40d:Status

Pressing z during Dwarf Fortress Mode brings up the status screen.

This screen contains a large amount of useful information about your fortress and its residents.

Title Bar

The very top row of the screen shows the settlement name and class, followed by the year and season.

Menu Bar

Along the top of the status screen, are various choices for sub-menus. Each can be highlighted with 4 and 6, and then selected with Enter. The menu bar consists of the following options:

• Animals - The Animal Status screen allows you to manipulate animals belonging to your dwarves.
• Kitchen - The Kitchen Status screen allows you to set cooking and brewing permissions for any ingredients currently in your fortress.
• Stone - The Stone Status screen allows you alter permissions on various types of stones that may be reserved for specific uses by default.
• Stocks - The Stocks Status screen allows you examine the number of various items that your fortress and its residents possess.
• Prices - The Prices Status screen becomes available once you have an economy. It allows you to examine the fortress's item prices.
• Currency - The Currency Status screen becomes available once you have an economy. It allows you to examine how much of each coin type you have (and recommendations from your broker on how many you should have).
• Justice - The Justice Status screen becomes available once you have a Sheriff. It allows you to examine any dwarves currently incarcerated, as well as their crime and sentence.

Main Status Screen

This is the screen that appears by default when you press z.

It lists a bunch of useful information, and grows more useful as your dwarves gain skills.

• The upper left hand corner lists the amount of wealth created by your fortress. This figure is slightly misleading; it is the total value of goods that currently exists in your fortress that you have created, and that you have not exported. Presumably, this is one of the ways that the game calculates how advanced your fortress is, for determining how likely you are to receive immigrants, get besieged, or get better trade goods from caravans. Note that this figure will only show if you have a broker with appraisal.
• Below that, the status screen lists trade information. This requires a broker with the appraisal skill.
  • Imports represent the total value of foreign made goods in your fortress. Therefore this includes the value of things such as the clothes brought in by immigrants, the equipment dropped by dead goblin invaders, and so forth. However, foreign made goods that have been decorated, processed or consumed (such as food) do not count towards this total. Goods that are stolen (by rhesus macaques, for example) seem to count towards this total despite the fact that they are no longer on the map.
  • Exports represent the total value of goods made by your fortress that you have traded to other civilizations.
  • A hypothetical example:
    • You buy (rope reed cloth) worth 50. This increases imports by 50. You then make this into a rope reed bag worth 100. This reduces imports by 50 (since it is no longer considered by the game to be foreign made). Fortress wealth increases by 100. You then export this bag. Fortress wealth decreases by 100, and exports increase by 100.
• Below that, you will see a list of your food stores. These all come with question marks, until you have a Bookkeeper with the Record_keeper skill. Depending on how skilled he is, and how accurate you want the counts, you will get better numbers. Note that the Bookkeeper will need an Office to take inventory, and it will take some time for him to count.
  • TODO: Include some sort of statistics as to how many units of food/drink a dwarf consumes per meal/drink/season/year/etc.
• The rest of the screen is taken up by your population display, indicating the number of dwarves in your fortress, and their occupations. Only the dwarves' most skilled occupation counts for this screen. It allows you to see at a glance who you have available, which gets increasingly useful the larger your population grows.
  • An important note is that the right hand side, displaying military Dwarves, only includes dwarves that are currently active in the military. When deactivated, these Dwarves are displayed in the left column, under their civilian job.

Animal Status Screen

This screen shows a list of all animals that are owned by the fortress or its residents, but does not include any wild animals in the region, nor animals belonging to invaders or caravans.

The animals are listed down the left hand column of the screen. Some useful information about this list:

• The word "stray" indicates that the animal is not any Dwarf's pet.
• Named animals are often a result of being named before joining your fortress, and usually means they were owned by an immigrant who game in. Named animals may also have made a kill.

The right hand column (owner) lists the current status of each individual animal in your fortress. This status can take one of several forms:

• Available - This animal is available for adoption as a pet, or assignment (in the case of working dogs).
• Unavailble - This animal currently cannot be claimed as a pet.
• Uninterested - Cats, being superior to all other creatures, cannot be assigned as pets. Instead, they will adopt an owner at their whim.
• A Dwarf's Name - This animal belongs to the listed dwarf. Pets can provide happiness to their owners.

Controls:

• Enter - Toggles its availability. This can only be done on "available" or "unavailable" creatures.
• b - Marks an animal for slaughter. Note that you cannot mark animals for slaughter once they belong to a dwarf. Also, some animals may not be slaughterable.

Kitchen Status Screen

This screen contains a list of all items currently within the fortress that can be used for either cooking or brewing. The items are listed down the left hand side of the screen. A bit right of center, is a column listing the number of each ingredient currently possessed. This number does not seem to rely upon the Bookkeeper, as it never seems to have question marks.

The permissions column to the right is subdivided into two additional columns. One for cooking and one for brewing. This is the most important part of this tab, as it shows you whether dwarves are currently allowed to use the given ingredient for the given task. Possible values are:

• Red - This item could be used for the task, but is currently disallowed.
• Blue - This items is able to be used for the task, and dwarves have permission to do so.
• ---- - This indicates that the given item cannot be used in this way. For example, Deer Meat cannot be brewed.

Controls:

• c - Toggles permission to cook the highlighted item.
• b - Toggles permission to brew the highlighted item.

Stone Status Screen

This screen lists all economic stones found within the game. These are stones that have a value and purpose. As an example, chalk can be used in the process of creating steel.

This screen can be critically useful to you, depending on where you choose to found your Fortress. This is because, by default, economic stones can only be used for their given purpose(s) unless they are mentioned as the layer stone on the regions screen. Which means that if you happen to have access to only economic stones, your masons will be unable to use it for building buildings or furniture or the like. If you attempt to do so, your mason will cancel the job, with the message that he "requires non-economic rock".

By going into the stone status section, you can allow your dwarves to use economic stone for any purpose. Simply scroll through the list to the particular stone you have an abundance of, and press Enter to toggle its availability for menial tasks. This will change the stone's color from red to green.

Note that this screen, despite being a status screen, does not actually give you any information on the stones you currently possess.

Stocks Status Screen

The stocks screen shows you a list of all of the goods your Dwarves own. Its accuracy relies heavily upon the Bookkeeper.

The left side of the screen lists the categories of all the items in your fortress. To the right of this, are two columns, listing numbers. They appear to be the number in the fortress, and the number currently in use?

To the right of these numbers are the goods themselves. By pressing Tab you can toggle between the detailed mode, which shows each item individually, along with relevant name/quality data, or the list mode, which shows items in stacks.

Prices Status Screen

This screen lists the price of (most) goods by category on the left. (Most) Nobles can alter the price of a good. Prices are in the form of a percentage.

Currency Status Screen

This screen lists how many coins of gold, silver and copper you have minted. It also listed how many your coins of each type that your bookkeeper recommends your fortress needs. Note that many players recommend not minting any coins and the figure given by the bookkeeper appears to have little to no affect on the game.

Justice Status Screen

This screen will show the total chains and cages available for justice, as well as the chains and cages currently in use, in the top right hand corner. If you have adequate chains and cages the number will be blue and red if you don't. The chains and cages required will be 10% of the population.

Along the left hand side is the list of people in the room. If they are actually prisoners the number days they have been jailed will be listed on the right hand side along with the person who jailed them and their title.