Project Goal

To create more dynamic, aesthetic, fun and natural looking trees while respecting the Minecraft graphic stylization and enforcing a narrow project scope that keeps things simple.

Features

A growing tree is a multi-block structure of rooty soil, branches, and leaves blocks that has many advances over the Vanilla Minecraft tree structures. The formation of the tree starts with a seed. This seed is either planted by hand much like a Vanilla sapling or the seed has a chance of planting itself if left on the ground in a suitable location. The tree then grows from a sapling, slowly increasing it's size over time, into a full sized tree. The tree can then be chopped down at it's base and all of the wood claimed at once.

Trees

Grow progressively from seeds to mature trees over time.
Grow in natural ways loosely modeled after real world trees and tend to grow in unique, believable ways.
Grow around obstacles in a natural way.
Are not just reskins but grow using different algorithms per species.
Have growth rate and mature sizes that are biome, temperature and rainfall dependent.
Drop seeds at random that can potentially plant themselves.
Won't grow in darkness. Leaves not connected to an outer tree branch or starved of light will die. Outer branches without leaves slowly rot away.
Will die and rot in a dark place (some species produce mushrooms when they rot).
Walking on leaves blocks is slow and sinking. Falling on to leaves prevents fall damage and destroys the leaves.
Vanilla Tree Fruits(apples, cocoa beans)
Thin branches can be climbed like ladders.

mature oak tree

Rooty Soil

Provides nutrients to trees and can be depleted over time
Applied with bone meal will increase soil fertility and allows the tree to grow past its mature state
Applied with various brewed potions for different effects(see next section)
Special effect particles are created on the entire tree when an acting substance is applied to the soil or bottom-most trunk block
Comparator can be used to sense soil fertility level

Potions

[]Biochar Base: Base tree potion for brewing
[]Potion of Depletion: Depletes soil completely so tree stops growing
[]Potion of Burgeoning: Quickly grow a tree
[]Potion of Fertility: Fully fertilizes the soil
[]Potion of Persistance: Stops tree from changing(Dynamic leaves are changed to Vanilla leaves).
[]Potion of Transformation: Changes an existing Dynamic tree into another tree species
[]Potion of Gigas: Transforms a tree into it's Mega variant (if available). By default it works with Spruce and Jungle trees.

Seeds

Take the place of vanilla saplings
Are randomly dropped from trees(configurable)
Can self plant if setting on a dirt/grass/podzol block in a forest with a clear view of the sky above it(configurable)

Saplings(Above: Oak, Spruce, Birch Jungle; Below: Acacia, Dark Oak, Crimson Fungus (1.16.5+), Warped Fungus (1.16.5+)) and their respective seeds.

Compatibility

Vanilla trees function normally.
Worldgen can be disabled to allow Vanilla trees to still spawn.
All drops from growing trees are vanilla leaves, sticks, and logs. Branches are not obtainable in survival. Shears only obtain vanilla leaves.
Vanilla textures are used for wood and leaves making it resource pack friendly.
Seeds can be crafted from vanilla saplings and vice-versa by using a dirt bucket.
Fire spreads and burns at the same rate as vanilla tree fires.

Forests

As trees drop seeds the forest line spreads.
Trees compete for sunlight when placed near each other and grow taller and skinnier than trees in the open. This produces a forest canopy effect.
Canopies block skylight producing dark forests where mobs can spawn during the day and saplings fail to thrive.
Podzol forms from dirt or grass under the dark forest canopies of some tree species. Podzol is meant to emulate forest leaf litter appearance.

at the edge of an oak forest

oak forest by the plains

a savanna sparsely populated with acacias

taiga near the coast with a mega taiga behind it

spindly birch trees in a dense forest

the canopy of the tall jungle trees produce a dimly lit forest floor

crimson forest

A gloomy crimson forest next to a smaller warped forest (1.16.5+)

Harvesting

Cutting the tree at it's base will fell the entire tree
Thicker branches take longer to harvest
Whole branches can be removed from the tree without disturbing the main body of the tree
Harvesting results in vanilla logs and sticks the number of which is calculated as the total volume of wood in the tree or branch
Fortune enchantments on axes are actually useful and work to increase log yield
Tools are damaged by the number of logs harvested(configurable)
Leaves grow back when destroyed if outer branches are left undamaged
Trees fall over when harvested(configurable)

The Woodland Staff

The woodland staff is a multi-function tool intended for use in creative mode(can't be crafted). In the most basic usage it can be used to copy a tree. Right click on any dynamic tree with the staff to pull it's JoCode. Next, right click on viable soil to recreate the same tree. The tree is also rotated based on the player direction. If the player right clicks a tree with the staff while sneaking then only the tree specieswill be copied, leaving the JoCode unchanged. In this way you can for instance create an acacia tree that is shaped like a tall jungle tree. Another feature for the Woodland Staff is that any JoCode pulled from a tree is also copied to the system clipboard as text. This enables a player to share tree models with others easily.

