Wow, so many replies! That's something nice to see.
Before answering, I would like to show the following stuff I've (almost) implemented:
Spellsinger ~ Basic magical workshop. (Outside Only)
Druid's Gazebo ~ Complex magical workshop, uses druidic score. (Outside Only)
Bowyer's Vault ~ Special bows.
Trapper's Yurt ~ Special natural traps.
Stonecutter's Shop ~ Works with petrified wood.
Ambercutter's Shop (was Ambercutter's Atelier, but that's a long name) ~ Works with amber.
Mossy Shrine ~ Calls forgotten beasts and sends workers to the underground.
Magma Works ~ Produces petrified wooden objects and extracts volcanic ash.
Hunter's Vault ~ Butchers animal corpses, boosts your hunters, lows druidic score.
Tea House ~ Brews tea from leaves.
Grower's Garden ~ Grows wooden objects in Spring. (Outside Only)
Alchemist's Yurt ~ Produces potions, soap and poisons.
Sacrificial Grounds ~ Offer captured invasors to the forces of nature to get stuff.
Wicker Works ~ Works with wicker.
Perch ~ Uses local birds to request migrants and information from beyond the forest. (Outside Only)
Elven Athanor ~ ?
Seelie Court ~ Summons and manages fairies/pixies. Changes with the season. (Outside Only)
Farseer: Same as the Druid from vanilla. Same responsabilities and behavior, but now is succeeded by the Archdruid/Archdruidess
Queen: Same as in vanilla.
Princess: Same as in vanilla.
Diplomat: Same as in vanilla.
Lieutenant: Squad leader, commanded by the Princess.
Captain: Squad leader, commanded by the Lieutenant.
Ranger Captain: Almost the same from vanilla, but now it's a site-level position and is commanded by the Elder.
Warden: Law enforcer. Commands a squad of 10 watchers. Appointed by the Elder.
Elder: Site-level ruler. Almost like the Mayor of the dwarves, but responsible for military strategy. Elected.
Overseer: Manager, meets workers
Chief Healer: Same as Chief Medical Dwarf.
Treasurer: Same as Bookkeeper.
Acolyte: Same as vanilla but now it's a site-level position.
Druid, High Druid, Archdruid: Same as Baron, Count and Duke from the dwarves. Appointed by the Farseer, succeeded by the Acolyte.
Highwood/Featherwood/Oak Treant: A living highwood/feather tree/oak with a human-like shape, with branches being his arms and roots his legs.
Faerie Dragon: A small rainbow-colored reptile, relative to dragons, with lacy wings and a playful demeanor. It is often domesticated by elves to hunt vermin.
Titans: The giant and procedurally generated incarnation of nature itself, now tamed by the elves to protect the forests of the world.
Since elves can tame any animal in the game, adding three elven-only pets looks fine to me. Treants are their only sapient minions, and faerie dragons their fancy version of cats.
Now let's start with the answers
I think adding pixies and fairies somehow would be cool. Not sure how to incorporate it though. Also shapeshifting into animals and using nature spells (like grasping vines, briarthorn wall, etc.) would be fun if you can get it to work well.
Pixies and Fairies for fairy dust, maybe. Nature Spells are a good idea, but I would like to add a fort-level druidism system before any other form of magic.
Have you seen http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143563.0 or http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=160610.0 ?
The ideas at the time were a mix of DF elves; irish/british folklore with elven courts; LotR/Warhammer high elves; and ent/plant loving sylvan/wood elves.
Wow, those posts have good ideas indeed. I like a lot the workshops you made, and (if you let me) I would like to add some of them to the mod.
A seasonal workshop like the Seelie Court could be possible using a script like outside-only but adapted to change the subtype of the building when it's certain season instead of destroying it... I guess.
I don't know if this is possible in Dwarf Fortress as it stands now, but plant-based traps.
Instead of building mechanical traps, Elves would plant them. Require a seed, and an amount of time before the trap becomes mature. Some of these could be based off of carnivorous plants (sticky traps like Drosera, snap traps like Dionaea muscipula, or pit-fall traps like Nepenthes, Sarracenia, etc.)
Also, what about poisons? A wooden spear might not be the greatest weapon, but if it could be poisoned for use against biologicals?
Plant-based traps? I think it could be done using special plants and a reaction to trigger the attack (something like a song of the spellsinger to start a fire in any Sunfire Bush on the map).
Though I don't actually know how an AoE attack would work, but I hope that it isn't something impossible to do.
Using venoms is a good idea, but I don't want to add that in the kobold way (extracting the poison from venomous critters). I would like to add some poisonous plants for the elves, to produce both regular poisons and special ones like Gnomeblight but for other specific races.
I would like to suggest adding animal men to the elves civ or if not as proper civ members as something like the summonable treants that has been suggested before.
Personally I find it fitting that animal men would like to join a civ that doesn't hunt their animal counterparts for food and they* could also help bridge the power gap between the elves and the metalworking civs. It should also prevent any problems created by altering the animals to allow their use in labors.
*The stronger than average variants or those with special abilities like serpent men.
Elf civs tend to gain animal men citizens in vanilla worldgen, as a civ valuing nature increases the likelihood of that happening, so this meshes really well. Meph has an "immigration office" workshop in one of his most recent mods, maybe some of the tricks he used there could be used to get animal men migrants for the elf civ.
I already have a version online that allows "migration" of any animal men type. It's really just a dfhack trick to spawn them directly at the workshop and add them to your fort. Not true migration, but it works.
Calling animal people from the wilds (selecting an actual animal person that's traveling through your map) or summoning it is very easy. I can make it appear in the border of the map, showing an announcement and simulating being an actual migrant.
I would like to subordinate all that to the Druidic Score, maybe using a persistent table with DFHack. The animal people should don't like to live in a place populated by guys that are enemies of the local fauna... maybe.
Quick Question 3: Should elves have new castes related with nature (like Taiga Elves, Jungle Elves, Mountain Elves, etc)?
Oh, I might be stepping on the toes of OP here, but would it be possible for this to be tweaked to use a live animal as a "reagent"? Lead a fox in (like when you slaughter livestock with dwarves), and a fox-person comes out?
Yes and no.
Not with the current setup, it would have to be a different mod using dfhack to run make-own, true-transform and different modtools lines to target a nearby animal instead of the worker. The animal would have to be pastured near the workshop and couldn't be used as reagent (like in the butcher, that's sadly hardcoded)
I wanted to write something like that years ago, to allow the mutation of insects into giant insect warbeasts etc, proved a bit tricky with vermin.
The rest works though and already exists, partly in Masterwork DF, partly in Boltguns Succubus mod.
As Meph says, animal reagents doesn't work (even when the game recognises PET and VERMIN as valid item tokens). I could use DFHack to target nearby animals, in a similar way like how Boltgun allows the player to corrupt nearby units in the Succubus Mod, but transforming animals into animal people isn't something I would like to see in the mod.
I would prefer to boost the actual animals with some tweaks like giving them new interactions or upgrading their stats.
(Maybe I must ask this in another post, but if someone knows how, can vanilla reactions like the ones of the butcher's shop or the glass furnace be added to a custom workshop?)
Quick Question 4: Should elves use Peat as fuel, or they must use some alchemy-related version of vegetable oil?
I'm sorry if someone finds any error in my writing. I'm not a native english speaker, and I'll be glad to fix any error you notice in my texts.Thanks for all the suggestions!
I was very busy this last week (well, I'm busy very often sadly) but I think that this mod will be ready to be played before October ends.