Bay 12 Games Forum

I have a suggestion: An option to store the user settings file DT in the install directory, rather than AppData. This would let us have different settings for different DF installs.

I have an install of Masterwork that had a bunch of options set to match my preferences, but I'm also writing a guide to DF for newcomers so I wanted to start from the default DT settings. However, when I downloaded DT again it picked up all my options from the MW version, and I couldn't find where the settings were stored to back them up. I eventually worked it out because after I cleared user settings the path was in run.log, but by that time the settings were gone.

For that matter, it would be handy to have the settings path in the dialogue box when you select to clear user settings.

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Chapter 8 – Meet Melbil, the Stonecrafter
In which useless tat is churned out

If you take a look at the units screen once more, you might notice that there's only one dwarf left that we haven't met.

Meet Melbil:



Melbil, like Solon, has a few military skills, but again we're here for his civilian skills. He's been chopping wood all this time, but we've got plenty wood for now. In any case, we're better off making things from stone if we can swing it, and that's what Melbil can do with his other civilian skill, Stone Crafting.

Find Melbil – the units screen is handy for this – disable hauling on him, and remove Woodcutting from his activated labours (remember, in v-look it's p for the Prf tab, then l for Labour to bring up the list. Woodcutting is in the Woodworking category). If we do run out of logs, we can always reactivate it, or more likely set a migrant to cut trees when we get some (you're most likely well into summer at this point, so a wave of migrants is probably imminent. When they do arrive, look for the relevant conditional chapter). This will let him focus on Stone Crafting.

Wait, isn't that what our Mason does?

Not quite. While both our Mason and Stone Crafter make things from stone, they have a slightly different focus. Masons primarily make furniture and larger items, while Stone Crafters tend to make smaller stuff like tools, as well as various crafts for flogging off to traders.

Firstly, though, we need to make a workshop for all this to happen in. That would be the Craftsdwarf's workshop (b-w-r). Put it near the Mason and Mechanic Workshops, and give it a stone stockpile as well – remember to set the pile to only hold non-economic stone, and set the wheelbarrow count (you could also delete the Mason's pile and replace it with an extended one serving both workshops if you wanted).

The Craftsdwarf's workshop deserves a special mention because unlike most workshops, it's used by multiple professions. Most of the stuff we'll be making from stone could also be made of wood by a Wood Crafter, or bone by a Bone Carver, and it all happens in one workshop. There's also a Metal Crafting profession which makes similar things, but that takes place in a forge. Other uses of the Craftdwarf's workshop include engraving memorial slabs, and extracting metal strands.

However, stone is generally more plentiful than wood, and all our bones are currently holding our creatures together, so Stone Crafting is the most common use for this workshop.

Once we've got it placed and built, let's look at the options available. q-look at the workshop, press a to add a new job, and then choose rock:



The options here are pretty diverse, so let's go through them:

Crafts, mugs, instruments, and toys have no actual function, but they do have a value so are useful for trading.
Rock short swords can only be made from obsidian, and also use a log each. They are the worst weapons you can make, so only use them in an emergency.
Nest boxes are needed for animals to lay eggs in. We'll make some of these later in this chapter.
Jugs are used for a couple of the most obscure industries – they can store honey from beekeeping and oil pressed from rock nuts (the seed for Quarry Bushes).
Pots, sometimes referred to as Large Pots, work almost identically to barrels, but have twice the capacity. We'll be switching over to making them almost exclusively instead of barrels, to save wood and increase the capacity of the stockpiles. You occasionally need a barrel as a building material or to extract syrup from Sweet Pods, and a pot won't do for that. In all other cases, pots are superior.
Hives are used for beekeeping, which isn't covered in this guide since I've never tried it myself.

So what are we going to make here?

Firstly, queue up 8 Nest Boxes, and then in the remaining two slots add a repeat job for Pots, and a repeat job for mugs. We're choosing mugs because from each stone you get three mugs, increasing the value and experience gained. Crafts are made in quantities between one and three, while instruments and toys are only one for one.

But if mugs aren't used for anything, why are we making them? Well, at some point in Autumn we're going to get our first caravan, and they're going to have tons of stuff we want to buy. However, unless we have something to barter with, we won't be able to afford anything. That's what the mugs are for. Being made of stone, they aren't all that valuable, but the resources are plentiful and we can make tons of them relatively quickly. As the fortress expands, you'll probably want to switch to more valuable goods, but we're just starting out here.

