Phaser home
Log inCreate a game

← Expansion packsLook

Phaser AE

Forests

Pro packv3.0.0-33DLook

Forests of any species, planted over terrain and drawn cheaply. A species is data, a planting is seeded, and the trees are packed into static batches with detailed meshes near the camera and simple ones far away.

This is a Pro pack. Upgrade to Phaser Pro to use it in your games.See Phaser Pro →

Released October 14, 2026 · updated October 19, 2026

Forests: a screenshot of its demo
A note about these graphics

Expansion packs don't come with graphics. This screenshot is one way of drawing what the pack does, made for its demo: none of the sprites, tiles or backgrounds in it are in the pack.

That's by design. A pack is a game's logic, mechanics and effects, and it works with whatever art you give it. Some packs draw effects, backdrops or 3D scenes of their own, but none carries a game's sprites.

So the look is yours. Make the art on phaser.io, bring your own, or let your agent draw it in code: the same pack can look like anything.

What it does

A species lists its parts: a built-in mesh such as a trunk, a conifer crown, a broadleaf crown, a bush, a palm trunk or fronds, or a mesh of your own, each with colours to pick from per tree, a height and offset for its centre and a size, all as fractions of the tree's height. Give it a height range, a weight against the other species and a function for where it grows, and the pack has a tree. Six species come ready: pine, fir, oak, birch, palm and bush.

game.forest.build plants a forest over any extent on a lattice, jittered as much as you like: no jitter gives an orchard in rows, the default a natural wood. Your height function puts every tree on the ground, and a density function decides the chance that each site is planted, which is how paths, lakes, slopes and biomes are kept clear or filled. The planting is deterministic for its seed, and a site the mask rejects never moves another tree, so editing a path does not reshuffle the wood around it.

The trees are packed into render-3d static batches, two per species part: one with detailed meshes near the camera and one with simple meshes for the rest. As the camera travels the split is redone, nothing past the draw distance is drawn, and the GPU culls what is out of view. Draw calls grow with the number of species and parts, not with the number of trees.

Features

  • Species as data — parts made of built-in or registered meshes, with colours, placement and size as fractions of the tree's height.
  • Six ready species — forestSpecies has pine, fir, oak, birch, palm and bush.
  • Seeded planting — a jittered lattice over any extent, from rows to a scattered wood, the same for the same seed.
  • Masks and weights — densityAt for paths, water, slopes and biomes, and a weight and where per species.
  • Near and far detail — detailed meshes inside the detail distance, simple meshes beyond, and nothing past the draw distance.
  • Live quality — quality switches between detailed and simple meshes near the camera, as an option or at run time.
  • Planting without drawing — plantForest gives the trees for a minimap, a save or a test, and validateForest lists every fault in a set of options.
  • Counts — trees, visible, near and countOf report what was planted and drawn.

Good for

  • Open-world and exploration games that need woods, forests and scrub across a whole landscape.
  • Flight and driving games flying or racing over wooded hills, with the far trees cheap.
  • Island and beach scenes with palms and bushes along the shore.
  • Farms and estates, with orchards planted in straight rows.
  • Lakesides and parks, with birches near the water and paths kept clear by the mask.

Make it yours

build takes the ground's height function, the species, the extent or a square size, the lattice spacing, the jitter, the seed, the density mask, a scale for every species' height, and the detail distance, draw distance and quality for this forest. The pack's options set the default detail distance (85), draw distance (400) and quality. Species are yours to define, with your own meshes for parts.

Two different plantings: a mixed wood over rolling terrain, birch near the lake, oak and bush elsewhere, with a biome mask from the terrain and a path kept clear; and an orchard of one species in straight rows, no jitter, on a flat field, with tighter spacing and a smaller draw distance for a close farm view.

A quick look

A mixed wood on the terrain, with birches by the lake and a path kept clear:

game.forest.build({
    size: 680, spacing: 10, seed: 73,
    species: [{ ...forestSpecies.birch, where: nearLake }, forestSpecies.oak, forestSpecies.bush],
    groundAt: game.terrain.heightAt,
    densityAt: (x, z) => clearOfPath(x, z) ? game.terrain.biomeAt('forest', x, z) : 0,
});

Works with

  • render-3d — required: the static batches the trees are drawn in.
  • world-3d — required: the 3D world, and the registry for meshes of your own.
  • terrain-3d — the ground to plant on and the biomes to mask by.
  • grass-3d — grass and flowers under the trees.
  • model-3d — for a handful of trees that must sway, fall or block, as ordinary meshes.

Good to know

  • The trees are static: no wind, no falling trees, and no per-tree collisions or queries. Rebuild after editing the terrain under them.
  • Trees stand upright, and a leaning trunk is a mesh that leans.
  • Crowns are opaque geometry, with no alpha cut-outs, translucency or impostors.
  • Repacking as the camera moves is cheap for thousands of trees but noticeable for hundreds of thousands, and a planting considers at most 200,000 lattice sites.

More Look packs

Show all →