Greetings, fellow wastelanders!  I come bearing textures.  What initially started as a personal project to re-color a handful of landscape textures pretty quickly ballooned into the monstrosity you see arrayed before you.  Originally intended for use with Spiffyskytrooper's excellent Dustbowl Overhaul, I ended up diversifying the textures and tweaking them so that they'd look good with just about any other landscape setup, from vanilla to crazy Fungal Forests. 

As this was, and pretty much still is, a personal pet project, there may be some irregularities of texture size, visible seams, incompleteness, and other such jank.  If you feel inspired to fix something that strikes you as broken, by all means go for it.  Hit me up and (if I like 'em) I'll add your alterations to the main file.  ...But I will not respond to requests to alter anything whatsoever.  Swapping around textures is ludicrously simple; if you see something you'd do differently, do it differently yourself.  This mod is presented as-is.



What it's All About

Once upon a time, I worked for the Navajo Nation Department of Fish & Wildlife as a field agent.  My job took me all over the Dinétah (the Diné home country between Sis Naajinį́, Tsoodzil, Dook'o'ooshį́į́, and Dibé Nitsaa, that fills the gap in the United States at the junction of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, and completely surrounding Hopiland) plus some of the Checkerboard region chewed out of Zuniland to the south, and quite a lot of the surrounding US-occupied territory.  The Dinétah is a diverse land, covering all sorts of terrain from badlands proper to dune-fields, dry prairie, canyons, piñon-juniper scrub, ponderosa woods, sage flats, riverside thickets, rock scree, and everything in between.  Though I now live in a green and fertile corner of the world where it rains all year round, the desert landscape still has its hooks in me.  It was comforting in a wistful way to note how much my memories of yucca moths, blown sand, and the song of the canyon wren were roused by fooling around with ground textures for an aging video-game.  But they were, and I've been dreaming again recently of the smell of sagebrush after a summer thunderstorm. 

Though this is undoubtedly a trivial matter, the landscapes of that place were in my thoughts as I put the mod together, influencing choices of color and texture in the composition of this imaginary world.  Much of who we are is an expression of the specific character of the place we inhabit.  The personality of the land and the personality of the human are of a piece, as a body is to one of its cells. 

The cool shade on the west side of a sandstone boulder in the hour after the sun rises.  Mariposa lillies blooming out of a gravel pavement far as the eye can see.  In-law chasers running before the sandstorm.  Days so hot all the ants go underground before noon.  Mutton stew.  The images above and below were taken by me and my colleagues while out in the field tracking eagles, counting prairie dogs, and guessing at yellowgrass densities in some of the most beautiful country on earth.  Baa ahééh nisin, díidí Diné Bikéyah.



Yeah That's Cool I Guess But What Does This Mod Do?

Right, so these are a bunch of textures.  They make the ground look pretty.  In particular they make the land look like a wild fantasy desert of salt flats, alkaline lakes, red rocks, weird ancient artifacts, cryptogamic soils, petrified wood, and dry country flora.  The color and texture palette drew inspiration from real-life landscapes, but have since been amped up into absurdity.  Bright whites, reds, oranges, and teals predominate.  Each of the Commonwealth's several biomes has its own palette and texture set, granting much more character to different parts of the map than the original game.  Prepare to experience the wasteland with fresh eyes (and plenty of potable water)!

You can use these textures with any landscape or landscape overhaul (so long as it makes use of the original game's named textures in some way or another).  Most every ground texture was haphazardly painstakingly swapped out for new ones repurposed from elsewhere and custom recolored for use in this set.  More on where all this stuff came from in the credits.  These textures were originally designed to go along with Dustbowl, because deserts, but they look pretty good with other setups as well.  Looks and runs just fine in old-fashioned regular-style Vanilla.  In addition, I've re-colored and juggled around quite a few grass textures.  Dustbowl will use them, but the effect will be more dramatic when combined with another grass overhaul.  In particular, I recommend using BADLANDS with True Grass.  Many of the new textures started life in TG, and refer back to unique TG textures.  Pictures will probably explain this better than words.  All images here were taken using L00ping's WIP overhaul of the PRC ENB, as well as his WIP overhaul of the NAC weather and lighting system.  The latest versions available on the Nexus should give similar results.