Speaking of trading, we might as well get ourselves prepared for our first caravan. When the caravan arrives, they'll need a Trade Depot to unload their goods at. It needs to have a clear 3-tile-wide path to the edge of the map, or the wagons won't be able to get to it, and won't even come onto the map. You can still trade if that's the case, but you'll only be offered the goods on their pack animals, which will be a much smaller selection.

To build the Trade Depot, press b then shift-d. Pick a place as close to your new entrance stairs as possible – it's a bigger, 5x5 building, so you might have to look around for a big enough clear space. Press Enter to select the position, and take a look at the next screen:



In the Item column header, it states (3 Needed). This means we need three items from this particular list to build it out of. It doesn't have to be 3 of the same material, but it can be if you like. If you choose multiple materials, the building will arbitrarily pick one of them to base its colour on, so if you want it a specific colour you should make it out of three the same. Pressing Enter will decrease the (3 Needed) by one, and increase the number before the slash in the Num column, to help you keep track. z will do the opposite, decreasing the selected count of a given material. You can also press shift-Enter to select the material as many times as necessary, and shift-z to deselect everything.

I'm going with Dolomite myself, since the white will stand out against the ground quite well. It's your choice though.

Once you've selected the material, leave it to get built. It needs an Architect to build, like the Wood Burner and Smelter did, but there's no rush here, so just let Zaneg get around to it when she has the time. If you get to Autumn and it's still not built, then we can worry about getting Architecture activated on someone else who's free.

In the meantime, let's get back to those Nest Boxes. Run the game if you need to, until a few of them are built.

Pick one of the 4x4 rooms off the dormitory, and put a door (b-d) on it. Put a door on the other room as well while we're at it. Then build all your Nest boxes (b, shift-n) inside the room, and run the game until they are finished building.

(This is the point in my game that my first migrants arrived. There's a conditional chapter dealing with that – do that as soon as you get your migrants, and don't worry if you notice differences in the screenshots because yours turned up at a different time)

Now, when one of your geese or chickens is ready to lay some eggs, they'll claim one of the nest boxes for their own, and lay the eggs there. At this point, one of two things can happen. If your dwarves have access to the nest box and there's a stockpile with space for eggs (or if they want them for a job in the kitchen), they will come and collect the eggs, taking them to the stockpile. If there's no access, or nowhere to take the eggs, they will be left, and the animal which laid them will sit on them until they hatch (which only happens if there's a male in your fortress, so it could be an indefinite wait).

In practical terms, this means if you want to breed egg-laying animals, you need to take action to stop your dwarves interrupting the process. Breeding chickens or geese is a good idea for a new fortress, since they're cheap to bring, hatch in large groups, and grow up relatively fast. Hatching the first two or three sets of eggs can end up with enough birds to keep your fortress swimming in eggs for years to come. Note that eggs aren't edible in themselves, but can be cooked into a meal at a kitchen. We'll go over that in a future chapter.

Before we can deny access to our Nest Boxes, we should make sure of a few things. First, we should add a Pasture inside the room with the Nest Boxes, and assign all our egg-laying birds to it. If you remember, this is done by pressing i to bring up the Zones menu, then defining a rectangle using the cursor. After that, press n to set it as a pasture, then shift-n to get to the list of animals, where you can navigate with + and -, and choose animals with Enter. In Dwarf Fortress, it’s actually not necessary to have your male and female animals anywhere near each other for them to breed – they just need to be on the same map - so it’s up to you whether to put the rooster or gander into the room with the hens and geese.

We should also make sure all the Nest Boxes and the door are finished building, so unpause the game as necessary until that’s done. Otherwise our Dwarves will be denied access to the room and won’t be able to finish the job.

Once all the Nest Boxes and the door are built, and the hens and geese have been taken to the pasture, take a look at the door in q-look:



There are three options we haven’t seen before here, as well as a status readout at the top which will change accordingly:

l: Forbid Passage – This will prevent anyone from going through the door – Dwarves, animals, and (most) invaders. Note that it’s a lower case L for Lima, not an i or a 1.
o: Keep Tightly Closed – This will prevent passage for animals only, but they can occasionally sneak through with Dwarves so it’s not very secure. It’s often better to use pastures to keep animals in a given place, since animals won’t try to leave those.
s: Set as Internal: Remember when we were defining the dormitory, the edges of the room were blocked by the surrounding walls and doors? Internal doors won’t block the room designation, allowing you to set up multi-area rooms.

For now, press l to forbid passage through the door, locking the henhouse and preventing access. Now the hens and geese can roost and your Dwarves won’t interrupt the hatching process. You’ll get an announcement when chicks or goslings hatch, and after that they will take a year or two to reach adulthood and start laying eggs themselves.

