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Konza Prairie Spring

No matter how many times I've hiked Konza, it never gets old. Ever since I made the original Konza Prairie map I thought I wasn't truly giving it justice with just pure satellite data. I've been wanting to get out of RF modding for a while now and was looking for one nice last project to finish up with, so making a recreation of Konza in RF seemed like the perfect choice. I've remade the top left portion of the original map which is the part of Konza Prairie featuring its nature trail. This map is at a 7:9 scale of the real place, though some parts were accidentally stretched slightly too tall. Konza is constantly changing and is a different beast in every season so I've decided to split it into 4 versions for each season. Also did that so I could better test out different lighting/weather conditions other than the regular plain day and night.

This is the Spring version. During late February Konza has controlled burns take place on it, resulting in the regrowing grass and foliage being healthier and hardier. Here's the burn from this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkoTwBduqdM
The day version is set on an overcast day with the sun peeking through. Night mode features the map during twilight.

If you're ever going through north-east Kansas come on over to the Flint Hills and check Konza out! It's much more beautiful in person.

Here's the links to the other seasonal variants:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2994199722&searchtext=Konza
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2994171702&searchtext=Konza
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2994184211&searchtext=Konza

The reason for that is because I have the terrain set to be instanced which only works on the high terrain setting. Instanced terrain is much more optimized, even if you were to set it to medium you'd be getting less performance anyways.

This is mainly due to the high amount of trees in this scene. Unfortunately, not much I can do about it because RF doesn't really allow any optimization other than what Unity has out of the box. Occlusion culling helped out some, but if you're on a hill (especially at the edges of the map) the scene starts lagging out because of all the trees it needs to render now. If you are having trouble with frames your best bet would be the general quality settings. Lowering this makes the LODs transition quicker into the lowpoly variants.

One recommendation I'd have is to try this out with Rummist's 2042 music mutator. Goes kinda hard on this map.

Big thanks to Sudo for providing the soldier models for the thumbnails.
Assets used were various materials from Quixel Megascans, as well as their sandbag, crate, and grain silo. The grass comes from ATOMICU3D's packs, Nobiax's Grass pack, and the Rustic Grass pack.

Mods used in screenshots: Sofa's Vanilla+ pack

Fun Fact: The United States only has 4% of its Tallgrass Prairie remaining, with the majority of it being in the Flint Hills of Kansas, which is where Konza is located in.