40d:Legendary

Dwarves which repeatedly perform a specialized task will quickly gain skill levels, and within a year or two of constant labor, greatly depending on the skill, can attain Legendary ability. Tasks which do not involve time-consuming gathering of materials, especially mining, engraving and record keeping, are easy to develop quite rapidly. If you have Proficient miners dig constantly through stone, they can reach Legendary skill before your first winter. Digging through dirt is far faster.

Dwarves which attain Legendary skill at any task will blink on the game screen and have a blinking name on the Unit screen.

Legendary is not the highest skill level a dwarf can attain. There are five invisible skill levels above it, all called "Legendary," but providing increasing skill. We've named them Legendary+1...Legendary+5. At Legendary+5, a dwarf will always produce at least exceptional goods, whereas at Legendary through Legendary+4 superior quality is possible.

Benefits of Legendary status

Attribute increases

With skill increases also come attribute increases. Legendary dwarves are typically Strong, Agile, and/or Tough – sometimes superdwarvenly so.

The specific benefits of each attribute are:

• Agility: Agile dwarves perform all tasks faster. Perfectly Agile dwarves work at nearly twice the rate as non-agile dwarves, not counting skill differences.
• Strength: High strength will increase damage done in battle^[Verify]. It will also reduce or eliminate the encumbrance penalty on a dwarf's speed. For example, a very strong dwarf isn't encumbered by full-plate steel whereas a dwarf with no strength attribute would be.
• Toughness: Tough dwarves are more durable in combat and heal much faster.

Increased productivity

Dwarves with Legendary skill work at a, well, legendary rate. A legendary miner will mine roughly 14-15 squares to a no-label miner's one, for instance, and a legendary engraver can smooth 25 squares in the time it takes a no-label engraver to do one. The real-time rate is dependent on CPU speed: a Perfectly Agile legendary miner can mine about FPS×2 squares per minute, or FPS×4 ore squares. This is through normal stone – dirt, and possibly other substances, are much easier to mine through.

Free rent

Like nobles, Legendary dwarves are exempt from the dwarven economy: they can take any object as a personal possession without paying for it, and claim any bedroom as their own without paying rent. This helps to keep them happy, although some Legendary dwarves may acquire an annoying number of objects.

Speeding skill attainment

If you provide item-producing dwarves (Masons, Carpenters, Craftsdwarves, Brewers, etc.) with a constant supply of nearby goods, they can quickly increase their skill levels as well. However, such dwarves can quickly produce mountains of goods, so you must allocate huge stockpiles and many dedicated haulers in order to keep their workshops from becoming severely cluttered. Farmers with a nearby seed barrel and food stockpile can also gain skill quite rapidly.

Strange moods

Dwarves which enter a strange mood and successfully construct an artifact object will usually gain one Legendary skill, with commensurate attribute increases. The single exception is a "possessed" mood, which will result in the creation of an artifact, but no skill increase. The skill a dwarf gains from a strange mood will be that dwarf's highest "trade" skill (generally, any skill which involves the production of finished goods, plus Mining, Engraving, and Furnace Operation). If you have your peasants train to "dabbling" in desired skills (such as Armorsmith), you will greatly increase your chance of gaining dwarves with those skills at Legendary level.

Cross-training Legendary dwarves

Because their attributes are so high, Legendary dwarves can quickly develop other skills to high levels as well. This is most useful when you have many redundant Legendary dwarves in certain professions but lack them elsewhere.

It may also be useful to deliberately train dwarves in a quick skill to get them to Legendary status, then switch them to other jobs. If you wish to do this, set the dwarf as your Bookkeeper and set the options to the highest level of precision. Provided with an office and with their other jobs turned off, the dwarf will train their record keeper skill to legendary in the space of about a season, leading to legendary status extremely quickly.

As haulers are usually unskilled peasants, having them cross-trained is a good idea to improve their attributes. With more strength they can haul heavy items (or bins full of heavy items) faster, and with more agility they can generally move faster; resulting in more efficient hauling.

The Siege Operator skill is also of use for training dwarves. Siege operation does not train very quickly, since it takes a few years to gain Legendary skill. On the plus side, it requires little supervision: Build a catapult and set it to fire at will. Siege operation is not considered a "trade" skill, so it will not interfere with gaining useful skills through strange moods, and having a catapult operate continuously is a good way to clear an area of loose stone. Furthermore, siege engines are of little use in combat without skilled operators. Dabbling operators take minutes to load a single bolt or stone, whereas skilled operators can load and fire several times a minute.

Another prominent skill for cross-training is the Pump Operator. Simply building some Screw Pumps, not necessarily near water, switching them to manual pumping and assigning the skill to the dwarves to be trained results in pumping hot air for the benefit of better attributes. Operating pumps also produces no strange moods and needs little supervision. The skill gained itself is rather useless, because of the possibility of Perpetual Motion within Dwarf Fortress. So nobody would really want to dedicate a couple of dwarves for this job.

Another set of skills for training are the Social Skills like Comedian, Consoler, Conversationalist, Flatterer, Intimidator, Judge of Intent, Liar, Negotiator, Pacifier and Persuader. They are gained for tasks like trading, but also for simple chatting among the dwarves. This happens occasionally, uncontrolled, and at parties. A way to force this chatter is designating only a single 1x1 meeting area Zone. All idling/breaking dwarves will flock to this area (resulting in a 3x3 dwarf pile), and a storm of communication ensues. So giving your dwarves more spare time will increase their training. Because they train not only one, but several skill (there are 10), reaching legendary status in all of them usually means that their dwarf attributes will be maxed. Oddly enough, some dwarves seem to ignore/do not use one or two of the social skills, e.g. some honest dwarf may never use the liar skill. But that has no real effect one the training. Gaining strength and toughness through talking is a little unusual, so it has already been suggested to remove attribute gain from improving this skills. But on the other hand, chatting among dwarves may also contain some brawling. It is also worth noting that allowing your dwarves to be socialites will make a significant chunk of the fortress friendly with each other very quickly. This might seem like a good thing, since making and talking to friends gives a happy thought, but dwarves also take the death of friends much harder than they otherwise might, increasing the risk of a tail spin of tantrums. Another fact is that it seems to have an effect how many dwarves are chatting simultaneously, the more the merrier, meaning faster skill gain. So seeing 70 idlers may be a good thing for once. Again, no strange moods in this skills, and little supervision, but almost an exploit.