So I stal...I mean follow the Gaslamp Games staff on twitter and the other day one of them said that there will be mushroom trees in CE. So exactly how useful would a giant fungus be anyways? I just can't see a mushroom being used as a building material as they're simply the spore spreaders for the larger subterranean fungus so they come and go quickly (some mushrooms IRL last less than a day). Maybe a mushroom tree would last a year or two at best? Trying to build something in them or out of them would be futile as it would rot away pretty fast and living around or inside a mushroom would be awful. The smell on the inside probably would not be pleasant and I would imagine damp as well, and citizens with allergy problems would suffer too. The trees could also be carnivorous fungi, which is a whole other problem.
Mushrooms are, imo, one of the most under utilized pieces of fantasy worlds. They are by their very nature, fantastic. The more mushroom the better. I think using mushrooms instead of real trees for things is a flippin amazing idea. Say Nay to Mushroom Decay! IRL mushroom mycelium can be used to make the equivalent of cardboard, among other things. I read something a while back that its actually used in cars somehow, somewhere. The stalks on some fresh mushrooms can get very very hard and very wood like irl also. Though like you said, they do decay very quickly. I dont think the facts of the real world really matter too much in a fantasy universe.
They may emit brain-melting psychospores, to be used for industry. Also, mushroom fancy hats are one of the hot new fashions in the empire.
Also, the mushrooms could be sentient. Since mushrooms can grow to a size of a few square kilometres, imagine the fun they could have in CE. Huge, sentient mushrooms, right under your city
But run-of-the-mill giant fantasy mushroom houses/objects and etc. get old after the Smurfs and Morrowind. Sentient fungi sounds terrifying. That would be a nice use, if your settlement is in a biome where trees are far-far away and/or non-existent and you really really need the wood for construction and mine shaft supports. Instead of wasting wood making barrels and paper you can use the mushrooms and press them into mycelium boxes and paper. And SCIENCE. I was going to mention madness inducing spores but brain-melting would be the same thing I guess. Maybe have fungi like those ones that take control of snails nervous system (or is it ants?) and make them find the highest point and then explode, sending their spores out. That would be an awesome way for your settlement to end, a mushroom zombie apocalypse.
have you ever heard of an earth star mushroom? I saw a time lapse video of one blooming and I swear it looked like one of those eggs from the movie "Alien".
Wheras plants have a major incentive to grow big, which is simply to compete with other plants growing higher than they do, in the best of all possible worlds they would all elect to give up on that pointless competition and just grow as thin mosses without getting involved in such an arms race. Mushrooms, on the other hand, serve no real useful purpose other than dispersing spores. There is little reason for fungi to compete to grow bigger mushrooms than one another, the bulk of their biological activity takes place in a massive communication and exchange network called the mycelium. That said, Prototaxites, an early devonian fossil, may have in fact been a mushroom tree. If so, they may have been like lichens, relying on photosynthesizing symbionts, and the formation of "trees" did present a competitive advantage. They would essentially have filled a niche that land plants would soon kick them out from, and were only around about 50 million years. Vascular plants probably were just far better at making trees in pretty much every concievable way: using materials more efficiently, being more sturdy, more morphological versatility, less loss of water, less energy expended on "infrastructure", etc. With such competition, Prototaxites may have been driven to extinction or such degrees of alteration that we can no longer recognize them today. As for the marine environment, the main literally-big photosynthesizers seem to be corals (also colony organisms, but based on cnidarians rather than mushrooms and with limestone-based structures rather than chitin-based ones), and large alga comparable to modern plants (kelp and seaweeds), so mushroom trees did not win out there either. However, considering dwarf fortress' tower caps, it would be a great shout out to the inspiring game. Even if giant mushrooms don't grow in the world itself, miners might collect "mushroom logs" along with all the fancy rocks, useful as a substitute for wood.
