Walk up to any big pine, cedar, fir or oak and the bark is sharp, every crack and plate. Ponderosas, incense cedars and lodgepoles had been showing a blurry brown smear up close, because the game kept the trees’ bark at a tiny version to save memory. It now always loads in full for all 14 kinds of tree, at a cost of about 0.8 GB of video memory. The giant sequoia’s flared foot keeps its full bark too.
The white fir, the big gray-barked fir, changed more. Its bark is a scan of real bark with deep corky furrows and ridges you can see in the light, in place of flat painted bark. A faint line that ran around the trunk at chest height is gone, and the bark reads ash-gray instead of near-black: its color had been measured off a mossy trunk in deep shade.
Since November 3 every trunk also sits in a collar of fallen needles, or leaves under oaks, darker right at the bark and fading out in patches toward the edge of the crown, with a soil stain up the bottom of the trunk. On dry open ground the needles lie in sparse patches. Whether a collar ever reads as a drawn circle, shows on grass or bushes, or pops in as you walk is not yet checked in play.
