40d:Room

What is a room?

The answer is not as obvious as it seems. A chamber with a bed in it is not yet a bedroom; you have to select the bed and define a bedroom from it. The functional room, as the game understands it, is not defined by walls and doors; it is a zone extending out from a piece of furniture (in our example, the bed) that defines the room, created when the room is defined from that piece of furniture. Everything covered by that zone is considered part of the room, and will contribute to both the room's value and its effectiveness. This zone does not need to extend to the walls. It is well possible to define several such rooms in one actual enclosed space; they may even overlap, although this comes at a penalty to the room's value.

Rooms can also be assigned to specific dwarves (to satisfy a noble's requirements, for instance). Unassigned bedrooms will be spontaneously claimed by individual dwarves not already possessing a bedroom. Married couples will share a bedroom (except for some nobles). Once the economy starts, dwarves will have to pay rent for their bedrooms.

Creating rooms

To create a room, you must first have built something capable of supporting a room from the build menu, such as a table or bed. Then you must select the completed item in question with the q command and choose to create a room. The room's radius extends outward in a rectangle, but will stop when it hits walls or external doors. If you first build the door to create a closed space, then the game will define the room so you won't need to resize it unless it is very big.

If you want to have a door dividing a single, defined room into multiple areas without blocking the room's zone, you can set the door to "internal" in the door's q menu. Rooms do not have to be blocked off on all sides, and can even overlap, but for various reasons you will usually want to avoid overlapping rooms and give them proper boundaries.

In general, you only need to define a room from one object in the room. For instance, a communal dining room is defined from one table -- just give the room a large enough radius to cover the whole space.

Rooms can not span z-levels; when you define a room it can only be on a single level.

Buildings, Constructions and Rooms FAQ
When I try to build a bed/door/chair why does it say needs bed/door/chair?
How do I make and build chests?
How do I construct a wall from a particular direction?
How do I designate rooms or areas?
Help! My doors are stuck open!
Once placed, can furniture be moved?
How do I increase the value of a room quickly and easily?
Add a question to this FAQ
Back to the Main FAQ

Types of rooms

Public rooms

• Archery Range, defined from an archery target. Used by the military.
• Barracks, defined from a bed, weapon rack, or armor stand. Used by the military or by dwarves with no bedroom.
• Jail, defined from a restraint or metal cage. Used for dwarven justice.
• Meeting hall, defined from a well or table.
• Sculpture garden, defined from a statue.
• Zoo, defined from a cage, aquarium, or restraint.

Private rooms

• Bedroom, defined from a bed.
• Dining room, defined from a table.
• Study/Office/Throne Room, defined from a chair or throne
  (These are actually the same thing, even though the game refers to them with different names).
• Tomb, defined from a coffin.

Room quality

Bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, and tombs will have different quality grades depending on their size and furnishings. Higher-quality room grades will produce happy thoughts in dwarves utilizing these rooms. If a room contains items made from materials a dwarf favors, the room will have a higher perceived quality to that dwarf. You can also increase the grade of a room by smoothing and engraving the walls and the floor.

Rooms can be viewed in the building list by hitting the r key.

Influences on room quality

• Furniture adds to the quality, by exactly the value of the furniture (most likely no longer true), which itself depends on material value and object quality, plus the value of any decorations. Price adjustments by nobles do not affect this value. Statues and windows are a special case; any wall they block access to does not count towards room value.
• Doors add to room value only if they are set to internal and the room is (re-)sized afterwards, though the room still has to extend only as far as to the door, not beyond (40d).
• Floor and wall grids add to value. See table below.
• Rooms should normally be separate. If rooms share floor space, then the quality 'score' is lowered for those rooms. Details missing. Rooms can share walls and external doors just fine at no penalty.
• Any material, stone type or furniture that an assigned dwarf has a preference for will increase the perceived value of a room for that dwarf - other dwarfs will perceive the standard value.

Factors

The room

Taken from Draxxalon's study. (wrong/outdated) Each tile touched by the room's designated area adds to its rental cost and quality (as per Room Grades below)

Type	Rough Floor	Smooth Floor	Rough Wall	Smooth Wall
Normal rock	1	4	1	5
Flux	2	14	2	18
Obsidian	3	21	3	27

• Smoothed and engraved ordinary stone has a base value of 10. This is multiplied by quality (x1 - x12) in the same way as objects. Note that walls are only detailed on one side (the side that the engraver is on).