There are a few thing to take into account here:

Hens lay up to 15 eggs at a time, and geese a little over half of that. This can quickly lead to a massive exponential population growth. It’s a good idea to keep it in check by unlocking the door every now and then.

Related to the above is the fact that too many animals in too small a space will start small fights each other. These usually end with nothing more than scratches and bruises, but can occasionally cause bigger injuries. You’ll probably want to get all the goslings and chicks out of the nesting room shortly after they hatch because of this.

Chapter Conclusion

The Craftdwarf’s workshop has more uses than the ones we’ve covered here, and we’ve not even seen the most important ones yet. Engraving slabs is something you’ll need to do every now and again when a Dwarf dies, and we’ll cover that in a conditional chapter based on that morbid inevitability. Crossbow bolts made of wood and bone aren’t as good as metal ones, but use more common resources and are perfect for practicing with (that’ll have its own chapter too, but I’m not sure if it’ll be conditional or not).

Eggs and poultry breeding are just two of the options you have for feeding your fortress, and are reliable enough that you could use them as your sole methods, if you were boring like that. You would still need to farm for plants to brew and for thread so you could make cloth, though. You’d also lose out on a few side benefits of other methods, like the bones, fat, and hides from butchered animals.

The Trade Depot is essential, and you’ll want to have one available at all times. There are things we can’t produce on our own due to lack of resources at this particular location, and trading can get us limited quantities of those things. You’ll also trade with other races who can produce things that Dwarves can’t.

Chapter 8 Endsave

Interlude 1: Meet The Functioning Hole In The Ground.
In which the surface is abandoned, and true Dwarven life is embraced.

Since we have no Dwarf to meet for this lesson, it isn't a proper chapter. However, this stuff is essential to know for a functioning fortress, even though it's mostly miscellaneous. We do have three major subjects to cover, however, as well as the small stuff: Proper stockpiles, Dwarven thoughts and needs, and the concept of Rooms.

First let's look at announcements though. You've probably seen a few messages pop up at the bottom of the screen by now, although nothing important should have happened yet (as far as announcements go anyway). You can see a history of the messages by pressing a:



At the top of the screen is the current date, the 4th of Slate. Dwarven months are named after stone, ores and gems mostly, and are 28 days long. New year's day is also the first day of spring, and is on the 1st of Granite. That's also the date we started the fortress. Slate is the second month, so we're a little more than a third of the way through spring at this point. More info on dates

- Looks like 2 snow storms have been and gone (that's why my wagon and workshops went white – they got snowed on). Weather will be announced here, but isn't a big deal. Dwarves which are outside during the rain or snow will get a mild unhappy thought. Snow will make the ground snowy, and rain will slowly refill any depleted ponds and put out fires. If we were in a good or evil region, it might rain other substances, but we're in a boring neutral place.
- Monom became a herbalist, because his herbalism skill has risen while his masonry hasn't.
- You have struck Amethyst! If you followed along exactly, you'll have that too because there's amethyst to the right hand side of the storeroom. Note that there's no announcement for striking dolomite. That's because dolomite is the layer stone; the default stone that all the other veins and clusters are put into. There'll be tons of it down there. Jet is in a large cluster to the south west where we dug out the 3 rooms, but don't get too excited. It's a basic, low value stone, half the value of dolomite and without the ability to be used in steelmaking. We'll be mining out plenty of low value stone through the life of our fortress, so there's no need to go out of our way to get any. If you see this message again and want to know what you've hit, check The Non-Dwarf's Guide to Rock to see what it's good for (if it's a stone, anyway. Gems are all good for the same thing, just with differing values).
- Kûbuk made a masterpiece. Hopefully the first of many.

There are a bunch of other announcements you might see over the course of the game as well. You can zoom to the location of most of the announcements by pressing z, once the announcement is pointed at by the green arrow. This doesn't work for stuff like weather of course, since there's not an appropriate place to zoom to for that, but it could help you see where that amethyst is, for example.

The big serious announcements will pause the game and usually move your view to the location automatically. I've added (no I haven't, but I will) a series of conditional lessons in one of the followup posts, which will cover things like that. Since these events need to be handled as and when they arise, we can't fit them in our normal lesson plan, but they are definitely important to learn. Head down there and have a look at the contents list, so you know when there's more to learn about something that happens.

