Biomes and whole ecosystems from your own meshes, on Unreal's own PCG framework, for Unreal Engine 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8, with no experimental plugins. Point one area at an ecosystem and it covers the landscape by climate: forest in the moist valleys, rock on the steep slopes, meadow on the dry flats, riverbank along the water. Draw a trail and the forest opens for it, the hillside levels under it and a road is laid on it.
No art is included, so nothing has to fit around ours. A free starter kit fills the six biomes with 50 CC0 models from Poly Haven: install the plugin, open the map and the forest is there.
Biomes. A biome is a list of layers with rules: trees, shrubs, rocks, ground cover, grass. You drop your meshes into the layers and the rules decide where each one goes, by slope, height, moisture, sunlight, paint layer, distance to water and how fast that water runs. One Data Asset per biome, nothing else to open.
Ecosystems: one area over the whole landscape picks the biome cell by cell (3 m) from height, slope, moisture, water, sunlight and paint layer, with soft borders.
Layers that grow together: saplings near their parent trees, ferns under the crowns, flowers in the clearings, shrubs along the forest's edge.
Ground that follows the biome: four grounds written to a virtual texture your landscape material reads through one material function, so the forest floor, the scree and the sandy banks change at the same borders as the plants.
Areas as a box or a closed spline, nested with priorities (a clearing inside a forest), blended at a border that wanders so it never reads as a straight line.
Six presets: temperate forest, conifer forest, meadow, riverbank, rocky slope, desert, plus a temperate valley ecosystem.
Water. Still-water plants stay out of the current and stones gather where it is fast. Any water works once it is marked: Epic's Water Bodies, a river tool's spline or the included Water actor, with an optional flow map from a water simulation.
Paths and roads. A spline marked as a path keeps every layer off a trail, thins them toward it, keeps trunks off its edge and lays its own ground under it.
Flatten Terrain levels the landscape under the path: flat from side to side, still climbing where it climbs, blended where two paths cross. It goes on its own landscape edit layer, so your sculpted terrain stays as it was and turning it off gives it back.
Road Mesh lays your mesh along the path, bent piece by piece, stretched to the path's width and set on the leveled ground, with your material and optional collision.
Move the spline and the terrain, the road and the forest follow.
Rocks and cliffs as ground. Tag your meshes and set the tag on the area: the layers grow on top of them as they do on the landscape, with the slope read from the mesh, so a forest covers a boulder instead of poking through it. A level with no landscape at all works the same way.
Measured, not promised.
1 km² of forest (140,000 instances) generates in about a second in the editor, the same instances whether it is one area or 256 m cells.
Editing a biome on the 1 km demo valley shows the change in about 10 seconds.
A 4 x 4 km World Partition map with one ecosystem: 864,000 instances in 289 cells, flown across in a Shipping build at an average of 17 ms per frame (1080p, Lumen, RTX 2070 Super).
In the demo views: 16-25 ms at Epic and High, 10-18 ms at Medium, 6-13 ms at Low.
GPU grass up to 64 per m², in 32 m cells around the player.
What breaks other biome tools, and what Biomecraft does about it.
Updates: generation is deterministic and the same in 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8, checked by script before each release. Version 1.0 is frozen in a test level that uses every feature, and every later version has to place exactly the same instances in it.
"It generates nothing": a setup check runs when the level opens, says what is wrong and fixes what it can with one click.
Swapping in your trees: one Data Asset per biome. No data tables, no structures, no graph to rewire.
Floating plants: every instance takes its height and tilt from the ground right under it, and layers keep a clearance so grass doesn't grow through trunks and rocks.
"Why is nothing growing here?": a log per layer and a debug output that show every spot that was turned down and why.
No roads: a path levels the terrain and lays its own road mesh.
Runtime and big worlds. Grass and ground cover placed around the player in 32 m cells, on the CPU or the GPU. Big areas split into World Partition cells that stream with the world. Generation is deterministic, so every machine in a multiplayer game grows the same layers and nothing is replicated.
Full Blueprint access. Every class can be extended in Blueprint, with events when an area finishes, Set Biome, Find Area At, Regenerate, and your own rule as an override on the biome (keep a base clear, thin the forest around a road). The graph is open: copy it and add your own nodes in the middle.
Good to know. Depends on the engine's PCG plugin, enabled automatically. PCG is Beta in UE 5.6 and production-ready from UE 5.7. GPU layers and Flatten Terrain work on landscapes only. After moving a tagged rock, regenerate the area. Windows and Linux.
Free demo and starter kit: https://github.com/filipetessaro/biomecraft-demo/releases/tag/v1.1
Documentation: https://apps.tessaroapps.com/biomecraft/docs/
Support: contato@tessaroapps.com
PS: Feature requests are welcome!