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[Rohain]

Is there any plans for being able to commission specific engravings and statues?  I think it would be sort of cool to have your favorite dwarf entombed with statues of him stomping on elves in the fetal position and such.

Beyond that, are there ever any plans of allowing the player to choose exactly what text is engraved, i.e. I could write my eulogy is to Urist McDeadpants over his tomb? 

[Warlord255]

This has been asked and posted endless times, but for the sake of courtesy I'll sum it up for you;

Toady's stance is that he is wary of stealing dwarves' autonomy by giving players arbitrary control over their artistic expression; namely, that the epic-story type things that arise from them might be made less significant if it was player-forced.

On the flipside, players would like the ability to arrange things nicely; putting engravings of battles in a hero's hall, for example. Savescumming or other artifical means of getting a desired engraving feels cheap.

Hopefully, with the detailed statues coming, some of this should be alleviated; the statue you want might show up eventually, and when it does you have total control over where it goes.

[Foehamster]

In the new version coming out next week, Armok willing.  Statues will be of things, but you don't have control over what.

So you'll at least have the ability to place statues that are actually of something.  Make enough statues and you'll get one of what you want.

[Footkerchief]

Here's the quote that I think Warlord was referencing:

Rainseeker:   There's a lot of limitations right now on what you can do, how customised you can make every item. Are you planning on allowing people to maybe create a template of an item that they want to create and then tell people to keep creating that same thing. You want to for instance create a goblet that is encrusted with diamonds and has an image of an elephant slaying a dwarf on it ...
Toady:   Yeah, especially if that's the insignia of your group or whatever. There are a few limitations that are design based. Most of the limitations just come from how the jobs are stored right now and I'd have to rewrite quite a bit to get them to think more about things, and just writing interfaces is always irritating. But ideally I'd like you to be able to do a lot more things, if you have a dwarf pumping those things out maybe he'll get irritated; he doesn't get to realise his dreams anymore [or] do whatever the heck he wants. But just having some kind of work order where you have the goblet, then do these things to it, and make the goblet out of this material, and if the [goblet] isn't at least finely crafted then just melt it down again and just get these things built and then we're going to build ten of them, and then do whatever. It'd be great to allow people to do things like that especially because with statues now; the dwarves can carve these statues that will look like things now, but what they look like is really up to the dwarf right now. It's understandable to allow Michelangelo or whatever to make the statue they want, but even those kind of people had commission jobs, and especially if it's like 'I want the ten previous rulers of my civilization; I want statues of them so I can line the great hall with them'. That'd be awesome right? And it's not something where you're like 'Well I want to carve a big cheese today, sorry' and so you've got like ten great cheese statues for your great hall ...
Rainseeker:   One of them made clouds.
Toady:   Yeah, cloud statues or dwarves surrounded by plump helmets or whatever. It's amusing for a while but then you want to allow the additional control as well.
Rainseeker:   You want awesomeness.
Toady:   Awesomeness! Yeah, awesomeness is good. My brother and I are always anti-zany in a lot of ways, even though a lot of zaniness kind of jumps in Dwarf Fortress we're usually against throwing in a monster that has big green boots and he's call the Happy Green Monster monster and he has a laser gun or something just because it's silly, just kind of randomly silly, it's just not the direction we want to take the thing. But at the same time we're there when it comes to the statues ...
Rainseeker:   I know, I mean come on, a dwarf smashing a bridge that he's already walking on.
Toady:   That's this emergent zaniness, and then we've got things which are zaniness that you would call zaniness by design, like these statues. The statues are goofy, the engravings are goofy, but there's something good about them and allowing the dwarves - like if you don't specify what you want them to do - then of course they're going to go on their little flights of fantasy, these little goofy guys. But if you tell them what to do they shouldn't be that pissed off about it. There might be times when a particular dwarf would grumble at that kind of thing and it might pop up a little warning 'he's been making these goblets and he's made two hundred of them, and it's making him a little depressed about this life'; then you might have to do something about it. I'm all for giving the player more control there; they can already carve out the rooms they want and place the furniture where they want and stuff. Especially because it doesn't even fall under the level of micromanagement. Micromanagement is usually what people refer to when it's something that sucks about a game that you have to fiddle with, like having to place the furniture when you don't care anymore. But being able to design the sword or statue ...
Rainseeker:   Yeah, I want twenty obsidian swords with red handles, darn it.
Toady:   Yeah, especially because it's gotten to the point now where you can tell your squad to carry those [kinds of thing]. So you could do that in your squad, you could be like 'I want you to have obsidian swords' but if you didn't have the control to make obsidian swords that would be a very frustrating system. There are things right now about the squad system I think where you can specify the squad uniform more than you can actually specify it in the workshop and that's where we're starting to have a breakdown/disconnect there, so obviously the specifications in the workshops have to come, and I believe ... which I'm going to go check right now on the website ... if I'm not mistaken the eternal suggestion voting has turned that up as well, I don't know if you remember off the top of your head.
Rainseeker:   No I haven't looked at it in a long time.
Toady:   Yeah I haven't looked at it for a while either, let's see how things are doing. Improved hauling still super, standing production orders, workshop material selection. So workshop material selection basically falls under this umbrella. People want to be able to make what they want to make; it's number three on the list right now, it's beating graphics, and beating pathfinding. So that stuff, that's obviously going to get dealt with sometime. I'm not saying that I'm going to do the top ten in order, I don't want to commit to something that's going to ... it may be impossible to do things in order all the time, but it's not like when four hundred people say they want something and the thing that they want is something you want to, it's like 'that's cool!' It's all good, everything aligns like the stars and stuff, so we'll be there, we'll be there, we just need to get through this horrible horrible release cycle and then this horrible release cycle will be over and everyone will be happy.

[Rohain]

Sorry for re-asking a question that must be as old as time itself, i'm fairly new to the forums and only picked up DF about two months ago.

And thanks for the concise, accurate, answer.

[ungulateman]

That's Footkerchief for you.

Remember, he searched for your sins.