Bed - Dwarf Fortress Wiki (2024)

A bed is a piece of furniture manufactured in a carpenter's workshop and then constructed on an indoor floor. A constructed bed is the base object needed in a bedroom or a dormitory. Once a bedroom is set up, it may be left unassigned (to be claimed by any roomless dwarf) or assigned to a dwarf. Dwarves gain unhappy thoughts from sleeping without a bed and happy thoughts from having their own, high-quality bedrooms, so building beds is often a necessity for a happy fortress.

Unlike many other pieces of furniture, standard beds can only be created from wood (beds made of other materials such as metal, stone, gems, or bone only exist in the form of legendary artifacts created during strange moods). If your fortress has no surface trees, you will have to bring wood with you, or rely on subterranean trees or trade to get wood for beds. Manufacturing a bed requires one piece of wood. To construct a bed, click on a carpenter's workshop, click on "Add new task", then click on "Make bed".

In the first season after embark, your first dwarves will want to sleep sometime around 6 weeks after embark (around the 28th of the 2nd month by default), although the exact timing will vary between each dwarf. A beginning fortress might only need 4-5 beds for their initial 7 dwarves, although as time passes and their sleeping rhythms get more out of sync, that number drops. Although a fortress of 100 dwarves might only need a dozen or so beds to accommodate all sleepers at any one time, by the time a fortress reaches that size, some private bedrooms will, most likely, be a good idea, and bedrooms can only be defined from a bed.

It's not a big deal for a dwarf to "sleep in the dirt" that first time, but doing so will create a negative thought, and it will take a while for that thought to go away. So, just in case more bad thoughts arise later for some unlucky emo dwarf, it's always best to avoid them whenever you can. You almost certainly have better things to do than to dig out the perfect housing tract those first few weeks, so a few beds stuffed into some random corner should be more than good enough for your first seven.

(De-)Construction[edit]

Because beds may only be built indoors, a bed on the surface will need to have a floor or wall built above it before it can be constructed.

Beds can be deconstructed even while a dwarf is sleeping in them, causing the dwarf to wake up. See noise, however.

Bed Assignments[edit]

To create a bedroom from the bed, first you must build the furniture bed, then open the zone menu and click Bedroom. You can then either select a rectangle which contains the bed or draw your room by clicking the paintbrush icon and holding the left mouse button to select the wanted tiles (from the Paint menu which is the one selected by default), or click Multi and draw a rectangle that will automatically draw bedrooms from all the closed (either through doors or constructions such as walls) rooms in the rectangle. Finally, click Accept if you are in the Paint menu, Done if you are in the Multi menu. If, after defining a bedroom, you leave the bedroom unassigned, the next dwarf without a bedroom to sleep in the bed will claim it.

To assign the bed to a specific dwarf, create the bedroom as above, then hit zone, click your bedroom, the icon with a dwarf head and a plus sign, and choose a dwarf from the list. Dwarves who already have assigned beds will have "Has Quality Quarters" written below their name.

You can (re-)assign or free (unassign) a bed, even if a dwarf is sleeping in it at the time. The change in assignment will take effect when they wake up. Each bed can only be assigned to one dwarf at a time, however, it is possible for one dwarf to be assigned to multiple beds. If, after you assign a dwarf their bed, you see two dwarves listed, don't panic - it's okay, they're married, and will share that bed. Married dwarves can sleep in the same bed at the same time (along with all 34 war dogs assigned to them).

See also[edit]

• Bedroom design