The amber material I just copied from the wiki using the values for glass. I suppose I could modify it to make them weapons grade.
That's understandable i guess, but the fragility and specialty of edged weapons does suit it being good for that purpose. Being so cheaply renwable, also carrying some planned obselecence that parrying with it too much or packing the cheap weapons in weapon-traps due to its brittleness can cause the weapon to degrade & eventually snap without invalidating wood armor.
Just as it would say on the wiki, max-edge determines how it performs against metals of a higher strength and grade, thankfullly
only shear yield, shear fracture, and shear elasticity matter elsewise for edged weapons (as the others relate to armor values being reactive to types of biting, pinching, strangulation, latch & shaking etc)
Resin is also quite interesting as a plant for production (in the way its implemented), but at the same time has nothing to lose in being a glob like material (see paper production etc) except maybe a bit more thought about quantities used in each reaction.
Here is the main problem I'm struggling with for this mod: The lack of scarcity of materials. Since all of my elf materials are derived from "renewable" resources (unlike mined metals in default DF), there's very little incentive to ever use the lesser grade materials for weapons or armor. You don't have to make bronze equivalent weapons when you could just as easily make iron equivalent weapons. They take more steps to produce, but you're never in much danger of running out.
Ideally there could be some kind of system by which certain materials are better for certain purposes, while other materials are better for other things. But I don't really know how to go about that. I need to come up with some reason to have all of these materials other than flavor, if that makes sense.
You're absolutely right about the need for some way of ethically removing trees. You can remove boulders by building floors over them, and you can remove shrubs and saplings by building dirt roads. The only way to 'remove' trees currently is to shoot them with a ballista, which doesn't give elves an unhappy thought.
I don't actually know how I would go about your ritual knife idea. Is that something that can be accomplished with raws, or would it need lua scripts or dfhack?
Ritual knife is easy peasy, its just a dagger, the hard part (if you can really say the productive process is 'hard') is to make it into amber so it has a edge that is worthy of being able to cut into trees. The axe skill is used for tree-cutting, elves are already giving off unhappy thoughts to me when i go about cutting trees becuase its hard built into their unthinkable ethical response for tree murder. ((also i can't strictly remember if elves give tree quota's to their own race, fun way to enact a civil war))
[ITEM_WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_DAGGER_RITUAL]
[NAME:dagger:daggers]
[ADJECTIVE:ritual]
[SIZE:450]
// [CAN_STONE] can be put into here if you want but its not a nessecity
[SKILL:AXE]
[TWO_HANDED:27500]
[MINIMUM_SIZE:5000]
[MATERIAL_SIZE:2]
[ATTACK:EDGE:1500:1000:slash:slashes:NO_SUB:1250]
[ATTACK_PREPARE_AND_RECOVER:3:3]
[ATTACK:EDGE:10:1250:stab:stabs:NO_SUB:1000]
[ATTACK_PREPARE_AND_RECOVER:3:3]
[ATTACK:BLUNT:20:600:strike:strikes:pommel:1000]
[ATTACK_PREPARE_AND_RECOVER:3:3]
I can empathize with the renewablility, its a recurrant problem in similar modifications, unless you go out of your way to have resources out in the world you need to find to kick-start a particular production chain, its better to kind of hover at a naturally low point of technology for infinite distribution.
Also, technically while you can't melt things down, you can still aquire resources from raiding & trading with other races, some metal bars at the metal-forge for instance. Perhaps metal armor and ingots can be transmuted into a special kind of wood to be refitted, but elsewise the metalsmith forge should still work out for them providing you have enough emberflowers reduced to ash/coke or magma to properly fuel it.
- Mimic wood logs for copying protective values from bars and objects, for unsharp reproducible adamantine or steel for instance.
- Molten metal resin for elf alchemical epoxy-alloys? ((epoxy is the same resin-stuff that cosplayers use to make their armor))
Amber is magma safe material anyway since its deritive of glass thankfully so you can cheaply pump it to a more convenient place.
Speluncaphobia or the fear of caves, as much as i've tried to extract from masterwork's humans seems to be this simple set of light reactive syndromes. Which should help your elves do much more poorly in the dark.
For the creature.txt file
[CAVE_ADAPT]
[CAN_DO_INTERACTION:SPELUNCAPHOBIA] //edited out the masterwork 'tag' from title
[CDI:TARGET:A:SELF_ONLY]
[CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:33600]
[CDI:FREE_ACTION]
[CAN_DO_INTERACTION:SPELUNCAPHOBIA_SLOW]
[CDI:TARGET:A:SELF_ONLY]
[CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:3050]
[CDI:FREE_ACTION]
And its interaction.txt file
[INTERACTION:SPELUNCAPHOBIA]
[I_TARGET:A:CREATURE]
[IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_CREATURE]
[IT_CANNOT_HAVE_SYNDROME_CLASS:LIGHT]
[I_EFFECT:ADD_SYNDROME]
[IE_TARGET:A]
[IE_IMMEDIATE]
[SYNDROME]
[CE_DIZZINESS:SEV:10:PROB:100:RESISTABLE:START:0:PEAK:10000:END:20000]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:CAVE_ADAPT:18400:26800:REQUIRED]
[CE_DIZZINESS:SEV:100:PROB:100:RESISTABLE:START:0:PEAK:10000:END:20000]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:CAVE_ADAPT:26800:33600:REQUIRED]
[CE_DIZZINESS:SEV:1000:PROB:100:RESISTABLE:START:0:PEAK:10000:END:20000]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:CAVE_ADAPT:33600:NONE:REQUIRED]
[INTERACTION:SPELUNCAPHOBIA_SLOW]
[I_TARGET:A:CREATURE]
[IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_CREATURE]
[IT_CANNOT_HAVE_SYNDROME_CLASS:LIGHT]
[I_EFFECT:ADD_SYNDROME]
[IE_TARGET:A]
[IE_IMMEDIATE]
[SYNDROME]
[CE_SPEED_CHANGE:SPEED_PERC:50:START:0:PEAK:3050:END:20000]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:CAVE_ADAPT:3050:NONE:REQUIRED]