Persistent Soil Deformation

With this mod, wheel ruts, tyre tread marks and plough furrows remain on your fields after saving and loading. They stay in place until the soil is worked again.

Features

• Records the marks left by every wheel on the ground, including tractors, implements, trailers and harvesters.
• Supports vehicles from the base game as well as modded vehicles.
• Saves how deeply the wheels sank as real terrain deformation and restores it when the game is loaded.
• Tyre tread marks and furrows created by ploughs are also saved and restored.
• Marks have no time limit and remain until the soil is worked again.

How marks disappear

• Ploughs, cultivators, disc harrows, subsoilers, packers, rollers, ridge formers and seed drills level the ground where they work.
• A plough buries the furrows left by earlier passes.
• Direct drills do not work the soil, so they do not level wheel ruts, but they do remove old furrows.

Installation and use

• Copy the ZIP file into the mods folder without extracting it, then activate it in your savegame.
• No settings, menus or on-screen messages are required; the mod works in the background.
• It can be enabled in an existing savegame, but it only records marks created after activation.
• After loading, the marks are rebuilt a few seconds after the map starts. They return gradually, beginning with those closest to the camera.
• The data is stored in the soilDeformationSave.xml file inside your savegame folder.

Good to know

• Marks are only recorded on farmland, not on roads. Furrows are not restored where a new crop has been sown in the meantime.
• Restored depressions may look subtler and shallower than fresh in-game ruts, especially on maps with a coarse terrain grid.
• The mod works in single player and on server or host games. Players joining a multiplayer game as clients do not see the restored marks. For multiplayer, the mod must be used as a ZIP file.
• With an extremely large number of marks, the oldest entries are smoothed out first to stay within the memory limit.

Created by Rónai Márk.