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[antymattar]

Ok so here i will be working on the elven aspects of life. Let's start with a mockup shall we:


As you can see, it is all inside one big tree. The branches are hollowed out to make rooms. Every room can have two inhabitants that will specialize in something. These rooms will also contain the necesarry tools for them to actually do something with their profession(Yes, I am assuming that they can smelt stuff. I read tolkien.).

No doubt that further updates will be drawn. This is all for now.

Trunk Hall:


Tent treehome:

[IT 000]

Well this does look cooler then the massive amount of elves that huddled around trees in past versions. A few notes.

- Elves don't burn trees for charcoal, no fuel so no windows. Use fortifications instead.

- Wouldn't the leaf pillars merge into one long line like a wall would do?

- And no, elves cannot smelt things, so there is no point in having a forge.

That being said I do hope to look at other levels. Say a level with a few shops on it or something.

[antymattar]

Umm... No no no. See these are not wimpy elves. These are REAL elves. I'm just making this with them baing able to forge and stuff.

[blizzerd]

i bet elves agree on burning leaves or compost to forge stuff, since tbh yea people did that for ages in rural areas

my grandgrandfather* forged his own plow by burning dried compost from himself and a cow


and he had a massive beard

*dont know how this is called in english, the dad of my grandfather

[antymattar]

Yes. That is also an option! You mean your great grandfather.

I'm also hopping that by the time that elves have hometrees they will be able to forge and mine.

[tfaal]

That's not really within Toady's vision for Elves.

[IT 000]

I'm also hopping that by the time that elves have hometrees they will be able to forge and mine.

Elves have been around since the first versions of DF. Being hippies and having wooden armor. In fact back when elves did have forest retreats, they still did not have metal. Why would they change? Toady doesn't want to give them metal or the ability to forge it, or he would have put it in the game years ago.

Metal aside I am liking how the tree is coming along. Except for the three wide door, doors need adjacent walls to build unless you use some sneaky dwarven magic.

Also could you include a key for the second map. I'm assuming the 'E' are elves (they've been changed to 'e' in game) but the goblet thing and the yellow exclamation points confuse me.

[Quarterblue]

I'm also hopping that by the time that elves have hometrees they will be able to forge and mine.

Elves have been around since the first versions of DF. Being hippies and having wooden armor. In fact back when elves did have forest retreats, they still did not have metal. Why would they change? Toady doesn't want to give them metal or the ability to forge it, or he would have put it in the game years ago.

This is why they suck, and it's a shame. "Traditional" elves do forge, actually. Of course some of you will say that DF is unique and all, but the fact is that elves do suck at the moment and most players only use them as training targets or gullible merchants to loot every year. What's the point? Making them stronger will help them have some kind of credibility in the game. And if I remember correctly there is a mod (Genesis I think) that allows elves do make some special wood as strong as high-quality metals, that could be a good replacement.

[IT 000]

I'm also hopping that by the time that elves have hometrees they will be able to forge and mine.

Elves have been around since the first versions of DF. Being hippies and having wooden armor. In fact back when elves did have forest retreats, they still did not have metal. Why would they change? Toady doesn't want to give them metal or the ability to forge it, or he would have put it in the game years ago.

This is why they suck, and it's a shame. "Traditional" elves do forge, actually. Of course some of you will say that DF is unique and all, but the fact is that elves do suck at the moment and most players only use them as training targets or gullible merchants to loot every year. What's the point? Making them stronger will help them have some kind of credibility in the game. And if I remember correctly there is a mod (Genesis I think) that allows elves do make some special wood as strong as high-quality metals, that could be a good replacement.

Genesis and a few other mods include Ironwood yes.

Traditional is relative, elves back in the middle ages were essentially malevolent spirits that would steal your socks. Or by contrast little people that would clean your house while you were asleep. Some would even steal your soul if you don't fall asleep, essentially the bogeyman of the early ages.

Now modern elves are six feet tall with goldenrod hair and the best swords in the land and wooden arrows that can magically pierce through armor. Or they make delicious Keebler cookies. Why don't we use cookie making elves?

Well Toady wants them to be wood wielding maniacs with a fetish for trees. So what if they suck? Elves don't exist, any of the other three ideas points are quite possible in the world of fantasy. Toady wants it this way, so it's this way.

This is Dwarf Fortress, not Elf Fortress. If you want elves to be more powerful, I acknowledge your point of view and see it as valid, but it is easily moddable. Download Genesis if you want to give elves an edge, or likewise mod elves to suit your needs, but until Toady himself descends from the clouds and grants the elves charcoal, I will judge elves by how vanilla portrays them.

[nil]

Pretty sure there are magically tempered woods swords, comparable to metal in strength, in some of ThreeToe's stories (which are basically cannon).

Or a person could just do what I did in Relentless Assault and drop melee weapons from elves entirely; all-wood is much less of liability if all your soldiers are archers (even now that armor provides better protection I think this would be true)

I like those mockups, though.

[Maklak]

About your schematics: I don't like seeing inside of a tree hollowed out like that. It doesn't seem to have enough structural integrity left to stand. I imagine their tree houses as rope, branch, and leaf constructions outside of trees. Very big trees are often rotten inside, so some space could be cleared in a big trunk, but would probably be irregular.

That said, your approach may be viable. Humans have technology of making furniture and even walls out of many interleaved trees. It just takes more effort, than it's worth. Elves presumably have some tree-shaping magic, so could take that concept further.

For playable elves you'd need some kind of hardwood, and reactions to create wooden items by concentrating: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=36256.msg1394650#msg1394650 Any metal items should be imported from humans, dwarfs, or goblins.

[Max White]

Reguardless of how any of us see elves, for Toady, they do not burn trees for coal. Rather then eat people they killed in battle. Still badass in my opinion.

I like the general design, and while it might do with a little tweeking here and there, it looks nice.

[NW_Kohaku]

It doesn't matter at all what Tolkien did, Toady isn't Tolkien's slave, and if Toady doesn't want elves that forge, they don't forge in DF.

Things like "ironwood" are more likely - they're just magic wood that is at least hypothetically capable of going toe-to-toe with metal weapons.

Also, I think that the Threetoe/Toady description of elven retreats was as being on top of the trees, rather than inside them.  I remember the Druid actually living in a tent that was on top of a tree.

It's possible to shape trees in real life, and a magical elven druid might just do this on a grand scale, and make trees shaped to have a broad flat area where the trunk splits off into different branches, without needing to utterly hollow out the entire tree.

[JohnieRWilkins]

The one thing that bothers me about the first mockup is the lack of a circle of leaves&branches around the tree. Why would the leaves grow from the trunk?

[Silverionmox]

Toady has said not to put too much stock in the stock universe, so racial flavours are not set in stone anyway.

I certainly hope that in the future there will be cultural variation within races, even while remaining true to their core identity.

Elves for example have the "one with nature" theme, but that can be realized in several ways:
- "don't hurt the plants" veganists like we have now
- intensive agriculture elves
- hunter-gatherer elves
- predatory elves who live off (sentient and/or non-sentient) meat (almost) exclusively
- elves that integrate machinery and nature (water- and windmills as a base)
- elves that are completely non-violent and use magic to eat stones and other dead matter and defend themselves.

Dwarves:
- Suicidal industrialists like we have now
- preferring certain materials (glass, specific metals, ceramics, bone etc.)
- stone only cavedwarves
- dwarves that integrate machinery and nature (water- and windmills as base)
- undergound-only dwarves
- technology-dependent dwarves that are born as cripples

In fact the way how population and ethics work now suggests that culture will much more important to behaviour than racial characteristics.