Heightened: Simply Bigger Vanilla Trees

Time to get lost in the forest!

A quick datapack that I’ve created to increase the tree heights of most trees in vanilla Minecraft. All trees retain their vanilla appearance except their heights are doubled or even more!

Heightened was pretty much inspired by a concept art from Mojang (more on that below), and also by one my favorite Forge mods called “Dynamic Trees”. Heightened’s vision is to complement the sense of scale that the 1.18 update introduced to Minecraft’s world generation. It’s goal is simple, make the trees look bigger and retain vanilla’s aesthetic, giving a different atmosphere to its forest. Being an enhancement is its main intention, not replacement. 

For now, I am going to work on 3 flavors of Heightened, as presets for those with different preferences. These three versions would be maintained and would be updated to 1.19 eventually. I would also love to replicate this mod as a Forge or Fabric mod. Here are the presets that I’m working on currently:

Heightened – Default – The original, and my own interpretation of bigger trees of Vanilla Minecraft. As stated in the description, the default version’s tree heights are mostly doubled or sometimes even scaled greater than the default. It’s largely inspired by Minecraft’s 1.19 supposed Birch Update.

Heightened – Subtle (formerly known as Slightly Heightened) – A highly requested version of Heightened. Subtle flavor increases most of the tree heights by at least 2 blocks. This version ensures that leaves are far off from the ground, making traversal less of a hassle, but stays faithful to the sizes of vanilla Minecraft’s vision.

Heightened – Realistic – The biggest and grandest version of Heightened. Realistic’s main goal is to, well, scale it to a realistic sense. Using real life measurements for scaling, this version of Heightened is perhaps the most different (and worst to chop) among these three. Looks off? Yeah, it would probably look really off, but I’d still do it regardless.

FAQs

Q: Help! I can”t chop all the wood!
A: I would definitely install a tree chopping mod/datapack. It’s a tradeoff between aesthetic and game design.

Q: Will this mod be backported for 1.16.5?
A: No. I have no plans currently to do that.

Q: The new trees don’t appear from saplings!
A: This is a limitation on my end and I’m unable to solve it for now. I’ve yet to see a datapack that does this, therefore I have no references currently to implement this.

Q: Are the images with Steve rendered?
A: Nope! Those are in game photos.