The tree draw distance is terrible again. Just did a flight in Anchorage and the trees only go out for a few miles then abruptly stop. Mountains in the distance look bare and the textures are awful. Not sure if this is just in Alaska around Anchorage or everywhere.
And the tree mod from Flightsim.to doesn’t work anymore either.
Increasing terrain LOD for me does not increase tree draw distance at all.
The more I fly and test after this SU4, the more irritated I’m getting. Didn’t they beta test this update?
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My tree draw distance is great. I’m flying at about 120 - 140 knots GA though, so maybe that’s the difference. I’m using the Bijan addon at the moment.
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It’s a tree replacement mod, I don’t think its purpose is to increase draw distance, more to replace trees with more believable choices. I loved the blooming crab apple trees that popped up where I live with the latest release 
It’s at simmarket if the mods take the link down… just search for Bijan. He’s constantly updating and improving it. And if you find issues, he’ll fix them…
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I also have this mod, but it doesn’t change the draw distance. It certainly makes the game look better, but the draw distance of trees is minimally affected - at least I see no difference.
With every update, I do a test at LOWI to see how far up the mountain trees are rendered. When the tree draw distance mod was working, I was able to see trees all the way up to the top of the mountain. Not anymore, whether I have Bijan’s/Flightsim.to mod installed or not makes no difference.
@autopylit88: There is a bug currently that causes a reduction of the tree draw distance depending on how far away from the equator you are. Anchorage is pretty far so will have a lower draw distance then someone who flies in Colombia or Indonesia.
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This is the single best addon in MSFS. The dev’s commitment to it is phenomenal.
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The Terrain LOD doesn’t seem to affect the tree draw distance. Confusingly, it’s the ‘TREES’ detail slider that does that. See images below. I fly in VR and very reluctantly pushed my trees to ‘HIGH’, fearful of the effects on FPS. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to make a significant difference.
Somewhere in France - TREES ‘LOW’ (Default bare hills):
TREES ‘ULTRA’ (Default dense woodland)
TREES ‘ULTRA’ (Bijan’s awesome Spring Seasons):
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There is a Trees Details slider? Is this new?
Not new - always been there. What changed with SU3 (I think) was that the tree draw distance got tied to this option. At least that’s when I started poking around to try to get my beautiful lush forests back. I think Bijan had commented on this on his Seasons Pack thread which pointed me in the right direction.
I was thinking the draw distance was better in Florida compared to Alaska. Did the devs mention this is a known bug with tree draw distance and distance from the equator?
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I’m just kind of disappointed in this update. They “tested it” yet there are little glitches and performance issues popping up anyway. I’ve always been pretty lucky when it comes to these updates but this one has created some strange bugs for me. My sim looked and ran the best after the last WU and subsequent hot fixes. This SU4 has degraded my experience
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I bumped Trees to ‘Ultra’ in settings. Florida and the mountains in North Carolina look fine with trees, Alaska still looks awful with draw distance still being only a few miles with bare and low res mountains in the distance.
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I wonder if it’s related to the mesh density then? The terrain mesh is going to be much denser in mountainous regions vs Florida, which in turn will suck more compute time/graphics space. They may be bumping trees for terrain… ?
I have the opposite going on here. I had to turn trees down to medium for it to look realistic.
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Tree LOD has been nerfed for quite a while, there were no changes made after the latest SU. Seems like the furthest draw distance you can get is about 5 nm. Some areas you will only get about 2-3 nm. If you are flying low and slow you may not notice how bad it is. Fly up to about 10k feet AGL and you quickly start to notice really how bad the tree LOD is.
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They both do:
This is LOWI with Terrain LOD 600 and trees ultra . With 200 and trees ultra you won’t see trees that far:
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Hi Bijan, thanks for the clarification.
I was really surprised how much impact tree detail setting had. I have Terrain LOD at 100; increasing that setting murders FPS in VR. I was pleased to find I can push tree detail to HIGH and get back pretty decent forests without killing performance (too much )
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Yes, there is indeed a difference in LOD if you are close to the equator or not. Sadly.
Although 600 on terrain LOD is a slideshow unfortunately.
The problem with mods, or increasting tree detail to 200, you end up with denser forests at the edge of the “circle of trees” making it look even more ridiculous.
I’m so annoyed that nothing can be done about it, and those early mods that increased the distance but got nerfed were absolutely ideal. I guess we are just in the dumbing down phase for the X-Box release.
Fly high to lose the trees and you then have the lowering in terrain resolution. I have a beefy machine and good graphics settings, and this looks absolutely nothing like it does on the promotional videos.
I’ve noticed a lot of the fan art on the official MSFS channels is all instagram, blurred out, high depth of field stuff, not showing how the sim looks when you are actually flying a tubeliner and looking out the window.
I won’t say it looks poor, because it dosn’t, but it doesn’t look great, or anything like how I was expecting when MSFS dropped.
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A comparison screenshot would be helpful to justify your post
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