DF2014:Statue - Dwarf Fortress Wiki (2024)

Statues are decorative buildings which can be built from the build menu under statue. They can be created from one stone at the mason's workshop, 3 metal at a metalsmith's forge, sand or rock crystals at a glass furnace, or clay at a kiln.

Statues, like engravings, depict people, places, things and events drawn from the game's generated history. Unlike engravings they do not display random geometric shapes, such as diamonds. Statues will often depict creatures that the artisan likes or loathes, or other dwarves surrounded by the creatures they like or loathe.

Because of their high base value, statues can be quite valuable when crafted from valuable materials, such as precious metals, or when crafted by a highly skilled dwarf. This makes them a good choice for raising the value of a room to create a legendary dining room, for instance, or to meet nobles' requirements for rooms of a certain value.

You can create a sculpture garden from a statue's query menu. Dwarves with no job will spend time at a communal (non-assigned) statue garden appreciating the statues (which generates a happy thought). If the sculpture garden is private (assigned) then the owner will hang out there when there's no job to do. In addition to normal decorations, a stone or ceramic statue can be glazed by a glazer.

Be careful when placing statues, because dwarves cannot normally move into the tile they occupy. (This also prevents dwarves from smoothing or engraving the floor underneath a statue.) A poorly placed statue can potentially seal off parts of your fortress. One can place a statue instead of a wall on a built floor, which leads to another possible use of statues: you may build a statue on a tile you don't want your dwarves to stand at. That makes an intentional cave-in much safer to carry out. Statues do not impede the flow of liquids (water, magma). Creatures can see past statues as they do not completely block line of sight.

During combat, dodging creatures can move into a statue tile. Dwarves will immediately step out of the statue tile once they recover their bearings. This detail can make statues useful in a danger room, by providing more space for training dwarves to practice dodging without requiring massive numbers of training spears and mechanisms. Statues may also prove useful in archer emplacements to control where your dwarves normally stand, but still allow them a chance to dodge incoming fire.

Building destroyers will topple statues (deconstructing them, but not destroying them). This can make statues a useful delaying tactic while your crack military dwarves are finally collecting the arms and armor assigned to them months ago. Note that creatures that topple statues located in temples, in either fortress mode ^[1][2] or adventurer mode, will be cursed (e.g. as a werebeast or vampire). In adventurer mode, this can be done by pressing u.

A killed iron man or bronze colossus will transform into a masterwork statue upon death (made of iron or bronze respectively). The image is randomly generated upon creation, so it probably won't be a statue depicting the actual creature.