I think a lot more could potentially be done with animals and the animal trainer/care skills. Maybe ways to train animals past just "war". Maybe even train them to do other things too.
Awesome idea! Just imagine, labor bears hauling your goods around. Cleaner monkeys scurrying around cleaning up the grounds. Birds singing in the tavern.
Citizens' labors in animals is a wonderful idea indeed. That could be a good solution to the weakness of the elven workers and warriors, but should employ some plugin like Autolabor (adapted to pets) or a very complex script.
They could be trained not only in the traditional vanilla way, but also they could improve some useful skills (like bite, discipline and dodging). Imagine an armored elephant trained to the point of being a legendary kicker or a grand master fighter gorilla.
Elves have no industries, only plant growing and anomal care. But you can add some biological. In one cheater mod dwarves have creatures with shearable skin, shearable ivory and other stupid things. But with elven magic it can be interesting. Like you can grow apples on oak, you can grow horns on pig!
Using magic to apply mutations is almost impossible. I would need to add a bunch of fake creatures with a lot of castes to simulate every mutation (and transforming the wildlife doesn't look elvish, it's more fitting for a Skaven mod).
Also. if you like useful magic, you can add magical transforming animals into giant versions. With previous suggestion, you can milk honey from giant bees.
That's a very good idea indeed, and very easy to apply.
Also, I could add some giant versions only available to elves, like the giant bees you say or giant unicorns.
Quick Question 2: Should elves interact with fairies and pixies in some magical way?
As beds you can add cloth version (hammock) and fearher version (pillow). Elves can make feathers shearable. This better than amber beds (sounds like gold toilets).
Adding hammocks and featherwork is a simple and good idea indeed.
Amber beds are something fancy I would like to add to them. It's like the gem beds in the Meph Tileset.
Elves have and really must have no materials like metal. Because they are biological civilisation. But they can have and improve their beasts.
Beasts mat be not only giant. They can evolve into new species. I will give you small list of examples.
Elves use their beasts for a lot of things. Needs mining? Elves not make metal pick, they prefer use giant mole to dig. War? They not make stronger armor. But make stronger army of really big beasts.
Mining is something that I'll NOT add to elves in no way. But boosting your pets with magic looks fine to me, as I said before.
Edit: typos
For labors you can write script that add to creatures natural skill by special training. Also you can make script that make some creatures (elephants, chimps, parrots) sapient when they are elven sitizens. Not forget adding grasp token to trunk or another body parts like I add grasp ability to harpies.
You can make this bunch by creature variation mechanic (like Toady make giant animals and animal people). Transforming wildlife is elvish, vanilla elves make trees bigger and grow different fruits on them, and even growing tree parts into shape of weapons, tools and other items. So it is absolutely elvish, when your idea of metals and spells for them is absolutely unelvish.
Probably. But not giant satyrs. About other wariations, I suggest wooly (growing shearable yarn on creature), feathery (with shearable feathers), horned (groving horns), trunked (remake nose into grasp trunk, not for all creatures, but just imagine example horse with trunk like small elephant), stinged (grow sting on tail), with some kinds of poison (for predators - bite or talons, for hairless and featherless - liquid skin secretions, for stinged - in stinger, and some special like camel or llama who spit poison) and shell-covered (alternative for armor - transforming skin tissue layer into segmented or scale-like shell tissue layer). I not sure about adding wings, in current version it not so useful. Also possible adding web or more legs, but I think this will be incongruous. You not need this variatins for all animals, just for animals who with it will looks not fully absurd.
Amber beds is luxury in nonelvish way. I not sure even elves have any luxury. What about grown wooden bed with grown leaves and frowers as decorations?
Digging soil, I mean. But with their nature fanatism even this may be forbidden.