How Do I Make it Do the Thing?

1. Download
2. Open with your preferred mod manager
3. If you want to use the included custom LODs, install NeuraLOD
4. Arrange in your load order to suit.  Put BADLANDS after any mod you want it to overwrite.
(Example: I want some grass, but, like, not too much grass, but I want trees too, and also proper precombined meshes and a pony! 
Fine:  Put True Grass first, then Dustbowl, then Rustbelt or Dead Forests, then BADLANDS last.  And then write to Bethesda explaining that their 'no horses in Fallout' because of mutually exclusive IP contracts between Skyrim and everything else that legally restrict independent modders from porting assets between games is still totes bogus.)
5. ?????
6. PROFITJUSTWORKS



Eff Ay Cue

Wait I don't understand, what does this do?
R T F M

Do I need Dustbowl?
No, but it will make your game look desertiful.

Does BADLANDS break precombines?
It is just textures, so no.

What the heck is up with the LODs?
Download the main file from NeuraLOD.  Place it above BADLANDS in your load order.  All will be well.

What's the FPS hit?
I dunno.  I play with stupid-high resolution and everything turned up to eleven so that I can take pretty pictures.  Most everything runs like a garbage truck with three flat tires at those resolutions.  Just for laughs I turned off my ENB while running BADLANDS and found zero performance loss over my old, unmodded FPS.  Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

So will you make a set of performance textures and put it in a BA2?
Nope.  This one's already in a BA2, and while textures sizes are all over the place from 512 to 4K, they all seem to run OK together.

That's a pretty big download file, can you make it smaller?
That's what they said.  A modular version will be available soon.

Your pictures don't look exactly like the pictures on my computer!  You scammin' me bro?
Probably not.  Remember that loose files will always overwrite files packed into BA2 format no matter where they are in your load order.  Check yourself 'fore you wreck yourself.  Also bear in mind that these pictures contain things like the sky (not a landscape texture), cars (not a landscape), people (also not landscape), random wasteland crud (sometimes but not always landscape textures), and other such things that are probably not covered by this (or any) landscape retexture, all filtered through the lens of an ENB.  You'll just have to fill in the gaps on your own with the zillion-and-one lovingly crafted retexture sets available on this very website.

Consoles?
Lol wut.

How do I get rid of the white bars?
I only know how to get rid of black bars:  Stand up real tall, wave your arms around and shout; if that doesn't work try mace and not smearing yourself all over with peanut butter when going into the woods.



Credits

Mad props are due to all of the original texture artists whose work I took and did terrible things to in Photoshop.  It bears noting that as these textures started life all over the place and were probably never intended to be used for bombed-out roadways, coastal cliffs, forest groundcover, etc. they might look a little wonky- and that is 190% my own personal fault for doing a half-assed job and not due to any ineptitude or malice on the part of these wonderful, talented beings.  Unusual combinations of texture layers, missing specular maps, etc. are all on me- and for the most part I can live with the strangeness as it is.  The secret heroes of the BADLANDS:

payl0ad for the LODs from NeuraLOD
MystiriousDawn for a great many fine textures
T4gtr34um3r for another great many fine textures and one of the kindest attitudes in modding
Spiffyskytrooper for the inspiration and some of the textures from the germinal Dustbowl Overhaul
Pfuscher for yet more fine textures and good advice about the complexities of FO4 texture work
L00ping for True Grass, all the best ENBs, and the rockingest pub in the Northern Hemisphere

As this started out as a private, personal project, it is possible that I missed an uncredited texture when cleaning this thing up for public release.  If you recognize your work here, please holler at me so I can give you proper credit.  If you'd prefer your work not be used here, please do consider the benefits of the Cathedral concept of collaborative creative work- but if you really have a problem with it I'll replace your textures with different ones.



News & Updates

Now available in multiple BA2s for ease of downloading on slow connections, and for mixing and matching with other texture overhauls.  Want just the crazy rocks but none of the weird ground textures?  Want the recolored True Grass textures but not the bleached roadways?  Etc.  Check the downloads page.



May your road lead you to warm sands.
DV