Living Forest - Tree Lifecycle & Chopping (Unity 2D)

A living forest for your top-down game. Every tree has a full life: it grows from a sapling into a big tree, withers, dies, collapses, rots away - and a new sapling takes its place. Your player can step in at any moment with an axe or a shovel.

🌲 New companion pack: Awakening Forest

Some trees are not just trees. Awakening Forest – Disguised Tree Enemies adds oak and dead-tree enemies in the same pixel-art style that stand still like ordinary trees, then wake up, chase and attack when the player gets too close. Works on its own or right between your Living Forest trees.

📖 Online documentation: Living Forest documentation (v1.3.1)

🎃 New in v1.3 — Halloween props (free update)

• Jack-o'-lanterns, a lantern post and candles that glow warm orange at night.
• A pumpkin patch to decorate your fields.
• Works with the v1.2 day/night cycle — placed in the demo scene, press N.

🌙 New in v1.2 — Night & day (free update)

• Day/night cycle for URP 2D - fade from code, or set a loop length.
• 8 glowing mushroom prefabs that light up the forest after dark.
• Firefly swarms that wander, blink and cast tiny lights.
• The leaf wind shader darkens with the night. Demo: press N.

What you get

• 45 ready-to-use tree prefabs - Oak (Summer, Autumn, Snow) and Pine (Summer, Snow), 3 sizes (small, medium, large) x 3 health stages (healthy, withering, dead)
• Complete chopping loop: hit reactions, cut marks, health bar, the tree falls away from the player, bounces, poofs and drops logs. Dig out the stump for planks, and a sapling grows back.
• Dead trees behave differently: they collapse by themselves and leave a rotten trunk you can chop for scraps - or that crumbles away over time.
• Self-running lifecycle: grow / wither / collapse / decay / sprout on a timer. Trees heal if the player walks away mid-chop. Collapses check for free space.
• Juice included: wood chips, falling leaves, dust, dirt, poof clouds, birds flying off, camera shake, hit-pause.
• Pickups: logs and planks arc out, merge into stacks (x3) and fly to the player.
• 20 sound effects (axe chops, tree break, crash, dig, stump, pops…)
• Leaf wind shader (URP) - only the canopy sways.
• Demo scene with an 8-direction woodcutter (idle, run, chop, dig).
• Clean C# code, events for your inventory and UI, works with the new Input System or the old Input Manager.
• English documentation + an illustrated lifecycle guide.

Easy to use

1. Drag trees into your scene.
2. Add TreeInteractor to your player.
3. Press Play.

Hook into your inventory with one line:

Pickup.Collected += (item, amount) => inventory.Add(item, amount);

Technical

• Unity 6 (6000.0+), URP 2D Renderer
• 32 pixels per unit, top-down / 3/4 view
• Sprites: point filter, uncompressed, pivots at the trunk base
• No third-party dependencies

License

Use it in unlimited commercial and non-commercial games. You can't resell or redistribute the assets themselves. The demo character is for demo use only. See LICENSE.txt in the package.

AI disclosure: parts of the pixel art were made with the help of AI tools and then edited, recolored and animated by hand. The code, sounds and documentation were created with AI assistance and tested in Unity.

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Made by YET ART STUDIO while building our game Deadstead.
Questions or bugs? Leave a comment below - we read everything.