How to Set Up a Library in Dwarf Fortress

Dwarves have a reputation for being drunken, bumbling, hardy creatures who only have an interest in tough toil and buckets of booze. That, however, overlooks the bright sparks and academics amongst them, who also love to curl around a book or learn the ancient knowledge. To attract such visitors, you’ll want a library. Here is how to set up a library in Dwarf Fortress.

Building a library in Dwarf Fortress

When building a library in Dwarf Fortress, you’ll need a few things in mind. It won’t necessarily need to take up much space, but for sake of productivity and practicality, you’ll only want to have one library for the whole fortress, so you may wish to make it larger.

All that you will need to furnish your library with is tables, chairs, chests and bookcases. So don’t worry about complex floor plans and make your library simple and easy to access. If you want a rather extravagant library, then you’ll want a lot of bookcases.

Once the building is complete, go into the zones menu. You must first make the library a meeting area. Then, go into the meeting area’s menu and click on the button with a wooden sign and a plus symbol. Make it into a library.

The library will be open and ready, but you must now make sure it is properly running.

Related: How to set up a tavern in Dwarf Fortress

Running a library in Dwarf Fortress

With the library built, click on the button with a magnifying glass to open up the library’s menu. Here, you can see all the details. Firstly, there are two roles that you must assign: scholars and scribes.

Scholars will read and study and discuss with each other, gaining knowledge. Visitors who arrive to see the library will also be scholars and will communicate with your scholars and share knowledge. As long as there are blank writing materials, they will write their own books and leave them in the bookcases.

Scribes will simply copy out existing books as long as there are blank writing materials. This ensures your fortress retains knowledge, even if one copy of a book gets stolen or kept by a visiting scholar. You will really want to assign a scribe and set the maximum amount of copies of each book in the collection.

Make sure to produce enough blank scrolls and quires. Place a chest in your library and dwarves will haul spare blank scrolls and quires into the chest. Scholars will use those writing materials to write new books and scribes will use them to copy existing books.

Finally, you can set the visitor policy. For the sake of knowledge, it would be recommended to allow visitors all the time.

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