How to make leaves plain blocks?

[shakra]

In vintage story, leaves have a additional layer that makes them fluffy, but this also makes them extremely laggy. The game usually runs at 60 fps, but when there are too many leaves, it drops all the way to 30. I looked in the options and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn that off. Is there a secret setting or a mod that just turn them into normal blocks, without the fluffy layer? I know this is the cause of the lag because i had the same problem in minecraft with texturepacks that have this feature.

[Professor Dragon]

Hello shakra,

You've got two points in here, that are not necessarily connected.

Q1) How to make leaf blocks square?
Q2) How to improve performance with leaf blocks?

A1) With the exception of Berry Bushes, you can NOT make regular leaf blocks square like in Minecraft, in vanilla.
At least, I don't think that they have an attribute for that.

You can make Berry Bushes square by right clicking with Shears.
They'll come back bushy though if you harvest the berries.

I don't know much about mods to change leaf block shape. I didn't find many on a real quick search.
It looks like this one has some square leaf blocks, but it is outdated: https://mods.vintagestory.at/buildersblocks

A2) It is important to remember that leaf blocks act a little differently in Vintage Story as they are transparent blocks with overlap, so rendering in a forest may have a performance hit.
You'd be better to address performance issues in general.
You could always test having a huge number of fluffy berry bushes in Creative, and then Shear the lot and see how big the performance impact is, if any. 

There is a setting called "Waving Foliage" which you could try disabling. https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Settings

From another post on this question (my emphasis):

On 8/17/2025 at 1:38 AM, 7embre said:

I think that's personal preference, I, for one, have more troubles with aliasing in the game (geometry approximation on edges) than with distant foliage being animated. However, I see that it can be annoying for some. I'd find it more annoying having them completely ignore the wind and having some kind of border at which wavy and non-wavy folliage intersect.

Also, rest assured — it doesn't. GPU instancing is very effective and can handle even million models doing the same thing in a screenspace.

Leaf blocks tank performance because of their transparency and inability of the game to occlude them, thus rendering thousands upon thousands transparent blocks with massive overdraw. But it's important for visuals, for that "forest" feeling, so there's no easy way around it unfortunately.

However, check out the other FPS impact hitters on that page.

Also, a lower View Distance may help if you are in a forest - you won't be seeing far anyway.

Some people chop down trees.

Check out this:
https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Framerate_and_Performance

Hope that helps.

Professor Dragon.

 

Edited October 21, 2025 by Professor Dragon

[Thorfinn]

Extending a bit on @Professor Dragon's excellent post, if you've already tried shutting off leaf movement, you could try more involved patching. You must have an odd machine for it to make it that bad, but if you have properly diagnosed the problem, you could go into .\survival\blocktypes\plant\leaves\normal.json and find the codeblock

	},
	sideopaque: {
		all: false
	},

and set it to true and see if that fixes it. Now this will mean you won't get to see things through the leaves, but it will have the effect of basically turning it into a block as far as rendering is concerned. If all else fails, you could copy the texture section from one of the dirt blocks and put it into the leaf code. If that doesn't fix the issue, then it's not a problem with the block per se, but something else, like the quantity of them in a forest.

It's times like this that make the lack of a comment in .json a pain. Remember to make a backup in a completely different file tree, but if you screw up, you can always run ModMaker and select the option to put your files back to the default state. Option 3, I believe.

Good luck.

Edited October 22, 2025 by Thorfinn

[shakra]

My settings are already on the "pathetic" preset and sideopaque thing didn't improve it. The best solution will be for me to edit/replace the model for the leaves. Are there already tools for that, like blockbench? Are there any guides on replacing the models and textures?

[Thorfinn]

Sorry to hear that, @shakra.  Are you running a machine way below recommended or something? Low VRAM, maybe?

Anyway, the Wiki disables modding searches by default. You have to enable it. I forget where you find the initial, "I gotta know more!" link to modding, but if you start here, it gives you the invite after some cautions.

Welcome to the forums, and may I be the first to welcome you to VS modding!