Some other announcements you might see:

[Dwarf] has given birth to a [boy/girl] – Yay, a glorious bundle of burden on your fortress!. Dwarven children take 12 years you reach adulthood, and will do very little in that time. You still need to keep them fed, boozed up, and happy though.
[Creature] has given birth to a [baby creature] – This is generally a good thing, depending on the type of animal. Animals will join the pasture of their mother if there is one, so it's a good idea to leave a bit of room for this purpose when it comes to grazing animals. Different animals take different amounts of time to grow up, loosely correlating to size.
[Dwarf] cancels [job]:[reason] – You'll see this a lot, and it can happen for a variety of reasons. Most common for workshop tasks is a lack of resources, for building jobs it might be that something's in the way. If a dwarf gets too close to a hostile/wild creature they'll run away, cancelling the job.
[FINISH] Add more

If you see one that isn't listed there or in the conditional chapters, try typing it into the search bar of the Wiki, and you'll probably find it easily enough. Make sure and post it in this thread for me to add to the list, too.

Oh, by the way:



The snow has melted (apologies if this happened a while ago for you, or hasn't happened yet). The ponds are still frozen, but that won't last much longer either. Now we can see what the ground really looks like.

There's a couple of grey ⌐ characters around. If you take a look at them in k-look, you'll see they're withered plants. All this time our herbalist Monom has been picking plants and leaving them lying, and after a while they wither. No need to worry, there are plenty of plants around and Monom would have just been standing around otherwise. He'll at least have improved his herbalism skill a bit.

There are green '.`, symbols around which are grassy ground – our pastured grazing animals have been munching away at the grass in their pasture, and seem to be doing alright. There's the occasional sand tile (yellow ≈) around, where a grazer has eaten a tile of grass recently and it's not grown back yet. The location I selected for this fortress has the highest vegetation rating, so the grass grows back fast. We could probably put 10 or 15 more animals in there before the grass couldn't keep up. Other sand tiles around are where trees have been cut down or shrubs collected, or where dwarves and animals have trampled the grass out of existence. Grass will grow back on these tiles too, if they're left alone for a while.

The white '.`, symbols are bare rock ground (it's white because it's dolomite, other rocks are different colours), while the ∞ symbols are dolomite rocks on the surface. The rocks don't do much, the only thing of note is that they block wagons from being able to pass. You can smooth them away if you need to though.

The dark green curly backwards y things are either shrubs for a herbalist to collect, or saplings that will grow into trees. The “ symbols are shrubs. Both shrubs and saplings can be trampled and killed by dwarves and creatures walking over them.

The light green curly y things and the light green ƒ shapes are bamboo. This essentially works like grass, but for pandas. We don't have any pandas, so just ignore the bamboo.

The yellow circles are bee colonies. They can be farmed, but we're not covering that in the guide.

The grey squares are flies of various types. All dwarves get mildly annoyed if they encounter flies, but each dwarf has a particular type of vermin that they hate, and will get very annoyed if they encounter. Non-fly vermin that a dwarf doesn't hate won't bother them. Vermin is defined as any animal below a certain size, not just pests. Your cats will wander around killing vermin, and leaving their remains lying around. These are shown by purple ² signs. As the remains decay, the symbols will turn white then disappear.

There's other stuff around. If you don't recognise it, k-look at it and you'll see what it is. If you need more info, type the name of it into the Wiki.

Going Underground.

This next bit depends on Zaneg and Tobul's mining a bit. Given that Meng's farm was finished, I'm assuming the storeroom was too. Let's put it to use.

We're going to put 2 stockpiles in there, one for food, and one for pretty much everything else.

Hit p to bring up the stockpile menu, then f to specify food. Fill the first 6 rows with this food stockpile:



For the remaining 5 rows, we don't want to be restricted to just one category. Luckily, there's a way around that. Press c for custom stockpile. Then press t to bring up the list of stuff which we can customise it with.



This screen will let you specify exactly what to store in the stockpile to a stunning level of specificity. Want a stockpile for battleaxes made of steel, but only of masterwork quality? You can do that. For now, we don't want to be specific in any way, since this stockpile is going to be our “everything else” stockpile. When we do make a more specific stockpile, we can always come back and deactivate those goods from this stockpile.

