How to craft and use pedestals in Dwarf Fortress

Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress have a long list of different needs to lead a happy and healthy life underground. Of course they need food, drink, and shelter to survive, but they also benefit immensely from things like friendship and art. Making art on it’s own isn’t enough to get all the benefits of it, though. Instead, you’ll also need to put that art on display for everyone to admire. As one of two different options for display furniture in the game, pedestals are a key part of sprucing your fortress up a bit. And as the cheaper of the two, they’re also the first you’re likely to engage with, meaning it’s easy to get caught on some of the details.

Related: Dwarf Fortress is richly rewarding, if you can get over a mountainous learning curve – Review

How to craft pedestals

You have a few different options when it comes to crafting pedestals in Dwarf Fortress. You can make them from stone, glass, metal, or wood at the craftsdwarf’s workshop, glass furnace, forge, or carpenter’s workshop respectively. Although the values for pedestals made from these materials will vary, and some may work better for your currently available workshops or materials, odds are the easiest of these to craft will be a wood pedestal, so we’ll focus on that method here.

First, you’ll need one wood (of any kind) to craft each pedestal. Once you have the materials, select a carpenter’s workshop by clicking on it. If you only need one pedestal, you can simply assign a task from the tasks tab and search for or scroll down to the “make wooden pedestal” option. If your fortress has a manager, you can also use a work order to make multiple pedestals, or even produce them continually. As pedestals aren’t the most critical piece of furniture, it’s probably safe to just use a one time order to make what you need, plus a few spares. Note that you can also move your task or work order up into a higher priority in the carpenter’s workshop or work orders menu respectively.

How pedestals work

Once your pedestal is crafted, it will automatically be stored in any stockpiles that are set to hold furniture. Placing a pedestal in your fortress is as simple as going to the build menu (B) and selecting the furniture tab (F.) From here, choose the display tab (Y) and place the pedestal wherever you want it. Then, you can select the pedestal by clicking on it. From here, you can set what item is displayed there (from a wide range of options) by selecting the “assign new display items” action. As with any action in Dwarf Fortress, this may take a while to complete, depending on how many available dwarfs are nearby to help out.

Displaying art on a pedestal is an important part of your fortress, as it will improve the mood of your dwarves who observe it. Note that your dwarves need access to the pedestal for this to work, as they can’t actually view the displayed item from across a room or behind a barrier of any kind.