Improving Weapons with only plant life

Question

We live in a jungle that is devoid of metal and stone. A giant vine forest hanging high above everything. We’re totally reliant upon the plant life to supply to our every need. Which isn’t all bad, there’s a large variety and it’s all around us. We’re seeking ways though to improve our ability to hunt…and perhaps do something about those troublesome neighbors on a neighboring vine cluster.

Available Resources

• Vines, we got a ton of them! Of basically any size you want!
• Mosses, Ferns, Small fibrous bushy plants
• Various berries and roots that are poisonous. We’re pretty good at making things to assist in hunting, but we can also make some nasty toxins.
• A few pitted fruits. They make decent sling material.
• We lack much in the way of hardwoods. Those that exist don’t get much thicker than arrows, which is a great use for ones we personally have tended to make sure they don’t get knotted up.

Special World Resources –

1. Heart Vines

   • These amazing vines grow to dozens of meters thick and are filled with streams of super-hot water. Punching holes risks burns and newly cut vines take up to 2 hours to die, splinters from newly cut vines may start trying to grow into the unfortunate person’s body. We only gather the outer most layers, destroying the whole vine is a taboo against nature and will cause widespread devastation to the region.

   • Once they’ve died, if soaked in water the become easy to shape and mold. Then with the addition of heat and drying they’ll become the most sturdy and solid substance known to our people! It’s very difficult to get a sharp edge on them but they can make good spears, a bit too rigid for bow shafts.

   • Disadvantage that it’s a very thirsty material and must be protected from water or they lose their shape quickly.

2. Cinder Moss

   • This strange moss sparkles and glows red and green in the dark and is nearly immune to fire. A necessity for any tribe to shield fires. Also, decent illumination on its own.

   • Great for retaining heat for long travels that don’t allow fire. Can keep a person warm for 3-4 days.

   • Must be kept moist and warm or it will die. When dead it turns into a powder and loses its previous properties. We soak it in boiling water every few weeks.

   • The powder causes itching but is good for hiding scents.

Assumptions in place

• We are very slowly building up supplies from the local areas, but it will be a long time before we can have enough material for our own people.

• Animal bones are also available, but living high in the canopy many are hollow or very lightweight. They're not particularly robust in general.

• We're ok with chemical warfare if needed, but it's hard to control just how much damage it does. It can also be bad to use on something you want to eat.

Problem
The predators in this region have an armored shell, vastly reducing our ability to hunt them and protect ourselves. The local tribe has taken advantage of this adaptation and has armor themselves.
We have slings, bows, spears, and axes. They're all fairly dull, and our poisons are useless unless we get lucky and bypass armor. Also a huge downside that a simple pouch of water exploding over us weakens both our weapons and armor quickly.

With only plant materials available how do we improve our ability to hunt and wage war? Especially the latter.

Answer 1

Many kinds of plant provide oils and waxes that might help waterproof your heartvine equipment. It'll be awkward to make stuff like pitch or tar without access to suitable materials for the cooking containers, but you might be able to use the shells from some of the local animal species for this purpose. There may also be animal sources of waxes, oils and fats that will help... rendering tallow is probably a bit difficult, but harvesting beeswax and honey, if it or some equivalent is available, should be practical.

Bones and shells make for reasonable tools, weapons and arrowheads, in the absence of better materials. You might also make armour from them. It might look good, but I couldn't tell you if it will be much better than heartvine, and it might be harder to get good coverage with.

Cuirboilli should be practical to make. There's a trick where you coat it with ground minerals mixed with glue to help protect against arrows, apparently... you might not have many minerals available, but bone and shell will do as alternatives.

Composite bows might be workable here, depending on the types of shell and horn that can be harvested from local critters. In the highly three-dimensional environment you live in, short composite bows would be more desirable than longbows and throwing spears (or spear throwers) as they'd be easier to carry whilst climbing, and easier to fit through narrow spaces.

Given the availability of reasonable quality armour, and the total lack of decent arrowhead material, the weapons on choice are probably going to be clubs (they'll hurt even through armour, potentially, can knock you off balance and damage hard-to-armour areas like hands and joints), hooks (for pulling people off the edge) and wrestling (for throwing them off the edge). The latter is quite a lot more dangerous than it is in real life, given the ready availability of a very long, very terminal drop for anyone who gets thrown in anything but a very safe environment. Free climbing judo seems like it might be a suitable style for your warriors to train in...

additions

The use of short, sturdy wooden hooks in the manner of an ice axe as a climbing aid, and as a combination of a club and a hook for grappling with enemies might be an excellent general purpose tool and weapon.

Using vines as climbing ropes is probably not recommended as they'll probably be insufficiently stretchy (making falls very dangerous or even fatal if they arrest you when you're travelling fast enough) but carrying a small numer of little hooks and spikes and slender cords and nets for use as climbing aids might help protect the climber a little and add to the options available for grappling with and entangling an opponent.