On this screen there's 3 columns, but we can only see one for now. Go down to Furniture/Siege Ammo category and press e to enable it:



It's not hard to see how we specific we could be, but we'll come back to the mechanics of that in a second. For now, enable everything except Food, Refuse, Corpses, Stone, and Wood. Once that's done, press ESC. Custom Stockpile should still be highlighted as the selected option, so go ahead and place one over the remaining 5 rows:



Ok, that's a basic setup, but let's get just a little more fancy and make a stockpile specifically for seeds in that 3x3 room opposite Meng's farm. Start by placing another food stockpile there, then take a look at it in q-look:



There are a few options here which can really seal the deal of your absolute control over where your stuff goes.
s: This takes you back to the screen we were just on, where you can choose which stuff is allowed in the stockpile.
erER: Lets you choose how many barrels are allowed for this stockpile. Food can be stored directly on the stockpile, or inside a barrel which is itself on the stockpile. This saves space in the stockpile. e and r adjust it by 1, while E and R set it to 0 or max. Since this is a food stockpile, it automatically has the max number of barrels selected.
cvCV: The same for bins. Bins are even more effective at saving space, since the stuff that fits in would generally require a whole tile for every single item, while food often stacks.
W: Wheelbarrows are useful, but we'll come back to them in Chapter 5.
a, t, and g: lets you set up rules and destinations for this stockpile's stuff. Say you wanted your mason to only make furniture out of orthoclase boulders, because you like the yellow colour. Set a stockpile to hold only that, and tell it to give to the mason's workshop, and that'll happen. You could make that one small, but have another, bigger one as a reserve, and set it to give to the smaller one. Or you could have multiple smaller single-type piles taking from a larger mixed one. The possibilities enabled by just these three options are endless and incredibly useful, and we'll cover them in more detail in a future chapter.

For now, we have a generic food stockpile, but what we want is a seed stockpile. Before we set that, let's make it so barrels aren't used here (seeds are stored in bags anyway, and there's a couple of minor bugs with stuff in bags inside barrels). Press shift-e to do that, and you should see Max Barrel is now 0.

Now press s and we'll change the settings. Press down to get to the Food category, then right to go into the list of sections. There are a few different controls here.



If you're in the right hand column, Enter will enable/disable a specific item.
f will disable all items in a section, while p will enable all of the items (All Meat for example).
a and b will do the same, but for all the sections in the whole category (All Food).
Some categories have an item or two which doesn't fit in any of the sections, and you can toggle them using u or j. In this case it's prepared food, which you make in a kitchen.

For this stockpile, we only want seeds active. The quickest way to do that is to press b to disable everything, then move down to seeds and press p to enable the section. Like with labours, the sections are white, light grey, and dark grey when all, some or none of the items are activated. If you really want to get fancy you could go in and use Enter to select only the underground seeds (the first 5 in the list, as well as Dimple Cups which are nearer the bottom). We don't have any above-ground seeds though, so it won't actually help immediately.



ESC out to q-look, and go down to the food stockpile we set up there. We want to change the settings on that to exclude seeds, since we have a better place to put them now. So that's s for settings, move down to food, highlight seeds, and then press f to forbid seeds from the pile.

The “everything else” stockpile could use a little tweak as well, while we're at it. Head into the settings for that, and under Furniture/Type disable sand bags (last on the list). We've got a fair few bags of sand in the wagon, and they don't fit in bins, so we don't want them filling up the stockpile. We'll leave them lying around on the surface until we need them.

One last thing. Go back to the main screen, and go to the stockpile placement menu again:



As we established, the food stockpile will use barrels to save space. Dwarves will try and fill every tile with a barrel. However, that would mean none of those barrels would be available for other tasks, notably brewing. If you press * a few times on this screen, you'll notice that the Reserved Barrels counter goes up. Set it to 5, and the dwarves will only add more barrels to stockpiles when there's 6 or more. This gives us some room to work. As our fortress grows and production increases, you'll probably want to increase that number. Keep in mind the spare barrels need to be stored somewhere too. Don't bother reserving bins, since there's no use for them other than stockpiles.

OK! That's us set up with everything we need to empty out the wagon into our storage room! Kûbuk's furniture and Tobul's axes, copper and charcoal will be moved too, and so will any gathered plants which haven't already withered. Bear in mind this will all take some time. If Zaneg and Tobul have finished mining the 3 rooms from number 3 and 4 on their list, then re-enable hauling for Tobul to help. If Kûbuk has finished the 3 doors that are first on her list, do the same. Both will still do their jobs, but will also do some hauling as well.

Bonus objective!

Now that we have a food stockpile, vermin will try and eat our food. It's not a huge worry, since we should be keeping a substantial reserve at all times, but we might as well do something about it. Remember those cats we have wandering around killing vermin? Try pasturing a couple (not all) of them in the storeroom. They'll focus their hunting there, saving our food.

