Stranded Deep Natural Regrowth

Natural Regrowth adds a persistent palm ecology system to Stranded Deep.

In the vanilla game, cutting down natural palms permanently reduces the island's tree population, while harvested coconuts do not naturally return.

Natural Regrowth changes this without turning resources into instant respawns.

Natural Regrowth integrates with Stranded Deep Mod Settings, allowing its user-facing options to be configured directly from the native Options → MODS menu.

Each island keeps track of its natural palm capacity. When palms are cut down, the population falls below that capacity and surviving palms gradually gain a chance to reproduce.

New palms begin small, grow through the existing Stranded Deep palm stages, and eventually become mature trees.

The result is a slow renewable ecosystem designed for long-term survival worlds.

PALM ECOLOGY

Natural Regrowth tracks the palm population of each island.

Cutting down a palm:

• reduces the current population

• does not reduce the island's natural capacity

• creates a population deficit

• allows surviving palms to gradually reproduce

Reproduction automatically slows as the island approaches its original natural capacity and stops once that capacity has been restored.

The mod does not continuously increase the number of palms beyond the island's natural limit.

PALM GROWTH

New palms begin as young PALM_4 trees and mature gradually through the existing Stranded Deep palm stages.

Default growth progression:

PALM_4 → PALM_3 after approximately 17 game days

PALM_4 → PALM_2 after approximately 34 game days

PALM_4 → PALM_1 after approximately 50 game days

Older palms contribute more strongly to reproduction than younger palms.

NATURAL PLACEMENT

New palms are not simply spawned exactly where a tree was cut down.

Natural Regrowth searches for suitable terrain around an existing parent palm and checks placement conditions such as spacing, height and slope.

If an island is currently unloaded, ecological reproduction can still happen logically.

The new palm remains pending and is physically placed when the island becomes available again.

COCONUT REGROWTH

Empty palms can eventually produce coconuts again.

By default, an empty palm waits a random 15–25 game days before a regrowth check.

Each check has a 15% chance of success.

If the check fails, another 15–25 day period begins.

A successful cycle produces:

• 1 coconut — common

• 2 coconuts — uncommon

• 3 coconuts — rare

Existing palms that were already empty before installing Natural Regrowth are also supported.

PERSISTENT ECOLOGY

Natural Regrowth stores additional ecological state for the world.

This includes:

• natural palm capacity

• current palm population

• managed palms

• palm growth stage

• pending births

• coconut regrowth state

• progress on unloaded islands

The system uses Stranded Deep's own game time rather than the Windows system clock.

SAVE BEHAVIOR

Natural Regrowth uses its own sidecar data for ecological information that does not exist in the vanilla save format.

This data is committed together with a normal Stranded Deep save.

If the player exits without saving, both the vanilla world and Natural Regrowth ecology roll back together.

Native palms and detached coconuts continue to use the normal Stranded Deep save system wherever possible.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

Natural Regrowth is intended to make long-running survival worlds renewable without making resources instantly or infinitely available.

New trees take time.

Reproduction is probabilistic.

Island population remains limited by its natural capacity.

Coconuts return slowly rather than immediately.

The goal is to make islands feel like persistent living ecosystems while preserving resource management.

SOURCE CODE

https://github.com/bamex-mods/stranded-deep-natural-regrowth

IN-GAME SETTINGS

Stranded Deep Natural Regrowth integrates with Stranded Deep Mod Settings.

Install Stranded Deep Mod Settings to configure Natural Regrowth directly in game through:

Options → MODS → Natural Regrowth

The in-game settings page provides access to the supported Natural Regrowth configuration options without requiring manual editing of the BepInEx configuration file.