VULKAN - Landscape Retexture

INTRODUCTION

It's gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.  That's right Wastelandsketeers, it's another visual landscape overhaul courtesy of your friendly neighborhood DV.  Once upon a time there was a wonderfully atmospheric little mod called Scorched Earth, by Spiffyskytrooper.  It used a handful of the game's existing blackish texture files, mostly from the Glowing Sea, to paint the whole 'Wealth in monochrome shades of grey, as well as reducing the density and abundance of grass and other flora.  As the BADLANDS project was to Dustbowl and later Desperados, the nascent germ of VULKAN was gonna be for Scorched Earth.  But then Scorched Earth vanished into the wastes, leaving a small, perverse, and voluble population of folks jonesing for a Fallout 4 with an over-the-top bleakly apocalyptic vibe.  Well comrades, now you've got plenty of pumice with which to scratch that itch, even if we are still waiting in vain for a bit of obsidian.

VULKAN depicts a Commonwealth utterly blasted by volcanic eruptions.  Long after the initial cataclysm, the Glowing Caldera continues to belch lava and poisonous vapors from deep within the earth.  The countryside lies covered in layers of ash and soot from burning forests.  Cratered pyroclasts litter the ground.  To the west, great hydrothermal vents have opened up around the old Nuka World amusement park, staining the blasted ground in thermophilic bacterial hues.  Blackened trunks and the battered remnants of human habitation remain amid the ruin.  And yet, for all the earth's destructive potency, life hangs on, tenacious as ever.  Sickly, contorted vegetation straggles in the wreckage across the 'Wealth, but in the north lush meadows flourish in the fertile, mineral-rich soil.  As they cobble together a new life from the wreckage of the old world, hardscrabble survivors tell each other that the worst has passed, that there is a chance, however slim, for a strange new world worth living in to be grown out of the ashes...

ABOUT VULKAN

VULKAN retextures the landscape and the grass to look like a volcano erupted just outside of Boston.  No, it's not especially realistic, but it is moody and evocative as all get out.  Different regions of the map have different floral assemblages and ground textures.

While it would have been cool to add heat hazards to the magma-flavored ground textures, I don't know how to do that.  You'll just have to role-play it like The Floor is Made of Lava, or come up with some genius head-canon for why everyone can walk around in the stuff without suffering anything more serious than a radiation headache.

VULKAN was designed with the vanilla game's flora setup in mind, though it looks interesting in different ways with both Dead Forest and Naked/Barren Wasteland.  Special mention to Misty Pines Overhaul, which add