It may be that you have access to rubber, which opens up a whole new range of possibilities. It is another way to potentially help waterproof your heartvine equipment, and perhaps a way to add some safety stretch into your climbing ropes (though I wouldn't necessarily want to trust my life to such a thing!).

Answer 2

Vine splinter slingshots

Using some form of hand protection, vine splinters can be made into a ball shape and then wrapped in leaves. These can then be shot from slingshots. Upon hitting a person, the ball breaks apart and cuts into them, where they begin to grow inside of them dangerously.

Poisoned cinder moss

You have stated that cinder moss causes itching. If you add poison to the moss and use it on weapons, people will scratch at it like a mosquito bite, and the poison will enter the newly formed rashes and cuts.

Vine splinter melee weapons

Consider a small container with holes in it. The main vines and dirt would be within the container, and the vines would eventually grow out through the holes to get to water and sunlight. The container could be attached to the top of spears or other weapons.

They could either be:

• Single-use, with the container breaking upon impact but causing more overall damage.
• Multiple-use, where the container does not break easily, allowing one to repeatedly 'scrape' the vines against their enemies.

Here's my bad Microsoft Paint attempt for a visualization (yes, I know they look like worms rather than vines):

Answer 3

So, sweet treepeople... you need a way past that pesky armor eh?

We have a warrior in our myths we call the "Spider-Man." He often fought foes more experienced, better armored and equipped than he. Perhaps your warriors have heard similar myths and wish to fight as the cunning spider.

Your best advantage (given your light gear) is your mobility, and your best strategy is to destroy the mobility of your opponent. Thrown weapons such as Nets and Bolas can be very effective, especially en masse. Not so tough to slip that fine heartvine stiletto through the crack in a suit of armor or a weak joint when they're tied up, is it?

Speaking of which, refining your toxicology would be helpful. It sounds like most of your poisons use injection as their route, not great against armor unless you're very precise. Inhaled or contact poisons would be much more effective, any of your plants give off caustic fumes when you boil or burn them? Try to make something like tear gas or smoke bombs that can be used to separate or disorient your foes or cover an escape. Try to make something like pepper spray but as a grease or pitch: don't use that in combat use it to pretreat choke points and passes in the canopy where enemy troops will have to move through. They'll have to spend time cleaning all their gear or everything will burn.

Use hit 'n run tactics, and lead your targets into traps. If your targets are bigger and heavier, use pitfall traps and weakened bridges your people can run over and your foes can't follow. Use vines to create tripwires, deadfalls, net drops, even the classic old "noose that yokes someone up over a tree branch by their leg embarrassingly." Fight like an ewok. Prefer defense, prepare many battlegrounds. Make punji sticks or caltrops out of vine splinters, force them to move very slowly through the canopy and wear heavy armored boots and gloves not suited for fast climbing. Always hinder, always exhaust.

Hooks and ropes are optimal tools both for climbing and defense. Take all the suggestions other answers gave, there's really good ones. Here's some more:

Seen a snake-catching snare? It's on the end of a long stick. You get some folks hidden on high branches then lure the armor under them. Once the enemy's hooked you either tie em off or shove off a counterweight to pull them off an edge.

Take a heavy hammer or maul. Right in the middle of the head put a nice wide replaceable heartvine spike. Get all the force in one little spot to punch through the armor. Poison the spike.

Know what a bullroarer is? You swing it on a string and it's SUPER LOUD. Go out at night, set up your trap fields outside the enemy village. Raiding party gets the bullroarers going, either drawing the enemy into your traps or destroying their rest. Do this for several days/weeks before raids. Once they realize you're doing this, start using it as a diversion instead and hit soft targets when they reinforce loud areas.

If you're in open conflict with your neighbors and they have superior supplies, raid them. Get them disorganized with the above techniques. Don't fight, steal and run. Make them chase you into the traps yet again. If you are too outnumbered to steal, attack their supplies and destroy their supply lines, try to spread them out. Poison their water if the situation is dire enough, but don't foul a place you might be able to capture and hold later. After the first time you use poison anything suitably bitter in the water supply should make them seriously reconsider their options in holding an area. Don't outfight them, outthink and outclimb them.

Answer 4

Use bones

I think bone is the best material for many kinds of weaponry because it's hard, can be sharpened, and will not be destroyed by water. Make spears and atlatls with them. Use human bones if animal bones are too small. Combine with heart vines to make them even more deadly.

Eating cooked bones, including small ones such as those from chickens, can seriously injure a dog and possibly these predators as well. If the predators can be baited into eating them, they should be easily dispatched once their digestive systems are shredded.

Further improved by poison, which will now have a fast way of entering the bloodstream.

Answer 5

The simplest answer is that after skillfully (and possibly at the cost of one or more of your troupe's lives) dispatching one or more of your pangolin-like predators, you turn the armoured scales, claws and teeth of your now-dead adversary into the weapons which which you dispatch further such adversaries... which has the potential, depending upon their level of sentience and culture, to add a huge fear-factor to your attacks.