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[Zurvan]

Just how are events selected for depiction in crafts, like statues, and engravings? It often seems as though strange events, quite un-dwarfy, are selected, like an elf taming a creature early in the history of the world, in a far-off place. Rather esoteric and peculiar.

It would make much more sense, I think, if events were drawn principally from the civilization that has created the fortress, especially events concerning historical figures related in some way to the craftsman, and also additionally from the environs of the fortress. If the surrounding area is host to a certain monster, or to elves, then events concerning these things, which would be part of the local lore, should feature heavily in the art of the settlement.

[Detoxicated]

Yes, it is somewhat frustrating to have your entire fortress dedicated to one battle where the elves beat up the goblins. Also, I hardly ever see references to adventurers of mine. I would like to see two different kinds of engravings. First we would still keep engravings of the random variety, but also there should be engravings where we get to chose the theme ourselves, in a manner, perhaps, comparable to the slabs.

[Larix]

As i understand it, the topics of engravings are chosen from what the engraver finds notable. The endless "settling of a giant dingo" engravings are typical of very young forts in very young worlds, where next to no topics are available yet.

I prefer the dwarf-regulated topic choices, but involving other dwarfs' thoughts, memories and preferences could enhance verisimilitude: if a tile inside a room owned by a dwarf gets engraved, combine the pools of topics the engraver _and_ the room owner find memorable and pick topics from those. It'd be nice if art could be 'commissioned' by nobles - statues and engravings in particular.

[Detoxicated]

Ít would be nice if relationships would play in well. While a friend of a commissioner would more likely create art based on the likes, a grudgeholder most likely would work on a piece of fear.

[neblime]

Ít would be nice if relationships would play in well. While a friend of a commissioner would more likely create art based on the likes, a grudgeholder most likely would work on a piece of fear.

i might be wrong here but i think that might occur already, I had one dwarf lose his wife to a vampire (who was then turned into an eternal bookkeeper) and engraved him surrounded by brown recluse spiders (which he hated) and weeping several times
might have just been a fluke though?

[Repseki]

Did you have any spiders in your fort? That might have been an engraving of an event rather than something to torture them with. Although I somewhat hope it was just to torture them.

It would definitely be nice if you had some control over what was engraved, or depicted in statues and the likes. I don't know how it would work when engraving a wall or floor, but with slabs/statues/etc it could work like slabs do now, but some general choices for the player to choose from. It wouldn't give you specific control over what was engraved/sculpted, but maybe something along the lines of choosing between a battle, civ hero, fort event, etc. Still some randomness depending on preferences of the maker while adding a bit of theme control.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Yeah, too much control would most likely just spoil the fun of finding out what it is they're engraving etc. I once had a fort where I after a long siege managed to end it by digging out and dropping the ceiling of my fort entrance, crushing the whole siege in an instant. Some time after that I noticed quite a large amount of the engravings I'd done since in my dining room depicted goblins covering from or being crushed by falling rocks (can't remember exactly how it was phrased). Nevertheless, just finding that was a moment of pure awesome, and wouldn't have been anywhere near as great if I'd previously scrolled through a menu and noticed I could've ordered that specific scene to be engraved :>

What Repseki said would probably be a good compromise. Not sure if it'd be more fun or annoying to have dwarves sometime ignore your decision and engrave whatever they feel like anyway, depending on their personality

[Deboche]

It'd be nice if art could be 'commissioned' by nobles - statues and engravings in particular.

I was thinking about this today it might be a good idea. Also, maybe you could have portrait statues or busts of specific dwarves

[Mesa]

I think that it would be really great if we had some sort of "knowledge" system ie. dwarves/whoever can only engrave/paint/sculpt/write about events that they actually know of.
Pretty sure that there's something done in that respect in the upcoming update, so I guess there's that.

And even later on it could also tie into the adventure mode (once we get the fort mode skills available there and engraving/other stuff becomes possible) where we could manually choose the events from one's memory (and whatever we've seen/been told about/read about).

And then there's the possibility of old dwarves claiming that they've seen and heard of everything, and stories progressively spreading throughout the world...
Which is why it's probably one of the PBNTL (Planned But No TimeLine) features.