Temples are places of worship in Dwarf Fortress where dwarfs can pray to any deity, megabeast, or titan.
Religion is an important part of the game and the dwarves will need a temple to express their faith and reduce stress. If you don’t build one early on, dwarves will petition for it.
Before building a temple, consider checking out our guide on how to attract migrants. It’s an easy and efficient way of growing your population early in the game.
In this guide, I will explain how to build a temple in Dwarf Fortress and provide some tips on how to set everything up.
How to Make a Temple in Dwarf Fortress
Start by clearing an area. You’ll need a minimum of 25 tiles in this area to turn it into a temple.
Then, you want to smoothen the rough floor and walls and place a door at the entrance.
For the next step, you want to construct an offering place. Access the construction menu (b), then furniture (f), and select the offering place (p).
Place the offering place toward the top side of the temple to leave room in the middle for the meeting area.
Navigate to the zones tab from the menu below (z) and select Meeting Area. Then, drag your cursor to select the newly built area.
After designating it as a meeting area, you’ll need to specify the type of meeting area you want. In our case, you want to select ‘New Temple’.
Then, you can select which god the temple will be designated towards. However, there are way too many gods in Dwarf Fortress, and building one temple for each god will take significant amounts of time and resources.
Therefore, I recommend setting it to ‘No Specific Deity’, which will allow dwarves of all religions to visit the temple and pray.
Keep in mind that when specific religious groups reach a certain number of members (~10), they will petition for a temple exclusive to their religion.
Other Things to Add to Your Temple in Dwarf Fortress
While the basic layout requires only setting it as a temple and having an offering place, you can add other things to your temple.
Primarily, using instruments in temples for music allows playing of religious songs. Due to that, you’ll also need containers in a temple to store these instruments.
In addition, players can assign performers to the temple in order to perform sacred dances.
All of these serve to boost religion further. While the temple can be fully functional without those, they are important to have.
Wrapping up
To sum up, that’s everything you need to know on how to build a temple in Dwarf Fortress.
Set up a designated meeting area, build an offering place, and set it as a temple. Then tweak the temple’s settings to select deities and visitors, and add other accessories inside it to increase its functionality.
With your population growing, an important resource is going to be food. Make sure to check out our guide on how to farm for food to make your fortress fully self-sustainable.
Which religion is getting its own temple first? How many temples are you planning to build in your fortress based on your population? Let us know in the comments below.
He has a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, which allows him to always come up with a fresh approach to solving in-game puzzles and challenges, but also to create content that’s to the point, clean and easy to follow.
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