Size

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You may be looking for size of clothing, armor, the dimensions of a tile, or the list of creatures by size.

Size is a measure of how big a creature or item is, as volume in cubic centimeters[1], and called [BODY_SIZE] or [SIZE] in raw files.

Size has many important effects on the game, many through its direct effect on item weight, but as material properties go, its implementation is sometimes underwhelming - witness the incredible compression of matter, space, and time that is the QSP. When even multiple full grown dragons occupy a single square, size becomes a little difficult to contextualize. It doesn't help that a bronze colossus fits in a basic wooden cage (although, a fire man fits in it too).

Size directly affects such things as which weapons your dwarves can equip, butchering returns, storage limits, and combat effectiveness for both creatures and weapons.

Size is used to calculate an item's weight, along with the density of the underlying material(s):

Weight (in Γ) = Density (in kg/m³) * Size (in cm³) / 1,000,000 (cm³ in a m³)

Through weight, the size of an item has further ramifications in the game, such as hauling speed, pressure plate activation, impact momentum, weight restrictions, and so forth.

The weight of creatures is calculated from the densities and sizes of the layers of their body parts, which currently results in corpse weights that are about 1/3 heavier than expected.

Internally, all custom size numbers are rounded down to the nearest multiple of 10 - thus, if you define an item with [SIZE:15], it will actually behave as if you had specified [SIZE:10].

Creatures

When it comes to creatures, size is a rough stand-in for weight since standard flesh weighs about one gram per cubic centimeter. However, in the typical complexity of Dwarf Fortress, there are a number of other materials animals can include (ivory, hair, horn, shell, etc.) which have their own densities, shifting a creature's actual weight relative to its size, sometimes significantly (elephant tusks weigh a lot). Creature size is determined by [BODY_SIZE] tokens, often with multiple tokens to set their base size at certain ages.

Bodysize determines several things:

• Average butchering yields.
• How much damage they can absorb (along with morphology).
• How much damage they can inflict in melee (along with morphology and attack definition tokens).
• For creatures that can wear equipment ([EQUIPS]).

• What size of equipment a creature can wear; clothing and armor are sized for a specific species and only creatures near that size can wear them.
• Weapons have a minimum size that a creature must be to wield them ([MINIMUM_SIZE] and [TWO_HANDED]).

The actual size of an individual creature is the result of different effects:

• The base BODY_SIZE for the species of creature.
• The age of the creature; most creatures are born at minimum size, and grow to a maximum.

• Some, like dragons and most species of snake, grow throughout their entire lifetime, and may not live long enough to reach the maximum.

• Inheritance; many creatures have [BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER]) tokens, that allow them to vary in height, width, or length, which they can pass on to children.
• Muscle mass, determined by it's strength attribute (a thin dwarf with ~44210 size will be ~64210 once they become unbelievably strong), due to muscle having [THICKENS_ON_STRENGTH].
• Fat mass, due to [THICKENS_ON_ENERGY_STORAGE].^[Verify]

Creature sizes range from 1 (small insect vermin) to 200,000,000 (giant sperm whales, the largest creature in the game). See List of creatures by adult size for details.

Sample list of creature sizes in cm³

Name	Size at birth	Size at maturity	Notes
Adder	15	150	Smallest (non-vermin) creature
Rabbit	50	500	Smallest domestic animal
Cat	500	5,000
Kobold	1,000	20,000
Dog	1000	30,000
Dwarf	3,000	60,000
Giant tiercel peregrine	8,308	113,292	Smallest giant animal
Water buffalo	100,000	1,000,000	Largest domestic creature
Elephant	500,000	5,000,000	Largest natural land-based creature
Cave dragon	6,000	15,000,000	Largest cavernous creature
Sperm whale	500,000	25,000,000	Largest natural creature
Dragon	6,000	25,000,000	Largest megabeast
Giant elephant	4,000,000	40,000,000	Largest land-based creature
Giant sperm whale	4,000,000	150,000,000	Largest creature, period

Mechanics

• Crafted items: Item definition tokens for industry-crafted items are specific to various classes of items: for instance, ammo has its own ammo definition tokens, as does armor, as do tools, and so on. A [SIZE] token is a field required in all of these definitions.

• Bar lacks a defined size token in the raws, but a bar has a size of 6000 cm³, which is consistent with their weight and density, and 10 bars fitting inside a bin. The dimensionless unit of '150' products per bar, primarily of use for soap, suggests that each use of a bar of soap should diminish by 40cm³ (i.e. 6000cm³/150). Whether this is true is currently untested.^[Verify]

• Inorganic items: Stones, gems, and ores appear to have a default, hard-coded size that is applied to all items of that class; thus there is no direct inorganic material definition token for it.
• Plants: There is no size plant token.
• Buildings: The [DIM:#:#] building token defines the by-tile size of a workshop or building.

See also

• Weight