Considerations Must Be Made

Right, next on the list, we'll need to talk about the needs and happiness of your dwarves. Each dwarf needs to eat roughly twice a season, and drink four times. If you have no food, a dwarf can last a little longer by hunting vermin, but that will only make a slight dent and the dwarf will still starve to death in short order. If you have no alcohol, dwarves will drink water instead (if you have any – ours is all frozen at this point), but dwarves are alcohol dependant. The longer they go without alcohol, the slower they get.
They also will need to sleep a few times a season (not sure how often, definitely less often than they drink [FR]). They'll sleep in a bed if there's one available, or on the ground otherwise.

You might see dwarves flashing with downwards arrows to show their status: Brown for hunger, blue for thirst, white for tiredness, and red for unhappiness. Your starting seven will be approximately synchronised at this point, so you might have seen a few of them standing around the wagon flashing blue, barrels in hand.

Your dwarves also get happy or sad depending on the various situations they find themselves in. The fact and manner in which the above needs are fulfilled play a big part in that.
Eating: Eating something a dwarf likes will give them a happy thought. If they aren't able to get food in a reasonable time when they become hungry, or if they have to eat the same thing repeatedly, they will get a bad thought. If there's not a chair and table for them to eat at, they'll get unhappy, but if there is they'll get a happy thought based on the opulence of the dining room (we're getting to that in a while). Prepared meals made in a kitchen can have quality modifiers which enhance the happiness gained.
Drinking: They don't need a table or chair to drink so won't complain about the lack, but also won't get a dining room bonus. They don't like a lack of variety in their drinks either, and have preferences for what they like to drink too. There are far less types of drink than food, so a dwarf is much more likely to have access to their favourite drink.
Sleep: Dwarves that can't find a bed when they need to sleep will sleep on the ground, but won't be happy about it. If there's a bed available to sleep in they'll use it, but unless it's in an actual bedroom they'll be mildly annoyed. If it's their own bedroom they'll get a happy thought based on the opulence of the room. If they're too close to some noisy work they might sleep uneasily or be woken, making them unhappy.

There are plenty of other factors which can cause thoughts for dwarves. Let's take a look at Melbil and Meng, to see how they feel:



Nothing too big has happened either way for these two, so they're still quite content. You can see that Melbil has had a fine drink lately. If you look at the light green section, you can see he likes dwarven beer, which is good since we have plenty of that. He obviously made a beeline for the stuff last time he was thirsty. He was annoyed by flies, which is pretty much inevitable since he's our woodcutter.



Meng was accosted by terrible vermin. If we look in the light green section for him, we can see that he absolutely detests rats, and he's apparently seen one. That's a more severe unhappy thought than Melbil's encounter with flies, but still not enough to knock him down from quite content.

Keeping your dwarves from getting unhappy is important. There are a couple of hundred possible thoughts, and they vary in severity. While the direct penalties for unhappy dwarves are not too harsh in themselves, unhappy dwarves will often throw tantrums, and dwarves who spend too long unhappy will go insane. Tantrums involve knocking down buildings, throwing stuff around, and starting fistfights. That doesn't sound too bad until you consider that dwarven punches can break bones and skulls, and some of the things they throw might be weapons or massive boulders. Also, when a dwarf goes insane, they have a chance of going berserk and attacking anything they see. Any injuries or death as a result will cause more unhappiness, triggering more tantrums, and soon enough half your fortress is dead or insane.

The direct bonuses for dwarves being happier than average aren't earth shattering either, but the real value in happy dwarves is their buffer against unhappy thoughts. When half your army is wiped out by an invasion, a dwarf might have lost several friends, be severely injured, and angry about almost starving to death before someone could bring him food in the hospital. If he was only quite content before, he's probably going to be insane before much longer (if he survives his injuries anyway). If he had been ecstatic beforehand, he might not even be unhappy overall.

Let's take our first steps towards happier dwarves by making some rooms for them. If Tobul and Zaneg haven't finished steps 3 and 4 on their list (the 6x6 room opposite the storeroom and the 2x2 and 3x2 rooms off that), designate them and run the clock until they have.

We need to make some Rooms. Rooms are (usually enclosed) areas set aside for a specific purpose, involving furniture. We're going to make a dormitory for our dwarves to sleep in, a dining room for them to eat in, and an office for Zaneg to use later.

