The western juniper of the sagebrush steppe was a scrubby pale tree that a playtest reported as broken. Every juniper there now draws as one of three trees built from scans of Utah junipers, chosen by its size and standing at the scan’s own height: 5.0 m, 3.3 m or 2.5 m before each tree’s own variation, with real bark on the limbs.
Manzanita in sage and chaparral country is a full leafy shrub with red stems at every distance. It used to turn into a bare red skeleton from 4 m out, which read as broken dead trees. Chop one and the notch and stump sit on its stems.
The knee-to-head young pines and incense cedars are rebuilt as well. Real branches grow out of the stem, in yearly whorls on the pine and a dense spiral on the cedar, the pine’s needles are bundles of three on its shoots, and the cedar’s sprays start on their twigs, where both had been flat cards around a stick. Young ponderosa and lodgepole saplings fade between detail levels instead of popping in a whole cluster at a time.
Still visible: the juniper’s crown is more open and twiggy than a real juniper’s dense dome, the tree reads shrub-sized against the sagebrush, its trunk bark is smooth and reddish where it should be weathered gray, and the inside of the crown goes near-black. The young pines were checked only in offline renders when they landed, and their limbs still wear the adult’s orange plate bark.
