Block Change Request: Silvery green leaves

[Azulejo]

Request: Silvery green leaves

Request Type: General Addition

Try to describe all workarounds and associated issues that make it necessary to add this block in your eyes.

Many plants in the Mediterranean have silvery green leaves. This coloration helps them combat sun exposure, same reason why many of them have smaller leaves. Adding a set of leaves that represent this would improve a lot the look and autenticity of the landscapes inspired by Southern Europe, the Middle East or North Africa, among others.

The request I'm asking encopasses the addition of a new leaf block as well as the modification of one already existing: Olive Fruit Leaves. Olives currently use oak leaves as a base, something that is far from the look of an actual olive tree.

Some may be concerned about the possibility of outdating many projects or even most of our vegetaition with the addition of a new set of leaves. I would argue that won't be the case, and here is why:​

1. Adding a new set of leaves would outdate most of our current vegetation. Silvery green leaves would have a heavy use mainly on the most southern regions of Westeros. While on that area this addition would be gamechanger, outside of it its use would be almost always very sparse. It could bring the possibility of making new sets of unique plants, alpine plants for example.​
2. This would outdate the vegetation of the southern areas of Westeros. This is partialy true, but at the same time it won't be as bad as it seems. Most of our projects there are on the works: The Arbor, Darkdell, Wyl... At the same time, a good chunk of the ones finished show signs of age on their vegetaition, regardless of the addition of silvery green leaves or not. Of those finished/more advanced The Tor, the Torrentine area, RM village and partially Wyl would be the ones more affected by this change. Their leaders could decide incorporating or not new vegetation if desired, though it won't be necessary.​
3. It would be easier to change the biome coloration of the spruce leaves/other set of leaves. Spruce leaves are used a lot on this area. Pines are very present on the Mediterranean, and they don't have a silvery green coloration. Cypresses are another tree comonly used here that also doesn't have that colour. Changing the colour of this leaf block to silvery green would be a mistake.​
4. This would outdate the olive trees that have oak leaves mixed. This is true, but not a big deal. Olive trees are confined to specific areas in our map, they're easy to find and for the moment we don't have a lot of them, and most use just olive fruit leaves. Those that use oak leaves too to break the uniform look would need to be retouched. I'm pretty sure this task can be easily done with WE or other editing tools.​

Types of evidence to support your request: Historical

Historical Evidence

Silvery green leaves are very present on the Mediterranean vegetation, as well as other dry areas around the world. The olive tree, a very important crop in this region, has this coloration. I would model the leaves according to the ones of this tree: small and shaped like an elongated almond. They should not be as small as our spruce leaves, closer in size to our birch leaves. Here are some pics of olive trees and other vegetation in the area that uses them and could be recreated with this addition:





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[AerioOndos]

In some places I've seen Olive Leaves used as gooseberries too. Being able to separate these two would be nice

 

[Azulejo]

Mmmmmm... I guess theres two possible approaches. Either leaving our current olive leaves for gooseberries and make a new set for olives (then we would have to replace all our olives trees), or change the olive leaves to the silver green leaves and add a gooseberry leaf block. Although I'm not sure if that's worth it, is it a widely used crop/plant? Could we, for example, use white grapes as gooseberries instead? I'm not opposed to the addition of a new leaf block for them, I just don't really know much about them or their use in our server.

 

[AerioOndos]

White Grapes are unsatisfactory as a replacement as the Jungle leaves are quite unlike gooseberry. Gooseberry and white cherries, even hazelnut possibly, could all use the same block if Olive were changed to a new texture, and the old version reused, or modified slightly as the mentioned berries (and/or nut).

Silvery green leaves would also be great for making lowlying plants in arid and dry areas too, ones that could make up garrigue, but I can't remember any exact names rn.

 

[Azulejo]

Silvery green leaves would also be great for making lowlying plants in arid and dry areas too, ones that could make up garrigue, but I can't remember any exact names rn.

That was exactly my idea and the intention I had with the last images I linked on my post. Fixing the olive leaves its important, but the main goal of this proposal was to add the ability to make more dry vegetation. Thyme, rosemary, wild-olive, lavander, wormwood, carnations, sage, retama, hawthorn, broom, common gorse, rockrose, tamarix, argan tree... Some of the canon flowers form Oldtown, like the moonbloom, could be made using this new leaf texture as a base, if desired. These are some posts where I talk a bit about some mediterranean plants: 1, 2, 3.

White Grapes are unsatisfactory as a replacement as the Jungle leaves are quite unlike gooseberry. Gooseberry and white cherries, even hazelnut possibly, could all use the same block if Olive were changed to a new texture, and the old version reused, or modified slightly as the mentioned berries (and/or nut).

Would be lovely to have both options.

 

[Margaery_Tyrell]

How frequent are olive leaves used for gooseberries ?

Because this strikes me as a backwards approach considering there are more olive trees (in more than just Dorne mind you, theyre in the Arbor and Westerlands as well in our server) than there are gooseberries on the server

 

[AerioOndos]

Oh yes, Ofc. changing the olive leaf texture to a more real version and adding in a new block with the old texture and manually inputting that

 

[Azulejo]

To sum up:

• Adding a new silvery green leaves block
• Change our current olive leaves block to the silvery green leaves block texture
• Adding a gooseberry leaves block that uses the old olive leaves block, with some tweaks so it can have more uses (like hazelnuts)