The first thing we need is to build the appropriate furniture. Kûbuk has already built beds, tables chairs and doors, which is what we need for these rooms, but they're not usable until they're placed/built (think IKEA flatpacks). Press b to go to the build menu, and then d for door. Move the X over to one of the entrances to the rooms, and press Enter, and pick one of the doors. Repeat for the other two entrances, then place 7 beds (b) in the 6x6 room, in whichever locations you want. Here's how it should look at this point:



The 2x2 room will be Zaneg's office. In theory all an office needs is a chair, but Zaneg will sometimes eat in there, and complain if there's no table. Press c to build a chair, and press Enter to get to the item selection screen, but let's take a closer look at that before we actually place the chair:



We have 4 chairs, but as we saw previously, furniture and other stuff can have quality levels. Sometimes we want to make sure we're putting in the highest quality furniture we can, while other times we want to avoid placing the good stuff where it would go unappreciated. You can change the material selection list from generic item types to a list of specific items by pressing x:



Here's a list of all the fortress's chairs, with their quality level on show. If you wanted, you could press v to look at an item. Let's build the lowest quality one in the office, and save the nicer ones for the dining room where everyone can appreciate them. Once you have nobles or a big enough dining room for quantity to overwhelm quality, you might want to do it the other way around. Selecting an item for this is the same as it was when it was just types, + and – to highlight and Enter to select. Go ahead and place it, then put the other 3 in the dining room. Do the same with tables (t).

Here's how it looks so far:



Notice that they're all black on light grey? That's because they're building sites, not finished furniture. One of your furniture haulers will carry the actual piece of furniture to the location, move anything in the way, and build the furniture. Once they're built, the furniture will be the colour of the material it's made from (brown in this case). Some of the building sites might be flashing between the symbol and a white oval; that's fine, the oval is just a boulder of dolomite which will be moved out of the way by the builder.

Go ahead and unpause, then pause again once all of these have been built:

At least one of the beds.
At least one of the tables in the dining room.
The chair in Zaneg's office.

Go ahead and look at Zaneg's chair in q-look:



The only option is the one we want: r: Make Throne Room or Study. Press r and then just press Enter on the next screen, and you'll see this:



This is the new q-look screen, now that we've made this chair into a room. If we had done this by accident, we could remove the room label by pressing f. Since this will be Zaneg's office, we should assign it to her. Press a, and you'll see a list of the dwarves in our fortress. Nobles will automatically be at the top, and since Zaneg's our expedition leader, she's first on the list. Select her and press Enter, then take a look at the new information:



Okay, Zaneg has an office! What's that good for? Well, not much yet. When we get our first caravan, she'll use it to meet with the outpost liaison, and we'll be assigning her some work that needs an office later.

Let's do the dormitory next. Move over to the bed and press r to start a bedroom. Let's look at next page now we're making a bigger room:



See the flashing blue bits? That's the area our room is set to cover, and everything in that area will belong to the room. Use + or – to make it bigger or smaller. It always expands out from the piece of furniture you're making the room from, and is blocked by walls and doors, as well as other impassible objects. Press + until the whole room and all the walls around it are highlighted, and then press Enter:



Here we have a few more options. We would be able to assign this room to someone if we wanted, but this is going to be shared. However, unlike other rooms, dwarves will grab any free bedroom for themselves, if they don't have one already. This is handy to save you having to do it yourself, but undesirable for a shared room. To stop this from happening, press d to turn it into a dormitory. Any dwarf who doesn't have their own bedroom will come and sleep here, if there's a free bed. We'll talk about barracks later on.

Create a dining room from a table in the 2x3 room. Again, don't assign it to anyone. The options for this include making it a meeting hall, which has exactly the same function as the meeting zone we placed away back in chapter 0. This room is too small to be a sensible choice for that though, so we'll leave it for now.

That's us set up! When our dwarves get sleepy they'll sleep in the dormitory, and when they get hungry they'll take their food to the dining room, and eat it there (except Zaneg who might use her office if she feels like it).

Interlude 1 End Save



Chapter 5: Meet Monom, the Mason
In which rocks are utilized.

Our storeroom is up and running, and loads of stuff is being put in there. However, you might notice that many of the tiles are being blocked by dolomite boulders. We should really do something about that.

Meet Monom!



Monom is our Mason, but up until now she's been performing her secondary profession, Herbalism (I totally didn't design her with a stoner pun in mind). Herbalism has its uses, but they're mainly to do with scrounging food before you have a farm set up, or getting plants to turn into seeds if you want an overground farm, or just as a place for extra dwarves to be kept busy. Over the life of a fortress Masonry will be much more useful, so let's get her working on that instead.

We need to build her a Mason's Workshop, so press b-w-m to build it. If Tobul and Zaneg haven't finished digging the southern expansion to the storeroom, then put it on the surface temporarily. If they have, then place it touching the stockpile in that space, like this:



Notice that I've left a 5 tile space to the West of it. That's because that Southwest corner is going to be our new entrance, and one of our future workshops will benefit from being close to the entrance.

