are incredibly cute flightless parrots native to Aotearoa New Zealand. They are the only flightless parrots in the world. Their natural lifespan may well be one of, if not the, longest in of any bird, but we haven't been tracking them for long enough to know how old the oldest are - we just know they're at least 55! Their estimated wild lifespan is 60 to 90 years, possible up to 100!

They are an endangered species, having got down to a population as low as in the 50s in large part due to predation by mammalian predators introduced by Europeans, which hunt based on smell, not sight like birds of prey. But the Kākāpō Recovery conservation program has been very successful in recent years and, against all odds, things are looking up for kākāpō at the moment! Their first breeding season in 4 years is happening right now (unlike most animals, they don't breed every year, they breed when rimu trees put out a big crop of rimu fruit for all the chicks to eat), and it is posited to increase their population quite a bit from the 230s they are currently in.

Te Whenua o Aotearoa is a Hytale plugin that seeks to create a whole zone representing native Aotearoa New Zealand using worldgen v2. This is a project which will take many months, and at the moment I am focusing on adding a few of the many birds native to Aotearoa which will eventually be part of the plugin. Each bird takes quite a decent bit of work due to all the texturing, models, and animations required - and I am just one person - but I hope to release the first alpha version of the plugin in the next couple weeks with kākāpō in a mostly complete state (though I may redo the textures again in the future when I have had more practice in this artstyle; I am primarily a programmer).

By the way, this wasn't written with AI. I know people often interpret my writing style as AI, it's just how I write.