Most creatures in Dwarf Fortress come with history. When Dwarf Fortress decides a bard visits your fort, it does not just generate a new bard. It selects one from the hundreds or thousands of characters it is tracking in the wider world. You can then pause the game, switch to legends mode, and go find out where that bard came from, what they were up to before visiting the fort, who the bard’s parents and grandparents are, etc.

The original seven settlers who start a fort are exceptions to that. They are created on the spot for your game. They have no parents, spouses, siblings, etc. Since people in this game want to visit with family from time to time, this means settlers tend to be lonely people.

The players of Dwarf Story quickly realized this, and three of them made it their characters’ mission to start families. There is no “fall in love” button in Dwarf Fortress — one can only set up the right circumstances.

The wiki sums up what is known (or at least suspected) about how relationships work. Armed with that info, I took the exploit-ish step of changing the tavern zone to just the corner of the tavern / dining hall:

The dwarves obediently pack themselves into that little 2 x 2 tile square. Stacked five deep, the dwarves can’t help but be adjacent. Dwarven speed dating!

Pets quickly became a problem; many dwarves had guinea pigs, geese, dogs and what not following them around. Animals get irritable when they’re in close quarters, and start nipping at anything nearby. Having all pets stay in the pasture above ground fixed that problem.

Lots of Acquaintainces

It seemed to work. The chart below shows how each dwarf’s number of relationships changed in the first year after the speed dating was initiated. The first three listed — Maltose, Fark and Thornbeard — are the ones who spent most of their time in the tavern.

Dwarves who spent that year in the tavern wound up with 2-3 times as many relationships as the dwarves who kept their day jobs. Of the dwarves who kept their day jobs, the number of friends also seems to be related to amount of down time. Hana (architect and mason) always had work to do. Argus was the mayor, and one of the bone carvers, so he often had something to do. Escott, the smith, was some times idle because of various logistical issues (mostly waiting for more fuel to be produced.)

I do not have data to prove that making the tavern zone tiny had an impact, but I suspect it did.

Relationship Quality

Dwarves who get along become “passing acquaintances”. Relationships can later progress through “friendly terms”, to “friend”, to “lover”, to “husband” or “wife”. Maybe. More on the ifs and buts later.

One of the dwarves (Maltose) made 3 friends. Another (Thornbeard) made one friend. All those friends were some kind of performer, and thus spent a lot of time at the tavern, and probably had some high social skills.

The chart below shows the ratios of relationship types. The three bars on the left are for the three dwarves who stayed in the tavern. Most of their relationships are “passing acquiantance.” The three bars on the right show that dwarves who mostly met people “at work” have mostly “friendly terms” relationships.

Not shown in the chart: though tavern-goers knew 200% to 300% more people than the workers, tavern-goers only had 4% to 50% more “friendly terms”. So the tavern goers were making lots of acquaintances, but didn’t make a proportionate number of meaningful relationships.

Would the tavern-goers make more friends if there were fewer people in the tavern, thus forcing them to focus their conversations on just a few people? Maybe.

Matchmaking

It’s tempting to try to control the relationship mechanic. For example, by filling a room with booze and food, then locking a dwarf in there with all of his or her opposite-gendered “friendly terms”. That can work. I haven’t seen a marriage come from that, but I’ve seen friendships and lovers come from that. [EDIT: after the Dwarf Story project, I saw examples where targeted matchmaking in rooms like this worked very well, especially if one uses a tool like Dwarf Therapist to get more insight into the prospective partners.]

The down side is that the dwarf won’t be getting a chance to meet other, potentially compatible people, plus micromanaging like that can lead to some challenges. Left to make their own decisions, dwarves will take care of their own needs most of the time. You’d have to let the dwarves out of the room from time to time, then herd them all back in there. That’s a lot of micromanagement.

Another challenge is the complexity of the system. There are people in this game who have no interest in romance, or are interested in romance but not marriage, or who have non-traditional gender preferences. You could spend a year of game time manipulating two dwarves into a planned lover relationship, then find out that A) one of the dwarves isn’t interested in marriage, and B) since both dwarves are now locked into a non-marriage relationship, neither dwarf will ever start a family.

So my attitude is that it is best to make a small tavern / meeting area, and make sure there are people with down time. However, I’m ready to be convinced that there’s a tipping point. For example, perhaps limiting your fort to 50 people is more likely to produce meaningful relationships than if your dwarves have hundreds of people around them. [EDIT: the best way to get two characters to make friends or marry is to lock them into a small room together, so that all their social efforts are focused on one another. The small tavern approach rarely gives enough one-on-one focus to make a really meaningful relationship. Since it is a rare pair of characters that is really compatible (there are a lot of factors,) matchmaking is still quite tough, but can be made easier by third party tools like Dwarf Therapist to check preferences. Of course, adding third party tools brings its own technical challenges.]

I’m also curious if a “meeting area” is better than a tavern for this. In a meeting area, people will not take time to entertain each other with song and dance — they can only talk. But maybe fewer talks is better if people are happy about all the singing and dancing. Who knows?

Takeaways

These bullet points might be completely wrong, but I’m going with them anyway.

• More time in the tavern = more relationship building.
• More performers = more likely friends.
• The fewer people a dwarf meets, the more meaningful those relationships become.
• A tiny tavern zone may mean more relationship building (but pasture the pets first.)