Pick a material for the building. Monom will build it once we unpause, but we should set her up a stockpile first. Press p and then s to select a stone stockpile, and draw a rectangle which covers a single-tile U-shape around the 3 free sides of the workshop. Once you have done that, take a look in q-look and you should be seeing this:



Not something we haven't seen before, but we're doing something new with it. Remember Tobul smelting her malachite? She took much longer to walk to the smelter with the malachite that she did to walk back, due to the weight. This can be worked around by using wheelbarrows, which eliminate the speed penalty from hauling. You can see that since this is a stone stockpile, it's already set to have a wheelbarrow assigned, but let's up that to 3 (the max). This can be done by pressing w twice. You've probably already got 3 wheelbarrows, since there was one in Kûbuk's initial list of stuff, and another 2 were pretty high up her list of further projects. A dwarf will carry each wheelbarrow to the stockpile, then whenever a stone needs moved to the stockpile they'll grab a wheelbarrow to move it. Note that if a stockpile has any wheelbarrows assigned, then dwarves will not haul to it by hand, only with the wheelbarrow.

We also need to consider what stone our Mason and other stoneworkers should be allowed to use as resources. We mentioned earlier that dolomite can be used in steelmaking, and it's one of the few stones which can. If we didn't have a whole layer of the stuff to use, then we wouldn't want to waste it on regular stoneworks. In fact, once we open up a new layer of rock and start mining some more useless stuff, I would suggest disallowing regular stoneworks entirely on dolomite.

In order to do that, we'll need to introduce the concept of economic and non-economic rock. From the main screen, press z. The page that appears is a pretty handy fortress overview, but we'll come back to it in the next chapter since it'll have more info by the end of that. For now, press right to highlight Stone, and press Enter. Here's what's behind door number one:



This is the stone screen. First of all, press Tab to look at the Other Stone. This is a list of all the types of stone which don't have a special use beyond building materials and resources for stoneworkers. They are all highlighted green, which means they will be allowed for those tasks. There's not much reason to deactivate any of these, except maybe colour control. Feel free to look through the dizzying array of stones, then press Tab to go back to Economic Stone. These are stones which do have other uses besides the basic ones. In the case of dolomite, marble, and a few others, they can be used as the flux component when making steel. Most of the other stones in this list are metal ores, along with a few miscellaneous uses. By default, everything in this list is deactivated, unless there's a whole layer of the stuff (dolomite and marble, in this case). Anything deactivated here will not be used by Masons and other stoneworkers, and won't appear in the list of building materials. The last thing you want is for your masons to make the tables for your dining room out of iron ore, while your weaponsmiths have no resources to work with.

As I said, there's no point changing anything yet, until we have something else to use instead of dolomite, so ESC out of there and let's head back to the stockpile we just laid down. Press s to look at the settings, and move down to the Stone category:



This is no good. Currently, it's set so that anything dug out of the ground will be brought here. Our Mason won't use any metal ores or other deactivated stone, so they would just clog up the stockpile. Deactivate the whole Metal Ores and Clay sections, and all of the Economic section except dolomite (remember that f will deactivate a whole section).

OK, time to put it all into place. Unpause the game, and dwarves should start moving wheelbarrows to the stockpile, then using them to move stone there too. Monom should also build her workshop, so get her started making stuff. Remember how part of Kûbuk's list was only to be done if there was no Mason? Add anything left of that part to Monom's list, and add the following after it:


1 quern (q)
20 coffers (h)
20 cabinets (f)
20 doors (d)
10 statues (u)
5 slabs
10 tables (t)
5 thrones (c)

Make coffers, cabinets, and doors as needed to keep up with bedroom production.

Chapter Conclusion

A Mason will never run out of work to do in a fortress. Making enough coffers, cabinets and doors for your dwarves' bedrooms, tables and chairs for their dining rooms and offices, caskets for their corpses, and other necessities will take up plenty of time, and then there's the extra things like statues to improve the quality of rooms, and floodgates for incredible (-y dangerous) feats of engineering.

While it's easy to think of wood as the infinite resource since trees grow back, the truth is that stone is what you will find most plentiful. Wood requires a specific journey to the surface and work done out where there are wild animals and occasionally enemies. Woodcutters are the most common first casualties. Stone, however, will stack up all over the place as you dig out your living areas and hunt for ore, and you'll soon have more of it than any sane person would want. Therefore, if it's something that can be made from stone, then you'll not often want to make it from wood or metal.

Chapter 5 Endsave