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[cochramd]

Has anyone else ever stopped to think about how tight the tolerances and universally enforced the standards are of our little dwarfs?

Any boulder or log, for instance, can be chiseled into anything that can be made from stone or wood. When made of the same material, a statue of a dwarf hugging a badger weighs the same as a statue of a dwarf surrounded by elephants. In fact, all statues made of the same material weigh the same, regardless of their subject matter; this is also true of figurines. No matter how low or high quality a bed or chair is, we never hear about ones that are uncomfortable or awkward to use because of their size. Any chair can be used to eat at any table without any issues, regardless of the quality of either; you never hear about about tables being too tall or too short for the chairs they are paired with. If a hallway, whether natural, carved or constructed, can have any one specific door built into it, then it can have ANY door built into it. And mechanisms.....oh, don't even get me started on mechanisms. There are some other examples I can't think of off the top of my head, but what I'm getting at is that the dwarfs of Dwarf Fortress have achieved perfect interchangeability with everything they produce. For a medieval-ish society, that's incredible.

Now I know what some of you want to say next: "That's just the case because DF is currently incomplete; in future editions, there may be chairs and tables that don't go together and so on and so forth." That may be true. It may also be true that we currently don't have a gender-based division of labor because DF is incomplete and that we may see it in future editions, but does that stop us from imagining our dwarfs' society as being almost completely meritocratic? Nay! So let us reflect on just how astounding it is that our little dwarfs can be so incredibly uniform in everything they produce.

[Sanctume]

That's because they have personality and mental issues.  How a dwarf not value art, but then dreams about making art.

[JRHaggs]

That's because they have personality and mental issues.  How a dwarf not value art, but then dreams about making art.

Well, a dwarf not value art, but Urist value art. A dwarf dreams about making art so Urist awestruck by dwarf.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

That made me laugh, JRHaggs. A mug of beer to ye.

[Killgoth]

That's because they have personality and mental issues.  How a dwarf not value art, but then dreams about making art.

They are very much like humans in that. Some people hate things like art because they secretly wish they could be creative, but don't believe themselves capable.
Toady has made an incredibly realistic and complex game.

[Skorpion]

Well, of COURSE everything's standard. These are DWARVES we're talking about. It would be anathema to them to create a chair that can't fit any given table, or a door that won't fit a doorway. Or to carve a passageway that ISN'T exactly right.

They aren't humans. There is no 'good enough'. It has to be exact. Even the clothing is one-size-fits-all, because dwarves themselves have been bred into standardisation.

[jontiben]

They're Swiss.

Because of the LoTR movies, I've always imagined my Dwarves with Scottish accents. Now I imagine them with a confusing mix of French, German, Italian, and Romansh (whatever that sounds like).

[miauw62]

Well, of COURSE everything's standard. These are DWARVES we're talking about. It would be anathema to them to create a chair that can't fit any given table, or a door that won't fit a doorway. Or to carve a passageway that ISN'T exactly right.

They aren't humans. There is no 'good enough'. It has to be exact. Even the clothing is one-size-fits-all, because dwarves themselves have been bred into standardisation.

Unsmoothed passages aren't exactly right, though. They're described as rough and can be climbed.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Well, of COURSE everything's standard. These are DWARVES we're talking about. It would be anathema to them to create a chair that can't fit any given table, or a door that won't fit a doorway. Or to carve a passageway that ISN'T exactly right.

They aren't humans. There is no 'good enough'. It has to be exact. Even the clothing is one-size-fits-all, because dwarves themselves have been bred into standardisation.

Unsmoothed passages aren't exactly right, though. They're described as rough and can be climbed.

Those are carefully planned hand-holds for when Dwarves are forced to throw themselves down pits. The ancient stonemasons knew well the dangers of fortress life when they designed the 'rough' wall.

[cochramd]

Well, of COURSE everything's standard. These are DWARVES we're talking about. It would be anathema to them to create a chair that can't fit any given table, or a door that won't fit a doorway. Or to carve a passageway that ISN'T exactly right.

They aren't humans. There is no 'good enough'. It has to be exact. Even the clothing is one-size-fits-all, because dwarves themselves have been bred into standardisation.

