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40d:Engraving
Engraving smooth walls and floors will greatly[Verify] increase the value of rooms. It is done by dwarves with the Stone Detailing skill. Engravings will cause happy thoughts and provide a record of the history of your fort. If you engrave while under siege, it is quite possible for the battles to be depicted before they are over.
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. The value of smooth and engraved walls is considered "Architecture" under the "Fortress Wealth" table.
Normal-quality engravings will never have the history of your fortress on them, and are usually about random things in the world. Engravings that are done with a quality of well-crafted and up will often be about bits 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 picture of it.
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. There is an option in the init file to view the full historical information in fortress mode as well, but it is not yet known if this will affect the information available in legends mode.
Art defacement
A masterful engraving that is destroyed or defaced (magma, water and goblins and mining do the job nicely, though fluids will only destroy floor engravings) may cause the engraver to tantrum.
Toggle engravings
Engraved walls and floors are represented by default with pictures on a gray background, making it sometimes difficult to differentiate between them. It is possible to display engraved surfaces as smooth ones with the "toggle engraving" option (engraved surfaces will appear as smoothed surfaces, but with a gray background).
To change the display of individual engravings in-game, select "Toggle Engravings" 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 with YES will cause new engravings to show as smooth surfaces.