Knots & Rings

Knots & Rings is a lightweight visual enhancement mod that improves the realism of Minecraft’s trees by adding natural wood imperfections and unique tree-ring textures. This mod is designed for builders, nature lovers, and anyone who appreciates environmental aesthetics with a couple of subtle new gameplay mechanics.

Note: Optifine or Continuity are required for texture variants and connected texture features to work.

Features

Natural Wood Variation

Logs and wood blocks gain new textures featuring:

• New bark patterns
• Realistic knots and holes
• Organic variation that blends with the vanilla style

Connected Tree Rings

When a log block is alive, the end grain changes behavior:

• Tree rings connect seamlessly across adjacent logs
• Trunks appear as a continuous cross-section of wood
• Large trees have a pith and growth rings that vary in thickness
• Chopped logs in builds stay separate as usual

Living Wood?

Yes! Logs that are part of a tree are now alive and become nonliving when chopped down. As long as a tree keeps its natural leaves it stays alive. This behavior is used to determine when logs should "connect" their tree rings. Logs can also be manually split apart or heal back together.

Detailed Mechanics

If a log block is placed or generated

 (1) adjacent to naturally-generated leaves (which can decay and drop saplings), or

 (2) can find a path through adjacent logs which meet requirement (1)

it becomes alive and part of a contiguous wood cluster; otherwise it remains separate. A log is adjacent to leaves or another log if it touches a face, an edge, or a corner of the other block.

When a tree separates from its leaves (i.e. becomes a stump), it becomes nonliving but remembers it was part of a trunk, and thus remains connected. If a nonliving trunk is split with a pickaxe, all logs that were part of the trunk separate. If an individual log block us healed with bonemeal, it will slowly heal and join with all the separate logs it's attached to.

A stump left behind from chopping down a treewill keep its connected end grain, more naturally complementing forest and plain landscapes. Use a pickaxe on logs to manually split them into separate blocks.
Any placed logs not connected to a tree will behave as usual and remain separate, keeping builds and structures looking exactly as intended. Use bonemeal on the logs to manually connect them. This will allow the wood to gradually heal until it becomes fully connected.

Compatibility

Knots & Rings is designed to feel like a natural extension to vanilla Minecraft, which means:

• No new blocks or items
• Unobtrusive, minimal gameplay changes
• Optimized and performance-friendly implementation

This mod should be 100% compatible with other mods and datapacks that modify structure and tree generation. Any existing world or server should also be able to add Knots & Rings without issue, and the mod can be removed while keeping worlds and servers intact.

The behavior features of Knots & Rings should generally be compatible with modded wood types, but resources must be added for them to make them work with connected textures and variant textures. If you would like to see support for another mod with custom wood types, reach out on GitHub!

Note: Resource packs that modify log and wood textures may interfere with the visual features of this mod.