No Money Mondays: Norway Forest by Tatu

Welcome back to No Money Mondays, our semi-weekly column where we take a look at everything freeware.

This week, we’re taking a look at Norway Forest, a new vegetation overhaul by Tatu that attempts to solve one of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s more persistent scenery issues: overgrown “jungle” trees.

The pack, which covers all of Norway except Svalbard, should provide a “significantly more realistic” depiction of the Norwegian landscape.

Tatu has also created packs for Sweden and Finland, which should reproduce similar results. Check those out here.

Since its launch, vegetation, and especially tree coverage, have been somewhat of a weak spot for MSFS 2024’s world generation.

Since the release, many reports have come in of trees appearing where they should not, including on agricultural land, exposed mountains, roads, rural roads, and built-up areas, at unrealistic densities.

For Norway in particular, this can be especially noticeable, as the country hosts large agricultural areas and mixed forests, extensive boreal areas, exposed mountains, fjords, wetlands, and increasingly sparse vegetation further north.

What the default simulator has usually done is cover a given area with way too many trees compared to real life. Although this issue is worldwide, it is especially noticeable in places with many high-elevation mountains.

To fix this, you’d have to download a “tree fix” patch from Flightsim.to, often several, to cleanse out the overly vegetated scenery in a given region.

Norway Forest, while also a tree fix, thankfully covers the entire country, so as far as flying in Norway is concerned, you only need this mod to keep your trees under control.

Tatu says the addon changes the biome definitions and vegetation used by MSFS 2024, based on real-world foliage data from The Norwegian Mapping Authority, AR50 land-cover data, CORINE land Cover, the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre, and Geonorge.

The mod improves boreal and temperate forests in the southeastern lowlands, southern, central, and northern boreal forests, alpine and subalpine environments, tundra, coastal and fjord vegetation, wetlands, agricultural transitions, and urban areas.

Forests will now generate differently, with more realistic vegetation types, and the addon also tries to keep exposed mountains, wetlands, fjord walls, and agricultural land clear of trees where appropriate.

Especially when flying VFR, you should notice that fjords and mountain valleys have clearer…