The last few days I’ve been really wanting to change up the look of my flights in Canada as the green seems a bit unnatural. There was a mod a little while ago that changed the biomes to Fall but I never got around to downloading before I believe it went to pay-ware. The only other mod I saw was on a site that seemed a bit sketch.
So instead I decided to try figure it out myself and share what I’ve learned. It is actually quite easy to do it seems but what I know is from trial and error so please let me know if I’ve misrepresented anything.
Before I start, if this subject interests you I highly recommend visiting the following forum link to a mod in the works that will be in the form of an app that lets you change seasons: Seasonal Tree Colors I’ll definitely be grabbing it but I’m just too impatient to wait haha
Some quick points first:
- Colour changes affect not only leaves but also the trunk and branches.
- After making changes to the .xml file you will need to quit to the main menu for changes to apply (this is the tedious part of the process).
- RGB vales can be a bit confusing if you are used to working at a 255 range like me. It requires some trial and error. Note that you can go above 1.0 value.
Step 1: Find the “Community” folder where you usually install mods on your system. Go back a steep to the packages folder then from there navigate to: Official\OneStore\fs-base\vegetation
Inside the vegetation folder make backup copies of:
“10-asobo_biomes”
“15-asobo_biomes_cities”
I’ll be working on “10-asobo_biomes” in this tutorial but the same principles apply to the other.
Step 2:
Open “10-asobo_biomes” in text editor. Notepad did the trick for me.
Step 3:
Inside here you will see the different Biome Rules. Each of these apply to a list of regions.
So find the region you are wanting to change.
For me I wanted to change the trees in British Columbia so I navigated up to
BiomeRule name=“Conifer_Cold”
Step 4:
In the default “10-asobo_biomes” file and the “Conifer_Cold” biome you will notice that there is already an RGB value for the “coniferboreal" species. You can mess around with these values to change the colours but it will change every “coniferboreal" tree.
To get the best looking results for Fall you will want some variety.
What I did to achieve this was to duplicate the following text a few times:
<Species name="coniferboreal" spawnRatio="1.0"> <Color r=".7" g="0.8" b=".7"/> </Species>
Since the default spawn ratio was “1.0” I made all my ratios add up to that (I hope I understood this correctly). For example 0.6+0.2+0.2=1.0. The larger values being what you want to be most prominent.
Then it is simply a matter of changing the RGB values and the spawn ratio for all the duplicate text segments above to get your desired look. It can be as simple or complex as you want. Here are my current settings to get you started:
<Species name="coniferboreal" spawnRatio="0.4"> <Color r=".8" g="0.5" b="0"/> </Species> <Species name="coniferboreal" spawnRatio="0.4"> <Color r="3" g="1.2" b="0"/> </Species> <Species name="coniferboreal" spawnRatio="0.1"> <Color r="3" g="0.8" b="0"/> </Species> <Species name="coniferboreal" spawnRatio="0.1"> <Color r="1.5" g="0.3" b="0"/> </Species>
Step 5:
This next point is probably a no-brainer for people familiar with coding but for plebs like me it is good to know: If you are wanting to edit colours of a Species that doesn’t already have a RGB option it is very important you use the forward slash correctly. If not, all changes won’t be applied in-game.
So looking at the default settings in “Conifer_Cold” and just below the line I talked about earlier you will see:
<Species name="scrub" spawnRatio="1"/>
Notice the “/” before the “>” closing it off. If you want to add colour details to the scrubs you would need to remove this dash then put below it:
<Color r="1.5" g="0.3" b="0"/> </Species>
Now “< /Species >” is closing it off.
This is pretty much all you need to know to get going. Just remember to try match up your settings in “10-asobo_biomes” and “15-asobo_biomes_cities”.
I haven’t experimented much but you should be able mix and match tree species to your hearts content. Want blue trees? No worries.
Hopefully this terribly written tutorial helps someone out. If you have some nice colour settings please share them below. I haven’t done much work on mine as you can see from the screenshots so would love some ideas 
Cheers