What are the thoughts on making Stella indifferent or even enjoy being out in the rain? Its overall a minor thing, but the thought crossed my mind when trying to build a mostly above ground fortress. Could explain it as some sort of delusion or belief that the rain is a lesser blessing from the gods.

In my one test it looked like nearly all Stella like being outdoors and only mildly dislike rain. I'm not sure the game supports creatures getting any more into being outside than that.

Another aboveground idea that probably can't be done yet but would be awesome: Make the Observatory require open sky and work better the higher it's Z-level. Maybe keep the current scrying style Observatory and make this telescopic version a situational upgrade like magma forge is to a forge.

I seriously need guide for this mod, my brain is too smooth. Only did stellar chart/essence part . Dunno how to make diamonds and stellite etc. Could it be possible to add more description somewhere? (keep a good job thanks for the elfs!)

stellate needs to be stronger imo as it requires SO much more effort to make than just steel

Its not that bad in my opinion, dwarf civ doesn't have something similar to the astralite, which is better than steel, so there is a good reward for the effort.

the death elves are cool, but the amount of times my militia commander accidentally kill her allies via her breath too many times.
Would it be possible to replace the necrotic breath with an obnoxious one? Or make it less...spray and pray?

Very good so far, any other races you want to do?

I think stellite needs to be simpler to make. with steel all you need is 3 items. With stellite you have to hope you find really rare gems, have to have clay for jars since it it seemingly the only thing that can hold the essence, silver, make the lenses all for a subpar version of steel.

My little contribution as I try to decide how to use this mod in my next world gen. Thanks again for all your efforts SEEU.

I realize most of the specialty elves come with non-combat benefits to be considered. Since all have combat buffs as well, I ran some blunt play-tests in arena to see how balanced everything seems there.

I didn't look at the combat logs to see which abilities were dominating, I just spammed 10 vs 10, ten to twenty trials over and ball-parked an average.

Here are a few of my findings of 10 "skilled" iron-clad normal Stella elves Vs. 10 "skilled" iron clad X Stella elves:

Freedom elves: Win with 3-5 survivors.

Nature elves: Win with 3-5 survivors.

Fire elves: Win with 5-7 survivors. Able to take on larger groups. With 10 barely loosing to 20 normal elves. Pushing the tolerable limits of combat balance compared to others above. Thematically, this could be considered acceptable.

Earth elves: Difficult to test range comparison to marks-elves since quivers don't appear available in arena runs. Their boulder throw does seem to do acceptable damage. 5-10 hits to kill, and the first one often crippling the enemy significantly. They can be evenly matched and even loose to normal elves, other times have 5-7 survivors. Quite strong considering they would be used as an unlimited ammo ranged unit. Maybe increase cool-down of rock throw. Maybe they are fine as is considering their benefits are all combat-focused.

Sun elves: Can get destroyed by normal elves on rare occasions for unknown reasons (maybe just luck), but usually display game-breaking power. S-Tier. Their ability which is spammed has the potential to mass stun groups, allowing a small number of them to be capable of taking on huge hordes if the conditions go well. Makes the 'practical' scenario of a single unit hero in a squad with normal elves extremely viable. Near the top of the list to be considered for re-balancing. [CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:20] seems absurdly short. If raising the cool-down, do so with care, as first cast is often wasted, discussed with Moon elves below. 300-400 values could be reasonable target range.

Death elves: S Tier class as well. Usually win without any losses. One or two deaths is possible. 20 normal elves can beat 10 death elves but they all usually die as well to the necrosis DOT. Since this class can't be mixed in with other elf types for combat, this promotes a squad of them exclusively. If cooking the blessed fruit into lavish meals wasn't possible to share the blessing with groups, this would all be fine. Since that is a thing, they become very niche but extremely potent. As a group of them spamming their special has much greater impact than a single death elf doing so. Reducing the probability of their specialty landing and its duration, both by a third, didn't have much noticeable effect on lowering their power level. Perhaps greater reduction or adjusting the severity of applied conditions would have more of an impact.



Moon elves: Requires further testing/understanding. Only group that lose trials with 2-5 normal elves surviving, making them combat inferior. Potentially intentional if they are meant to be use for non-combat purposes exclusively. They have a moon dust interaction which is combat related, so I took a closer look at it. Moon dust appears to have no noticeable benefit in combat in its current state. My guess is that having them take a useless action during combat is what is causing them to stand there and get impaled. It's set to SEV:15 which seems very weak in comparison to other interaction's severity. Possibly a typo? I don't know what scale severity uses from 1 to X.

Changing moon dust to SEV:5, similar to other caste interactions, and even to SEV:1, had no noticeable effects on the outcome of combat. However, SEV:1 -plus- reducing the cool-down from 1000 to 120 did make a massive difference, causing Moon elves to win with 5-10 survivors. Tweaking these to a middle ground could provide a more desirable outcome.

Conclusion:
Even with adjustments, unsure what effect moon dust and its CE_DROWSINESS condition has in combat. Normal elves didn't appear to get fatigued/over-exerted any faster than Moon elves. No "sleep" effect occurs either. Cool-down of 1000 could be problematic since first breath attack goes off before combatants are close to each other and is wasted. Why Moon elves lose the combats with default settings isn't clear if they can't use their ability while it is on cool-down

For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to put here that the Stella Elves seem to be Human sized rather than Elf size. That's a considerable power advantage, I think. In Vanilla, humans are practically giants in a way.

I wonder if this decision was made so that they could wield their unique weapons?

Wish SEEU was around more because I would like to be able to discuss the design decision while I consider readjusting sizes in my Local repository. They still know way more about these things than I do.