Dwarf Fortress – How to Encrust Furniture and Other Items

Dwarf Fortress is the game of stories and legends. You can control your dwarves as they build up their fortress and socialize and fight and drink. One thing you may want your dwarves to do is encrust an item with jewels or gems to increase their value or for the sake of luxury. Here is how to encrust furniture and items in Dwarf Fortress

How to encrust items in Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress allows you to do many things, but ultimately, the finer details are decided by your dwarves. To encrust an item with something, you must first build a Jeweler’s Workshop, which can be found in the workshop building menu. Once it is placed and constructed, you can then issue commands.

If you click on the Jeweler’s Workshop, you’ll notice that the vast majority of orders are to do with encrusting. You can choose to encrust ammo, finished goods, or furniture with polished stones, cut glass, or cut gems. This leads to a total of nine encrusting combinations.

Issue a command (granted that you have the items needed) and a dwarf will scurry over to complete the task. You will notice that they will gather an item and an encrusting material and then get to work. Before long, you will have an encrusted item.

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Can you choose which item they encrust?

As your dwarf does its thing, you may get frustrated that you can’t explicitly control what item they encrust with, and what item they encrust exactly. There are two ways to handle this.

Firstly, you must understand that Dwarf Fortress is a story game, and all of the finer decisions are in the hands of your dwarves. They will, for the most part, do what they want to do. That’s why sometimes they will haul finished goods from the workshops, and sometimes they won’t. If they decide to encrust a random door with rubies, then that is how the story will proceed.

However, if you really want to control what they encrust, then you can do that – but at great effort. You will have to set up two 1×1 stockpiles. One stockpile will be limited to only the one item you want to encrust, and the other stockpile will be limited only to the one item you want to encrust with. Set the Jeweler’s Workshop to input from both of those workshops exclusively. That should solve your problem.

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