I already have in-house a rough set of rules for use with barbed break-away projectiles such as poison darts, harpoons, etc. Something of that sort would be applicable to the elf-arrows. If the projectile head is small, then it may not be obvious that anything remained in the wound unless a successful first-aid roll detected it. Then some surgery would be needed to remove the object.
If your objective is to have a more surreptitious delivery of the seed, then a
blow-gun might be a more appropriate weapon. I'm not so sure that an effective
blow-gun dart is really all that inconspicuous though. From what I've seen of
the blow-guns designed for war or hunting, the darts are at least 15 cm long and
often longer.
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Howard Fielding proposes that Aldryami grow and use their armour and weapons as
living copper.
I agree with half your idea.
They may well grow plants that provide all their metallic implements, but the metal is not living when it is used. It is laid down like wood or bark. For a time the material is still living, in that nutrients flow through it and there are active cells there laying down more material. Eventually the material loses its fluid circulation and hardens into a non-living mass. It is still part of the plant, but like your own outer skin or hair, it is not alive.
Copper armour may be from the bark of certain trees. Cut away in large pieces it can be put together into lamellar. Such trees would be very obvious to an observer so they are probably only grown in the deep forest where outsiders will not get a chance to plunder them.
Arrow heads are probably seed cases. These could grow with a living husk over them hiding the hard metal from any who don't know to look, so they could be grown almost anywhere.
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Mark Groff proposed several things including photosynthetic elves:
Sorry, but I must disagree. An elf just doesn't have enough surface area to gain much energy from photosynthesis. Certainly nowhere near enough to be useful for a mobile and active life-form. Not to say that sunlight isn't good for them, or even essential. They might have biochemical reactions that absolutely require extensive exposure to sunlight (not unlike humans synthesizing vitamin D in their skins with exposure to sunlight). This would look very much the same as a plant photosynthesizing if you don't know any better.
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