Fall damage from falling through a trap door or hole should be significantly reduced if you happen to land on grass.

Scroll of nature, which creates grass, trees, and shallow water in a radius around the player (larger if the scroll is blessed). If cursed, it summons blights. Druids should start with one or two of these so they will still be able to employ grass tactically even if they don’t start with the spell of create grass.

Fire starter: a charged tool about as frequent as a tin opener that is primarily used not to create fires (because of the lack of firewood) but for getting released by plant monsters. It can also be used to burn grass off your current square.

Spell staves should have active or passive effects that scale up with your skill in the stave’s spell school. For instance:

• The staff of enchantment may apply confusion or sleep to monsters you hit with it.
• The staff of holiness reduces the chance that your items will get cursed.
• The staff of healing gives increased HP regeneration.
• The staff of evocation increases your damage output while standing on grass, or grants you the phase-through-trees ability.

Druids’ buffs to HP regeneration and damage with wooden weapons should scale up with their experience level rather than being flat, since otherwise they decline in usefulness as the game goes on.

Grass terrain, rendered as a green period or comma. It could have the following properties:

• Dies and turns to normal floor if hit by fire or have a death ray zapped over it.
• Turns into fire terrain if hit by fire and can spread to nearby grass.
• You can plant trees on them, whereas you cannot do this on normal floor.
• Small monsters that are capable of hiding under objects can hide in grass.

A “druid staff” artifact, which can be invoked to create a patch of grass similar in size to a stinking cloud, radius 4-5. Enemies within the grass radius become rooted to the ground, making them unable to move (but still able to fight, shoot, etc) for some time. While wielding it, you can chat with trees, which causes them to give you some food, mana, or rarely a pet (possibly an ent).

Ants (or locusts, if implemented) can eat food off the ground, and they create more of themselves when they do, proportional to the nutrition consumed. They can also eat food out of the inventory of something they are attacking, and if the target is carrying food in a bag, they can reach into the bag and either eat the food there or spill it out on the ground. Locusts that can’t find any food to eat could inflict illness with their bite instead. They could also eat grass terrain, if implemented (turning it into normal floor) and multiply that way.

Maybe, to avoid the problem of how unchecked gremlin multiplication creates a bunch of low-HP, one-shottable gremlins, locusts will increase their maximum HP by eating if their own maxHP is below some threshold. (Then they’ll split again by eating more after getting over the threshold.)