Entertainment

Toys

Although saplings tend to spend their active free time playing games throughout the forest (running, racing, tag, hide-and-seek, obstacle courses through dense foliage and gnarled roots and branches, etc.), some saplings with less inclinations toward physical sport have naturally gravitated toward more materialistic means of entertainment. Many kinds of wooden carvings are a common sight in the hands of saplings both old and young in the forest villages. For the much younger saplings closer to toddler age, small and soft "dolls" made of roughly woven plant fibers such as hemp, and shaped into the likeness of forest creatures would be what parents would prefer to occupy the hands of their children with.

A somewhat more rare, but far from uncommon sight would be ceramic figures. Capable potters and clay/stone workers often tend to prefer to spend their time and skill making things of more practical use for their tribes, but turning their skills toward creating artifacts for both decorative and playful purposes was standard practice.

Lastly, a popular hobby among pre-teen saplings was collecting small and smooth river stones. These would be rubbed and sanded down until as round a shape as possible could be achieved, then used to play any of many varieties of games involving these marbles.

Architecture

Most all villages in /uuu/ take advantage of their ability to shape the forest to create their dwellings. Houses and structures consist primarily of living wood that grows out of the ground. Most buildings are made up of several different trees growing and fusing together into walls and a thick, often solid canopy. Because of this, the floors "inside" of sapling homes is often the same as the forest's floor, dirt, leaves, and some moss.

In more mountainous or rocky terrains, sapling villages grow their structures into existing caves, cliff faces, or stone protrusions for added structural support and protection. Many saplings in /uuu/ villages are well versed in stoneworking at a small scale. Making steps, stone waymarks, small monuments, and short mortarless walls is definitely within their well-practiced means, but larger scale masonry that would require stronger metal tools are not usually within the capabilities of /uuu/ settlements. Despite this, some few and exceptionally capable saplings throughout history have been able to use the manipulated growth of plants to position large stones and boulders into magnificent, extremely durable, fortifications; some even large enough to resemble buildings found in more technologically progressed nations.

Material acquisition

Dead, cut, and worked lumber used for construction is not unheard of in /uuu/. Much the same way saplings would acquire meat from naturally deceased animals, trees that have fallen from storms or other causes are used as material. Both because it is often easier to grow trees into structures, and because saplings usually lack the metal tools used to cut and shape wood, dead wood is more often than not carved using stone tools into things like furniture, or simply firewood.

It should also be noted that while chopping down a living tree in the forest is considered by most to be near sacrilegious, the harvesting of vines, leaves, or sometimes branches, as long as the source tree can continue to live, is common practice.