Desert Dirt

[Dr Roach]

Could someone make dirt a light, sandy color in biomes with a lot of sand, like in the desert, extreme desert, and arid shrubland biomes? To add an increased visual difference, dirt and sand in arid shrubland biomes could be red. If this would be a simple task with XML editing, could someone explain how?

[dburgdorf]

Changing the way a terrain looks is a simple matter of replacing the terrain's PNG file, if you want the change to be universal. If, on the other hand, you want sand in some biomes to look different than sand in other biomes, you'd need to create a new terrain definition for the second "type" of sand, and edit the relevant biome definitions to use that new type of sand instead of (or in addition to) vanilla sand.

[Dr Roach]

Would plants not growing on dirt or something similar be a problem?

[dburgdorf]

Would plants not growing on dirt or something similar be a problem?

No, that wouldn't be an issue.  Every type of terrain has a fertility rating; every type of plant has a minimum required fertility. If a plant's minimum fertility is less than or equal to a terrain's fertility, the plant can grow there, regardless of whether one, the other, or both are modded items.

[Dr Roach]

So, where are the dirt graphic files?

[CannibarRechter]

You want to look in Defs\TerrainDefs at the various files there, in particular Terrain_Natural.xml.