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Names and symbols
v50.14 · v0.47.05 This article is about the current version of DF.Note that some content may still need to be updated. |
Many things generated by the game, such as sites, artifacts, symbols of office and citizens of a civilization, are given individual names by the game. Groups of characters such as armies are also given individual symbols, in the form of descriptive text. These are usually, but not guaranteed, to be unique.
Every fortress has a name. Sometimes you forget what that name is. If you are playing in Fortress Mode, the name of your fortress should be displayed at the top left part of the screen.
Custom names
Custom names have no effect on gameplay, but there are a lot of options which can be accessed when embarking and selecting prepare carefully, or in the fortress mode interface, when choosing a symbol of office.
You can choose the name of your own fortress, and the name and symbol of your founding group during the Embark process. When you reach the stage where you are deciding on your founders' skills and starting items, select "Fortress Name" or "Group Name", at the bottom of the screen, to choose your fortress or group name. You will be given a semi-random name automatically. Names are often compounds of two dwarven words. You may craft a far more elaborate moniker than what is chosen by the name generator.
Fortress and group names have this format:
[Front][Rear] the [Adj 1] [Adj 2] [hyphen compound]-["the" Noun] of ["of" noun]
The front compound forms the first half of your fortress's name. Choose from an extremely long list of words. Select clear, to clear a word selection--your fortress does not need ANY of these words to be chosen (i.e. a blank name) to be legal. At the top of the screen, you can search for a word (in English).
The rear compound forms the second half of your fortress's name, which is combined with no spaces ("Foobar" instead of "Foo Bar").
Adjectives, at first glance, it appears these do nothing, but they give up to two words after your compound word (above) separated by spaces that are the adjectives to "The" X or "Of" X word choice (see below).
The hyphen command adds a third word joined by a hyphen to your "The" X or "Of" X word:
- Foobar the Great
- Foobar of Death
With Adjectives and Hyphen compound:
- Foobar the Great Moral Thraal-Generals
- Foobar the Goblin-Chunks of Exploding
With no front & rear compounds:
- The Great Deadly Foobar
- The Foobar of Foobars
- Of Foobars
Custom symbols
When embarking, if you choose to prepare carefully, you will be given the option to customize your group symbol. The options for doing this are similar to choosing a custom name, but have the capacity to be even more elaborate and long-winded than even custom names allow; giving you choices for representing nearly all named entities in the game and deciding their relationship(s) to each other.
See also: Symbols