My cave ponies don't have hard peytrals either, it's annoying. I equip my military with bone ones, which is a valid material for soft ones, apparently. They're set to common, the same as breastplates are on the vanilla races, but it's a bit silly for them to just not have anything like that, so I'll probably change that. As for rope reeds, it might be because there's so much stuff now, they get culled when the available plant list gets too long, or just because rope reeds require a [WET] biome and your civ just doesn't have access to a river or lake, or even a stagnant pond, anywhere at all. I might try moving some of the dye plants underground, see if that helps, and increase preferences for settling on lakes and rivers.
Ursas could be able to find a "star cap mushroom". Just because I just want a excuse to post a 2001 video every time its mentioned (My gods, its full of stars! "Bites down on mushroom" I can see forever!"Also, the excuse to create some sort of super-valuble 'moon wine' and enjoy all the new migrants because of my newfound wealth. It could also expand the plant_pony_megabeast folder a bit. Not sure how it would do in world gen, however, considering that ursa minors are uncommon already.
Some sort of ursa truffle would definitely make sense. I wonder if I should make eclipse black ursae separate castes so they can be made bigger, and be given special truffles. Come to think of it, the various bear ponies should probably have them, unless they all lay the standard bear ones as a result of inheriting the tags. That'd be interesting for a player fort, everybody takes five occasionally to lay a truffle. Especially right in the middle of being besieged by all the civilised civs because the bear civs are babysnatchers.