All that milkbot said, about flavour, pelts, horned helmets from horn, pelts from furred creatures, trinkets, artisans, clocks, optional standardized materials, custom named butchery objects from megabeasts... all this is polar opposite to what I have been doing. Everything serves a function. The only decoration I have are the potted plant/totem buildings, and they dont cause lag. I also added some flavour to the trading races, but even there I got requests to do away with the custom named items, because they confuse/distract people. You, milkbot, are actually the very first person to report rather playing with custom named stuff.
I can add flavour items optionally, and will add this in a poll sometime.
I will never make standardized materials an option, simply because all reactions are based on the custom mats I modded in, and it would break practically every reaction.
I do however like the idea of having more leather from bigger creatures and will see what I can do about that.
Megabeasts currently dont leave corpses, but skill aethers that give one free legendary skill. Therefore butcher-items from them would be impossible.
More descriptions is already in my todo list. I do have to note thought that the caste descriptions were one of the few genesis feature I dislikes, this one was actually that did lead that list. Obsidian, domple and whatnot, what does this guy do again, why is this civilians doing WHAT ? I choose these very short and informative one-liners, so that people can easily understand what the caste is doing. Granted, most of them you know by just seeing the high natural skills, but again, I want the mod to be easily understandable. This is very important to me, since it is very hard to get into by now, just because of its sheer size. I can however write longer descriptions in RPG style AFTER that first stentence that cleares up what the castes do.
About the good/holy/human, nature/elven, evil/dark/drow and tech/contructs/dwarf system... I am already working in that direction. Humans are not holy enough, and I will next improve on the drow with summonings and more evil stuff, but the rest is setup though. As of 1.8.1 there is a new magic system, with these bases:
Nature = Based on Alchemy and Research, made better by trading with humans and elves.
Dark = Based on killing organic things (ash, bones and blood), made better by trading with drow.
Dwarf = Based on smelting and smithing, made better by trading with dwarves and mining candy.
This leads to a high investement and different magics for different playstyles. I plan to add some more farming into the nature branch and take the human out of the equation. Maybe you are right, with humans having a magic, but dwarves only tech, BUT I just finished this and I really like the idea of dwarves praying to the rock that sourrounds them, being helped by there ancestors. I know that this is horribly Dragon Age-like, but I do happen to like that game. The first one.
Mentioning the horsemen of the apocalypse gave me the idea of either four custom demons, nightcreatures or megabeasts. I think they would be fun to make. War making dwarves berserk, Plague affecting everyone with with one of my diseases, Famine spawning little (friendly) critters (rats?) that drink/eat away you stockpiles, and Death being good plain old Death, jolly good fellow, liking cats and such.
Diseases/Plagues are already in the mod, 8 of them. None of them kills too many dwarves though, and I am still awaiting more feedback on them. You can immunize dwarves with wards, but these you can get only through trading, so a better solution would be needed. Maybe transforming dwarves temporarily into... some kind of doctor, I just envision these venician masked doctors that fought the medieval plagues. See Assassins Creed design as well. That would work.
I do like the Frost-Giant drop idea of "Frostbrand Metal". I would probably put it rather close to Adamantine, far above anything else the mod has, since it should be a reward for battling and killing the strongest enemy.
Construct itemcorpses to make new ones from dead ones makes sense. Turrets could drop a turret case, or a "badly damaged turret" that can be salvaged. I like the idea. Landmines however blow up, so no leftovers
Golems could probably drop their weapon (sword, hammer, spear)
Breeding special creatures for their itemdrops, rock-laying beetles/crabs and such is a splendid idea and will be added as a bigger industry next. They would inlcude grazer tags though, because giving away these creatures for free would be unbalanced. Dont know about the beetles yet, how they would work out, balancing-wise.
Red dye from blood, or more dyes in general I also like.
PS: I am German too, so dont worry about any english spelling you mess up
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- Optional flavour items.
- Magma-only metal and/or items.
- Breeding/Animal industry, giving special butchery items.
- More dyes, starting with a blood-based dye.
- Make different amounts of leather from differently sized creatures.
- Add a hide-effect to landmines, so they are not killed by archers all the time.
- Add some more weapon/armor tags to materials, for platinum hammers and gold armor.
- More creative caste descriptions, without loosing the info of the short ones.
- 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
- Improve both diseases and methods to heal them. NEEDS MORE FEEDBACK FROM CURRENT ONES.
- Frostbrand material made from dead Frost Giants.
- Useful Turret/Golem itemcorpses.
- Season prepared meals to improve them. Unsure if this works.