As you showcase your creative and strategic engineering skills in lay-outing your whole fortress, it is also important for you to know the things that support the internal and external relations in the game.

Dwarf Fortress is a pretty complex game. You will not only focus on digging, building, and assigning zones. It is also your job to make sure that your dwarves have enough sources of supplies to suffice their everyday needs.

One of the things that can help the dwarves live practically is by doing trades. This is a convenient way of gathering resources, especially if the needed materials are not available locally.

That being said, we will help you familiarize the mechanics of trading in Dwarf Fortress.

Trading Guide for Dwarf Fortress

Trading in Dwarf Fortress would require you to build first a Trading Depot. To have one, go to the building menu, and you can immediately see the Training Depot on the rightmost part.

A training depot is one of the first buildings that you should have in your fortress, and you can place it anywhere you want–be it inside or outside the fortress. Eventually, this will be occupied by the elves.

However, there will be some problems that you will experience if you place a trading depot inside. As time goes by, and while the caravan is getting bigger, wagons will also appear and come here. Note that these wagons need enough space to fit in.

How to Trade in Dwarf Fortress

To start the trading process, go to the noble screen or press n. Here, you will assign a dwarf as a broker. This could be anyone, but if you have a dwarf with a skill related to this, then it’s a better pick.

Once the people have arrived, click the trading depot and click Move goods to/from the depot.

Once you click that, the screen will show you all the items and resources you have with you. What you can do here, is look for the items that you have the most extra, of those items that are not that useful or valuable.

When you have already found the things you want to trade, check these. However, an important note to remember is that elves do not want to buy or receive wood. If you selected a wood item, it is automatically a no-no for them.

Here, you will see how many items are selected before finally trading them. Then, click Broker requested at depot. When the broker has finally arrived you can now proceed by clicking the Trade button.

Inside the trade panel, you can review here all the items you have selected. As you can see, the items are written in yellow. This is an indication that all the items are okay. But if one of your items has wood in it, then the color will be different.

RELATED: Dwarf Fortress: Military Squads Guide

On the other hand, the items listed on the left side are all the items that the elf has brought. You can check these items out and look for the things that you want to trade with.

At the bottom part of the panel, you will see the button seize, trade, and offer as a gift. Remember not to be rash in clicking anything here.

The seize button will cause you to steal all the marked items on the elf’s inventory. This will surely piss them off. When you choose an offer as a gift, you will simply give all of your items for free and you will not gain any profit.