• Example: a 3x3 Room

XXXXX
X...X
X...X
X....
XXXXX

As you need to knock out one bit of wall for the entrance, a 3x3 room has ten floor and 11 wall tiles (the corners are inaccessible and don't count). That makes a basic value of 22. When smoothed, it will score ((10 * 4) + (11 * 5)) = 95, assuming it's all plain stone.

As an alternative to engraving, floors can be constructed out of valuable materials (such as gold, steel, platinum, aluminum, or megabeast soap) in order to increase room value significantly. Constructing a floor on top of an engraving will destroy the engraving, making its creator unhappy and possibly making the builder a criminal.

Furniture

All standard furniture (beds, coffers, weapon racks, etc.) has a base value of 10. The value of doors is unknown but they seem to be counted in somehow. The base value is multiplied by the material value and the item's quality. For example, a *Marble Door* is worth 10 (door) * 2 (marble) * 4 (*superior quality*) = 80☼. A few pieces of high-quality furniture can increase a room's value quite a bit, and high-quality high-material-value furniture can add thousands to the value of the room.

• The floor space that the furniture is standing on still counts. Therefore, really valuable soap floors might be a good idea.
• Windows act as walls and statues and block the value of tile that they are built on. You can use the high value of a high-quality clear glass window as a separator of rooms to make both rooms very valuable.
• Statues (basic value 25) block the tile they're built on. They also cause any wall they're blocking to no longer contribute to room value.

Artifacts

If you are the lucky owner of artifact furniture, placing it in a nobles office or bedroom is the best thing you can do, as even a 'cheap' all-stone artifact will be worth at least 2400☼, boosting the room very close to grand. In practice artifacts frequently exceed 10,000☼ and can turn a single tile of dirt into a royal room.

Specific room quality grades

The grades of quality of rooms are as follows. These quality grades only apply to bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, and tombs.

Bedroom	Dining room	Office	Tomb	Rent
Meager Quarters	Meager Dining Room	Meager Office	Grave	1 - 99
Modest Quarters	Modest Dining Room	Modest Office	Servant's Burial Chamber	100 - 249
Quarters	Dining Room	Office	Burial Chamber	250 - 499
Decent Quarters	Decent Dining Room	Decent Office	Tomb	500 - 999
Fine Quarters	Fine Dining Room	Splendid Office	Fine Tomb	1,000 - 1,499
Great Quarters	Great Dining Room	Throne Room	Mausoleum	1,500 - 2,499
Grand Quarters	Grand Dining Room	Opulent Throne Room	Grand Mausoleum	2,500 - 9,999
Royal* Quarters	Royal* Dining Room	Royal* Throne Room	Royal* Mausoleum	10,000+

(* aka "Legendary")

Examples:

• Modest Quarters:
  • a 3x2 room with one or two masterpieces in it.
  • a 3x2 room, smoothed wall and floors, half-decent furniture (+ or * ).
• Quarters:
  • 3x2, smooth walls, two or more excellent pieces of furniture.
  • A 3x3 room single detailed everywhere (with no ore or gems in the walls) with an exceptional (triple bar) door, bed, cabinet, coffer, weapon rack and armor stand (rent 395).
• Decent Quarters:
  • A 3x3 room single detailed everywhere (with no ore or gems in the walls) with a masterpiece door, bed, cabinet, coffer, weapon rack, and armor stand (rent 815).
  • A 5x5 room, double detailed floor, good quality furniture.
• Grand Quarters:
  • A 6* 6 room with smoothed walls, engraved floors and three exceptional pieces of furniture.
  • A 3* 13 room with smoothed walls, engraved floors, six exceptional pieces of furniture and one masterful piece.

Saving on noble's rooms

You can make one large room, and install every noble there. The quality reduction for overlapping rooms is sufferable compared to the savings over constructing and furnishing a large number of rooms, particularly if you can add to the room's value with artifacts. If the king shows up, you must furnish this room to four times the "Royal" quality for it to count as Royal or just build a separate room for him.

This is a risky strategy as nobles get upset that their rooms are not better than those of lesser nobles. One solution is to designate the rooms of higher-ranked nobles as covering slightly different space, and adding high-value statues, mechanisms, or other objects within that area, not covered by the other nobles' "rooms" (as designated).