Dynamic Trees Plus (1.16.5+)

Dynamic Trees Plus is an extension to the Dynamic Trees mod exclusive to the 1.16.5 version and up, which aims to add dynamic versions of other vegetation that would not fit the scope of this mod, such as Cacti and Huge Mushrooms.

Saguaro Cacti in a badlands biome (feature of Dynamic Trees Plus 1.16.5+)

What will happen to the existing cactus?

In the 1.12.2 version of Dynamic Trees the cactus will remain as a feature and will not be removed.
In the 1.16.5 version, the dynamic cactus is a feature of Dynamic Trees Plus, which fits much better with its scope, and is not a part of base Dynamic Trees.

Mod Compatibility

Add-Ons

Add-ons are mods that do the work of including modded trees in a more modular and maintainable fashion using the Dynamic Trees API. This prevents bloat in the base Dynamic Trees mod which only includes vanilla Minecraft trees. Below is the current list of add-ons graciously developed by other modders. Refer to their individual project pages for information on which trees the mods are able to provide.

1.16.5 Add-Ons:

1.12.2 Add-Ons:

Compatible Mods

Mods where features mix well with Dynamic Trees, the compatibility is notable or has been explicitly provided. Mods not on this list are not necessarily incompatible.

Better Foliage: Leaves blocks will be enhanced as expected (does not work with trunk rounding feature, this won't change)
Better Beginnings: Can't chop down a tree with your bare hands, tools work as intended.
Optifine: I know, right? Can you believe it?
Quark: The grass color of the Rooty Dirt Block and the dynamic leaves foliage is changed by Quark's greener grass option.
Passable Leaves: Dynamic Tree leaves become passable when this mod is installed.
Serene Seasons: Dynamic Trees fully implements a season system for its trees, which is by default compatible with Serene Seasons. Trees will respond to the climate and slow / stop their growth accordingly. Fruits also have a specific harvesting season.

Incompatible Mods

Applied Energistics 2: Meteor generation ruins dynamically generated trees.
Tree Chopper: issue
Liquid Luck: Dynamic Trees are known not to drop logs and sticks when this mod is installed.

Project Scope

Examples of in scope features

Trees and only trees.
Provide advanced growing versions of vanilla trees
Zero to minimal configuration. Should work out of the box with sane settings or defaults
Provide interfaces for other mod developers to expand the mod with add-ons, new trees, effects, mobs and other things. If you need a hook then lemme know :)
Response to seasonal changes
To achieve compatibility with other popular mods when appropriate
Stylization should not deviate from the Minecraft aesthetic. All parts of a block model should be comprised of rectangular prisms with each face aligned to 1/16 meter(a standard minecraft texel)

Examples of out of scope features

Species of trees not implemented in vanilla Minecraft(such as those in Forestry, Pam's Harvestcraft, Natura, Biomes O' Plenty). For compatibility with these please refer to the Addons section.
Creature entities, mobs, and/or particles(ents, squirrels, monkeys, fireflies, etc)
Fruit(other than vanilla Minecraft tree fruit products: apples, cocoa beans)
Dungeon loot(pointless for this mod)
Tree villages, villagers and/or trading posts
Swings or other gadgets commonly attached to trees
Magic, energy systems, XP drops, enchantments
Tools and/or apparel(in survival, admin tools might be okay)
Grafting
Tree genetics and/or pollination, such as that in forestry
Automatic fertilizers, detectors, or any kind of machine for interacting with the tree

Features like these will never be implemented. I'm not suggesting that these are bad ideas or wouldn't be fun but they are indeed outside the scope of what this project is meant to accomplish.

Those wishing to implement out of scope features are welcome to do so in a separate expansion or compatibility mod. Popular mods tend to experience scope creep and featuritis. Ultimately you end up with jet packs, metal ore trees, nyan cats, flaming super death cactus swords, and 15 kinds of creepers. I won't have it.

Technical Details

Under the hood

Trees grow using a combination of a cellular automata algorithm for leaves and branch network logic for trunk and branches
No tile entity rendering is used. Rendering is done with BakedModels for better performance with large numbers of tree nodes
Leaves are only updated with updateTick() so chunks are re-rendered when dirty no more than with vanilla crops
A DropCreator interface is used for creating seed drops and other items. New drop creators can be registered by other mods to expand existing or new tree behavior
Worldgen uses a custom variation of Adaptive Incremental Stippling(AIS) using the PoissonDisk Distribution for high quality and non-overlapping tree placement
Season data available here

License, Permission and Modpacks

Permission is hereby granted to use this mod in ANY mod pack or server. Please don't ask for permission to use the mod in your mod pack after I've already told you that you can, it's annoying. Attribution would be nice but I don't require it. You are not allowed to re-publish this mod to other sites without providing a CurseForge download link and my permission. Did I mention that you have permission to use this mod in your mod packs?.. Good! You were paying attention!

Bugs and Issues

Use the issues link at the top of the content section for reporting bugs. The comments section was removed because it was abused.