DF2014:Maximizing value - Dwarf Fortress Wiki (2024)

Value is important for trade with caravans, ensuring your dwarves happiness, attracting migrants, and luring in visitors. One reliable way to increase value is creating items. Not all items are equal, or even close to equal, in value, however. The tables below are ordered by value, to help you select optimum furniture and trade goods to maximize your fortress's value.

It is also vital to consider the material, which acts as a multiplier to the base values listed here; see the table on Item value for details.

Metal[edit]

Weapon-grade metals[edit]

For weapon-grade metals, spiked balls and serrated discs are much more valuable than any other products. They can be traded to caravans or installed in weapon traps to give passing dwarves happy thoughts, while lower-quality products can be melted without loss of material.

All metals[edit]

For all non-weapon-grade metals, flasks and goblets are the optimum trade goods. The best choice for furniture is probably a chain--they can be decorated as "finished goods" and installed in restraints and wells, both of which can be admired by passing dwarves. Lower-quality chains can be melted without loss of material.

Stone[edit]

For stone, mugs are the optimum trade goods. The best choice for furniture is mechanisms, followed closely by statues. Both can be decorated and, when built, admired by passing dwarves. Thanks to the 4x bar multiplier, metal ores are always more valuable when smelted to bars than when worked as stone (assuming equivalent quality).

The base value of common stone is quite low (a mere 1), but most fortresses end up with such vast amounts of it that consuming it to produce value or trade goods is seen as an upside. Flux stone has a slightly higher value of 2, but you may want to use it for steel production instead. Obsidian has the highest value of all non-ore stones and can be mass-produced, making it ideal if you want to produce large amounts of value over the long term.

Glass[edit]

For glass, trap components top the list again. They're so valuable they make reasonable trade goods, even though goblets and vials are much lighter. The best non-trap-component furniture is probably a statue, since it seems to be admired more often than a window.

Glass has the added advantage that (provided you have a Magma glass furnace and a source of sand) green glass can be easily and cheaply produced in massive quantities without consuming any meaningful resources. Clear glass can as well, but it consumes wood, which may be available in more limited supply and needed for other things; additionally, due to the required wood, it cannot be sold to elves. Crystal glass is more valuable still, but available in finite supply.

Wood[edit]

For wood, trap components top the list yet again. They're also the best trade goods, even though crafts are much lighter. All of the non-trap-component furniture has similar value (except traction benches, but they require additional material).

Wood is available in unlimited supply, but the rate at which you can produce it is often limited; given its many other uses, many players avoid using it for trading. Another drawback is that as a material, all wood has the same low base value of 1.

Pottery[edit]

For pottery, the options are quite limited. Statues are the most valuable furniture, though a set of three crafts can be more valuable overall.

Cloth[edit]

The value of cloth items is complicated. For most purposes, the dye, cloth and thread components add a constant amount to the value of cloth products, but goods that are produced in pairs get this value added to each item, making them worthwhile when using high-quality dyed cloth.

Food[edit]

The value of a well-prepared meal made from the proper ingredients is so high that some players consider trading them to be an exploit. One advantage to relying on them to trade or amass value is that you don't have to split your production between feeding your dwarves and producing trade goods; another advantage is that the workflow that leads to a cooked meal can accept materials from a wide variety of sources indiscriminately, including crops, meat, fish, random gathered plants, and even many liquids (provided the meal has at least one solid base.) On the other hand, food rots when left outside of a food stockpile, which can make it tricky to manage, and higher-value ingredients (such as flour) generally require long production chains to turn them into food.

The final value of a meal is complicated and depends primarily on the number of ingredients, which acts as a multiplier to the final total after summing up the value of each individual ingredient; therefore, the low value of each individual crop is misleading (although some, like flour, are already fairly high.) See Cook for details and the material multipliers on item value to get a sense of the relative value of plants and meats.