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Elf

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Revision as of 17:44, 8 August 2014 by Scorpion451 (talk | contribs)
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xTATTEREDx  · +FINE+  · *SUPERIOR*  · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡  · ☼MASTERWORK☼
Elf
e
Urist likes elves for their grace.
Portrait

No portrait

Biome

Any location

Attributes

· Learns · Humanoid

Cannot be tamed 
Size
Birth: 3,000 cm3
Mid: 15,000 cm3
Max: 60,000 cm3

Age
Child at: 1
Adult at: 18
Max age: Immortal
Cannot be butchered

Wikipedia article

v50.14 · v0.47.05
This article is about the current version of DF.
Note that some content may still need to be updated.
A medium-sized creature dedicated to the ruthless protection of nature.

Elves are smelly, stuck-up, arrogant tree-fondling hippies humanoids dedicated to the protection of their concept of nature (focused on trees).

Elven caravans arrive in late spring. During trade, elves will not accept wood, wooden items or any goods decorated with wood. This includes clear and crystal glass items and soap, because wood-derived lye and pearlash are used in their production, however, ash-glazed items are acceptable. Elves bring their own "grown" wooden items. Those were presumably produced without cutting down trees. Elves will accept elf-made wooden items in trade, but not wooden items made by anyone else. Be careful not to offer them your wooden bins or barrels, or quivers containing wooden bolts/arrows. If the contents of bins are marked for trade individually, and are not wooden themselves, the elves will not care that you used wooden bins to haul the goods to the depot. You may also steal from them or even kill/torture them without fear of repercussion: merchants will not resist if you seize their goods and will not competently fight back if attacked.

Offending elves by attempting to trade wooden items normally causes them to refuse further trade this year and leave early. Repeatedly offending elves by attempting to trade wooden items may cause them to attack your fortress with an ambush.

Elves will generally accept items made of green glass, stone, metal, bone and other refuse, silk, leather, plant fiber cloth, meat and fish, totems, and even plants. They will accept animals in trade, as long as those are not held in dwarf-made wooden cages.

They also accept raw clear glass and raw crystal glass, even though they are made using pearlash. Despite the name, petrified wood is a kind of stone and therefore acceptable. (Apparently its okay if the tree died of natural causes a long time ago.)

Elves bring only plant-related and wood-related items, caged animals, various types of clay and sand.

They have no facial hair but rarely they have at least stubble.

Some stupid, useless, treefondling traitors dwarves will like elves for their grace.

Trading

List of what you can expect in an average elven caravan:

  • Wooden bins of rope reed raw cloth (depending on how many bins of these you have already). Buy a few for moods, but leather is generally less expensive and more dwarven. You may want to buy a few more if you haven't started producing your own cloth.
  • Wood logs (quantity depending on how many logs you have already: lower means more). Always useful.
  • Various aboveground plants, with sometimes whip vine and sun berry or their byproducts.
  • Aboveground plant byproducts : golden salve, gnomeblight, alcohol, flour, dye, seeds. Some, such as gnomeblight are useless, while some, such as sun berry or whip vine seeds, are quite useful and valuable.
  • Wooden containers : chests, cages, buckets, and barrels. They all are useful.
  • Soil types: sand in bags, various types of clay. Can be useful if you are lacking of either.
  • Bags and ropes made from plant cloth. You already should have those, but a few extra bags never hurt, although plant cloth bags are a bit expensive.
  • A few exotic aboveground tame animals in cages. May be a disappointingly useless animal or an incredibly awesome one.
  • Caged tame vermin, which has no real use aside from putting in a zoo.
  • Rope reed clothing, mildly useful if you are in lack of clothing and haven't bothered setting up a clothing industry.
  • Wooden crutches and splints, which are pretty handy for health care if you didn't make any.
  • Wooden armor and weapons, which are generally useless unless you are trap-happy, lack metal, or don't have enough wood to build spears for danger rooms.
  • And finally, plenty of useless crap which has no use at all (apart from being traded to the next caravan for actually useful stuff, but even then you can make crafts out of more valuable stuff than wood) and should be dumped into magma as soon as possible (along with the entire caravan if you desire). They include cloth crafts, wooden crafts, wooden toys, and wooden instruments.

Ethics

Elven ethics often differ from those of other races. Their position on moral philosophy will likely put them at odds with humans, goblins, and sometimes kobolds and animal-people. They are likely to be friendly with dwarves, unless provoked, although a dwarven civilisation may be at war with elves in world-gen.

Elves are the only race which wholeheartedly accepts the devouring of enemy combatants. Looking in legends mode shows that an elven combatant will sometimes devour the other person they were fighting when they win. In spite of this, elves refuse to butcher and consume intelligent beings. Elves find torturing as an example acceptable, but condemn other forms of torture and consider torturing for information misguided. To elves, keeping any trophy of any kind is an unthinkable act. Elves begrudgingly allow for killing animals when done in self-defense, and the killing of other elves by an elf is justified if there is an extremely good reason for doing so. For elves, the killing of plants, especially trees, is unthinkable. On the other hand, the killing of neutral beings and enemies is acceptable. Elven society seems to be regulated by shame from the community, rather than by threat of punishment. As such, elves never offer serious or capital punishment to criminals; instead, elves found to have committed vandalism, trespassing or theft are reprimanded, while those convicted of treason, lying, breaking oaths, assault or participating in slavery are forced into exile.

Elves value nature incredibly highly, and they also place a degree of value on family, eloquence, cunning, artwork, fairness, merriment, competition and romance. Elves do not especially respect commerce and have a dislike for self-control.

Diplomats

The elven diplomat will arrive approximately half way through the first month in Spring. If the player agrees to a treecutting quota, it will be visible after selecting the elves in the Civilizations screen and pressing Tab a few times.

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