How to Set Up a Hospital in Dwarf Fortress

In Dwarf Fortress, your dwarves may fall into accidents, or gain injuries through warfare or from savage beasts. In any of those cases, you’ll need a hospital. Hospitals are places of recoveries and surgeries, and any blossoming Moutnainhome will need a hospital to prevent the worst. Here is how to set up a hospital in Dwarf Fortress.

How to build a hospital in Dwarf Fortress

What you’ll need

In order to set up your hospital, you’ll need quite a few things ready. You’ll need a dedicated area, the zone ready, dwarves ready to attend to their roles, and lots of supplies.

Firstly, make the area where you want your hospital to be. Make sure it is close to a supply of water and food. Make it decently big, but structured and organized. A messy hospital is a dangerous one. Before you even start doing all of this, however, you’ll need a Chief Medical Dwarf assigned in the Nobles/administrators tab. They don’t have any demands so you can assign one straight away.

Make sure your hospital area has enough ground to include beds, tables, traction belts, and chests.

Dig out your area and then assign the whole area as a ‘meeting zone’. From the meeting zone, you can click the button with a plus sign to turn it into a hospital.

Place beds, tables, traction belts and chests (at least one of each) into the area. Make sure you have at least one dwarf assigned as an orderlie.

Related: How to Get Rid of Miasma in Dwarf Fortress

Setting up the hospital

With the hospital established, you can now click on the button with the magnifying glass to bring up the hospital menu. From here, you can assign doctors, diagnositions, bone doctors, and surgeons. Try to have every role filled.

There is also a list of all the things a hospital will need, soap, powder, splints, etc. You need to assign the max amount of each resource you will allow the hospital, to make sure smaller establishments don’t take up as much as the larger ones.

You can use work orders to automate the production of hospital items when they run low.

As soon as all of that is set up, you’ll have a functioning hospital.

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