"Steel" Wood
This shield is older than dirt, I swear, but if I'm faced with choosing to use it or a regular piece of wood, this steel wood antique would be my choice.
This shield is older than dirt, I swear, but if I'm faced with choosing to use it or a regular piece of wood, this steel wood antique would be my choice.
(Not a Copyright right here, just asking that To-Do, viewable by everyone be looked at from time to time and someone comment on it to remind me it exists - Also if people would comment on Glossary of Terms with terms they come across and think should be included, that would be wonderful)
Default Corive Cover art was done by me, Lyraine, on Midjourney. The default Background image was done on Artbreeder.com and further artwork includes backgrounds and headers done on artbreeder or with Midjourney, unless credited otherwise.
Theme was mostly stapled together with parts of Scripture Theme, World Anvil Base Theme, and Elven Forest designed by Whitemace, Maybe TJ Trewin, and I know for certain TJ Trewin, in that order. CSS help gratitude goes out to Siloandra, Spartango and BrokenJac as well on the Discord's CSS Help channel, and extra thanks to everyone else on the Discord who has helped out with CSS or similar tools.
Interesting. I saw a video this days about methods to compress wood and supposedly make it "as strong as steel". The fellow making the video showed some classifications of strength of materials and made some comparisons to make a persuasive ( enough to me) argument that it was a case of journalistic hyperbole. In my main fictional setting (Sharitarn) there are some animals, plants and materials that came from different Universes where other natural laws apply, in some cases those things keep "working by other laws", in a way that is impossible to replicate even by magic. That sort of special/rare thing, hard to fake, has one nice application, even when there is no practical use for their physical properties: money. Rare, easy to carry and impossible to falsify, are the qualities you need for your coins. Downsize being that if you nation has a coin like that your govern may not be able to print more money when circumstances demand some sort of special assistance for families during a lockdown. Or war effort. Sharitarne nations like the Elven City of Erevi (where the coin is made of a sort of metal that lows temperature) must learn to live with that unfortunate limitation. Poor fellows.
There are a lot of interesting uses for such materials that can be considered. I tend to forget things like money when it comes to my "less real-world natural" materials. I tend to find "practical" uses first and branch out from there. There may be hard times for the people of your Erevi, but I imagine people work around that - inflation having some kind of cap because people can't sell if no one is able to buy, and when there are fewer available coins, then people use other things to supplement buying with coin. Corive uses coinage, but a lot of the places in Corive also use barter amongst each other. A butcher may trade a number of cuts for another number of bread loaves for example. People find a way to work around or through economic hardships.
I used to completely forget the monetary aspect of life in my fictional settings. Until I saw that video they made here in Worldanvil. The interview that focus monetary history. My favourite anvil video, tied in that position with that one about one eyed characters. I still mostly forget the monetary element when I am righting stories, must admit. But I at least take it in consideration now when shaping the setting. A nice thing about strong wood is that it makes trees as large as skyscrapers (or mountains, or orbital elevators even) plausible. Mixed with Tolkien trope of sentient trees that opens a interesting (but a bit disruptive) door.