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40d:Engraving
Engraving smooth walls and floors will increase the value of a room. This is done by dwarves with the Stone Detailing skill. Engravings may cause happy thoughts, and are a good way to keep a record of the fort's history. You can view them with look + enter.
Engraving an area
- Press d to open the designate menu.
- Press e to select "Engrave Stone".
- Move the cursor to a position on or near a wall and press enter.
- The spot you marked changes to a blinking green "+" indicating where the area you wish to engrave extends from.
- Move the cursor to any position, across the area you wish to engrave and press enter again.
- The wall tiles in the area you defined should blink with a light blue regular pattern.
- Wait for a dwarf to engrave the stone on the walls.
Art quality
Engraved surfaces raise the value of rooms, depending on the quality of the engraving. Engravings only affect the value of the room on the side they were made on, though smoothing affects both sides.[1] The value of smooth and engraved walls is considered "Architecture" under the "Fortress Wealth" table. Quality affects what is inscribed on an engraving. Normal-quality engravings will never have the history of your fortress on them, and are usually about random things in the world. Engravings made with a quality of well-crafted and up will often contain pieces of historical information about your fortress' past. Engravers are inspired by the history of your fort and will use them in the engraving. Like when your axedwarf bravely held a crucial part of the fort and slew some goblins, your engravers can make a graven image of it.
An engraving of a subject that a dwarf dislikes will reduce the the effective value of that room for that dwarf.[2]
Engravings can be viewed by pressing k, moving the cursor over the engraved area, using the + or - keys to move down to the engraving and pressing enter. Adventurers are also able to view these by revisiting your old fortress (use l to look around, then a over an engraving you want to look at), and will see a much more detailed description of the engraved happening. The art and the story behind the engraving will show up in the legends mode. Detailed engravings can also be turned on for fortress mode in the init file.
Toggle engravings
Engraved walls and floors are represented by default with pictures on a gray background, sometimes making it difficult to differentiate between them. It is possible to display engraved surfaces as smooth ones with the "toggle engraving" option (but then you will not differentiate between engraved and smooth surfaces).
To change the display of individual engravings in-game, select "Toggle Engraving" in the designation menu (d-v) and select the area you wish to display differently (this has no effect on gameplay).
The display default is set in the init file line [ENGRAVINGS_START_OBSCURED:NO]. Replacing NO by YES will cause new engravings to show as smooth surfaces.
Art defacement
A masterful engraving that is destroyed or defaced (mining, magma, tower caps and goblins do the job nicely, though magma and tower caps will only destroy floor engravings) will cause an unhappy thought in the engraver (see the Quality article for details).
Also, if Justice is in effect the dwarf that defaced the artwork, if any, can be held accountable for his crimes. This will also happen in the case of engravings of lower Quality.[Verify]
Trivia
If you engrave while under siege, it is quite possible for the battles to be depicted before the entire siege is over. This will mainly show single events that have happened during the siege already, such as deaths of certain creatures.