Errant Biomes 1.10

This update introduces new Species templates that make it faster to set up Species for most common scenarios. It also brings a range of performance, stability, and usability improvements throughout the plugin.

Material Parameters

You no longer need to edit the Growth Mask Material each time you want to customize Species placement. We’ve added new Species templates with built-in parameters for the most common scenarios - for example:

• spawning over a weightmap or avoiding a weightmap
• restricting placement by slope angle or elevation
• noise-based distribution
• applying a hand-painted mask, or a mask from Errant Landscape or Errant Paths.

These templates make Species setup more intuitive and beginner-friendly.

note

SubBiomes don’t yet have templates, so customizing them still requires editing the Mask Material.

• We added support for StaticBoolParameter and StaticSwitchParameter in Mask Materials, which are shown as checkboxes in the UI.

• A new material parameter node allows sampling multiple weightmaps and returning the maximum of their values. This allows configuring a Species to sample multiple weightmaps via one parameter, without editing the Growth Mask.

Other Improvements

• We decreased Runtime Spawning memory usage by avoiding unnecessary readback buffer copies. We now read directly from the buffer and release GPU memory after processing.

• We now reset already spawned runtime instances correctly after scalability setting changes.

• A new console variable (biomes.rt.SingleSpeciesDebug) allows generating only a single species by name. Useful for debugging or testing.

• We added Species compatibility versioning to ensure generation results remain consistent across different plugin versions despite the fixes we introduced. Existing projects may choose to ignore the latest fixes by selecting the previous compatibility version to get the same generation results as before.

Fixes

• We moved "Common" Species settings to a separate tab, which fixed issues in UE 5.6.

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• Fixed glitches in spawning patterns for Species with very small spacing.
• Landscape data is now properly included when World Partition sections are loaded automatically by Errant Biomes.
• Instanceable Blueprints now correctly report their bounds for priority calculations (requires Species compatibility version 2).
• Fixed PCG nodes creating unnecessary data.
• Fixed missing metadata domain warnings in UE5.6 PCG.
• Changed defaults in Growth Material Masks to make them work better on Vulkan.
• Fixed bounds texture node working incorrectly on objects with 0-sized bounds.
• Fixed incorrect spawner actor bounds in UE 5.6.
• Fixed Runtime Spawning sometimes getting into a loop of creating and destroying components.
• Fixed Runtime Spawning creating unnecessary FNames, populating the pool and leaking memory.
• Fixed crash when creating object hash from a dead UObject.
• Fixed issues where empty masks would not save correctly when Errant Biomes Editor mode was open.
• Fixed Custom Mask incorrectly sharing materials, leading to wrong results.
• Fixed rename/duplicate operations breaking existing parameters in Material Masks.
• Fixed Mask previews occasionally failing to display.
• Fixed instances not being cleared properly when components were destroyed, which previously caused memory leaks.
• Fixed incorrect results from the IsIdle method in the runtime spawning subsystem.
• Fixed RHI validation errors caused by missing flags in runtime transform buffers.
• Fixed garbage transform buffer data on PS5.
• Fixed a crash caused by HISM updates with partially loaded static meshes.
• Fixed exception handling when null soft objects appear in the Biomes dependency graph.
• Fixed crash when using material instance in Material Mask parameters.
• Fixed visual offset on debug previews.
• Fixed multiple crashes on Vulkan in the Editor.
• Fixed crash when drag-and-dropping the mask generation order in Species.