No need to bash people, tastes are and will always be subjective...
All criticism is welcome as long as it is in good spirit.

Bro really comes in here arguing why someone elses opinion on how the game should look is wrong. Bruh, people have different tastes, its ok. Go find a different mod you like lmao.

Nobody is arguing that subterranean plants wouldn't be at the very least pale in real life.
But..
This is a game, set on an alternate universe where dragons exist...why is it so hard to suspend disbelief over plants operating in a different manner than what we know? Furthermore, there's a million industry games where as soon as you cross the entrance to a cave , plants light up...its not uncommon to treat fauna as decor more than environment.

Any way, as i have already explained, I made them coloured to keep track of which one is which and dark cause they don't grow under the sun and they make spotting holes on the roof easy. Not because i believe that plants should be colourful when one goes miles under the surface. =)

I wasn't saying light shouldn't impact anyone's vision or that it doesn't in reality, but at the time I thought that in dwarf fortress it didn't. After looking into it more, I can't find much definitive information about how vision works, but it seems the LOW_LIGHT_VISION token determines how well a creature can see in the darkness, so maybe there's some effect. Either way, setting aside that the lighting system and how it relates to vision are underdeveloped, the caverns are considered dark by the game, so saying that a human seeing across them means they're light is selectively considering the game mechanics that support your argument while ignoring those that don't.

My position is that there's not much biological reason for subterranean plants to be colorful in the absence of sunlight, and that there is no omnipresent light in the caverns, and in fact there is none at all aside from magma, magma men, fire men, fire snakes, fires lit by such creatures, and sunlight from surface caves. As well, underground plants are a thing of fantasy and as such typical biological rules don't need to apply to them. When I say light doesn't impact vision, I'm talking about game mechanics as they exist, to make a point that they are not a good basis for arguments as to how the world of dwarf fortress is supposed to and is planned to work, in response to your argument that because an ordinary human can see across a cavern there must be light there.

Pick a position to argue matey, you can't be the realism absolutist and spout nonsense like "light doesn't affect anyone's vision". Stop flip flopping from one position to another every time you get shot down ...and we can debate this until the cows come home.

Until then...its nothing but comical reading your attempts at supporting a single argument with your wishy-washy view on how everything can bend and twist to support your subjective opinion, but nobody else's.

The only cavern plants that could have a significant amount of chlorophyll are cave moss, which is only in the second layer, and spore trees, which are fungus. As for there being light in the caverns, the game's light system is rudimentary and boils down to "has this tile been exposed to the sky at some point" meaning a constructed building can never be dark even if it's completely sealed from the outside. Light also doesn't impact anyone's vision. Your argument relies upon this underdeveloped feature and also implies that, say, an underground passage sealed by a cave-in must also be bright enough to see in, because a human could see all the way across it. A more in-depth lighting system is planned for development, at which point you will need torches and such to be able to see in the caverns. Regardless of how easily creatures can see across the caverns, they're not supposed to be naturally well lit

*
--Humans (no infra/night or other type of other vision) can see from 1 edge of the cavern to the other..and 8 z levels down (through a hole on the ground) ... there should be no debate whether the DF caves and caverns are dark to the point of blocking photosynthesis or not.

--Every creature that lives underground (with few exceptions) has coloured skin. If the conditions required for plants to be "pale" were satisfied , animals would showcase similar "lack of colour"

--A plant can be "pale" because it has managed to evolve to a state where it doesn't rely on the sun as much as its brethren .
In other words "pale" plants =/= absence of light, but lack of dependence to light...one might (more often than not) come hand to hand with the other...but that is correlation and not causation.

Ps. I really enjoy talking about "nonsense" like this , its a sign of the game having pulled us in =)

..cont

IF it were my call to make, this game would have some sort of lighting system ..making torches etc a must use if you are going deeper and deeper...making plants go paler and paler as you descend etc etc. But it's not, and due to that before making any custom texture one has to make certain practical calls. I chose to do things the way i did, others might choose to do things differently.

cont..

@d41337n8r
I get where you are coming from...BUT there are a lot of things that don't follow reality (as we know it) in DF. Nitpicking on a custom texture when so much is out of wack with reality is being pedantic for being pedantic's sake...but since i am of the same mind as you. (a pedantic nitpicker who actually considered redoing the textures for every subterranean plant at some point . =) ) i'll happily debate this.


It only takes a chemical compound and a sliver of sunlight so that our eyes can catch/interpret a colour variation. ...in DF caverns there's well more than that amount of light*.


cont..

I brought up quarry bushes because their color is justified. Just like fish that live in the deep sea with no sunlight, they have no need for pigment, and it's the same with all underground plants. The only reason they would have a color is if a chemical they produce or take in for some different reason happens to be that color, or if they want to attract or avoid the attention of some underground animal. Really it doesn't have to make sense though because underground plants in general don't make sense, unless they're doing chemosynthesis or magic they shouldn't have the energy to grow in the first place.

I don't think the sprites in this game are composed with the lighting of the environment they're most likely to appear in taken into account. All the plants, trees and animals on top of the ground will still look well lit, so the moss is gonna look like it's just a dark color. Besides, it's not like these can't be exposed to light categorically, since the caverns could be lit up with fire or magma. There isn't a lighting system for sprites in the game, so selectively applying it to moss doesn't make much sense to me.

@d41337n8r
--They are colourful , because i am not sure if they all have the same properties (ie. can support grazzers) so it made practical sense to keep track of which "mold" is which. My first draft was gray/green with specs of the original yellow/blue/purple...and it looked like there was tiny amounts of splatter everywhere.

--They are dark, because they can not grow under direct sunlight...hence they are at the very least in the shade...and shade makes colours darker.

Further more quarry bushes are as much as a standard setter as ANY other crop that can't grow under direct sunlight..so..No, they shouldn't be white or gray like quarry bushes. (Nor is there anything that establishes complete lack of light in order for them to be luminescent )

I don't see why being in the shade would make the moss dark. There's no sun to photosynthesize with, and no UV to block with pigment, so if anything they should all be white or gray like quarry bushes. Of course, they're colorful anyway because it's cool and doesn't have to make sense, but it doesn't have anything to do with the shade.

It does feel a bit "washed" to me...but as long as it is across the board one can simply argue that "its an art style choice, tastes are subjective" etc etc.

I'm sure someone with the proper tools (i'm using paint.net for these texture mods *kek*) will bust a whole texture pack that kills it =) . I don't know if i can be bothered to learn my way around GIMP and Photoshop is too expensive to maintain (for a hobby) nowadays...but i'll definitely touch up anything that rubs me the wrong way. (eg. I'm currently working on grayscaling most yellow elements in the UI..i play at night and they are an eyesore .)

@DW420
Every single i mean, really loved Vettlingr back in the days.

Checked your mods on workshop, really lovely work, hope one day we can change the whole game palette.

@Mayka32
Are you referring to the grass tile page only...or every single texture?

(I feel the moss being dark is justified since it only grows under shade...dunno about everything :) )

The whole sprites palettes needs to be a little darker tbh

It's a shame that one type doesn't seem to take priority over the others...it looks like a nice rug when only one type covers a big patch of land.