Unsmoothed passages aren't exactly right, though. They're described as rough and can be climbed.

The miner carves out every boulder of rock or ore he makes to perfect standards, only to see it destroyed, but that is okay. It was his every intention to see it destroyed to produce furniture, trinkets, metal bars, etc; his purpose in carving that perfectly standardized boulder is to ease further processing of the stone. Much can said the same for rough gems, but walls, those are a very different matter. While every piece of ore has a destiny at the smelter, every gem at the jeweler's shop and a great number of stones at the mason's shop or craftsdwarf's shop, most walls are not destined to be engraved. The vast majority are destroyed in order to access the stone behind them, and smoothing them does not facilitate this process. Now imagine, if you will, how long mining would take if the miners had to stop and smooth every new wall they created. Horribly slow, isn't it? So for the sake of practicality, the dwarves choose to view rough walls not as imperfect and therefore unacceptable work, but incomplete work. The standardization of boulders and rough gems ensures that rough walls will always be roughly a certain distance apart; other than chiseling out a section for a door, no additional effort is required of the miner to produce acceptable rough walls in any circumstance.

[Torrenal]

Looking over the list of ingreedients for my forts latest artifact, I think I've figured out how they do it.

Three rocks, any one which is suitable for making an entire coffin.
2 logs, any one which is again suitable for making an entire coffin.
2 stone blocks (not suitable for coffins, but good for making a fair section of wall)
2 metal bars
A gemstone
Leather.

All crammed into one mechanism.

Now, if there were leavings from that, I'd expect my dwarves would have had to clean them up, after all the game tracks even tears until they dry, so it's not a question of the dwarf taking two splinters from each log and a pebble from each stone...

It's not a tolerances thing.  It's a whole other kind of ability entirely.  The dwarf used the entirety of each ingredient, folding them into a pocket dimension linked to the artifact, incorporating the whole of each part into the final artifact.  I see no other possible explanation.

//Torrenal

[Daris]

It's not a tolerances thing.  It's a whole other kind of ability entirely.  The dwarf used the entirety of each ingredient, folding them into a pocket dimension linked to the artifact, incorporating the whole of each part into the final artifact.  I see no other possible explanation.

There's nothing strange or magical or "pocket dimension" about this.  Your artifact mechanism simply exists in more than three spatial dimensions.  Just as a two-dimensional being would perceive a sphere as a flat circle, what appears to be a simple mechanism is, in reality, that portion of a hyper-mechanism that intersects the dimensions that we can perceive.

The dwarves themselves also exist in at least four spatial dimensions, possibly more.  Once you accept this reality, so much of what they do and are starts to make sense.

[contheman]

Looking over the list of ingreedients for my forts latest artifact, I think I've figured out how they do it.

Three rocks, any one which is suitable for making an entire coffin.
2 logs, any one which is again suitable for making an entire coffin.
2 stone blocks (not suitable for coffins, but good for making a fair section of wall)
2 metal bars
A gemstone
Leather.

All crammed into one mechanism.

Now, if there were leavings from that, I'd expect my dwarves would have had to clean them up, after all the game tracks even tears until they dry, so it's not a question of the dwarf taking two splinters from each log and a pebble from each stone...

It's not a tolerances thing.  It's a whole other kind of ability entirely.  The dwarf used the entirety of each ingredient, folding them into a pocket dimension linked to the artifact, incorporating the whole of each part into the final artifact.  I see no other possible explanation.

//Torrenal

I'm not saying it's aliens...but it's aliens.

[cochramd]

It's not a tolerances thing.  It's a whole other kind of ability entirely.  The dwarf used the entirety of each ingredient, folding them into a pocket dimension linked to the artifact, incorporating the whole of each part into the final artifact.  I see no other possible explanation.

There's nothing strange or magical or "pocket dimension" about this.  Your artifact mechanism simply exists in more than three spatial dimensions.  Just as a two-dimensional being would perceive a sphere as a flat circle, what appears to be a simple mechanism is, in reality, that portion of a hyper-mechanism that intersects the dimensions that we can perceive.

The dwarves themselves also exist in at least four spatial dimensions, possibly more.  Once you accept this reality, so much of what they do and are starts to make sense.

But would not these materials still retain their mass if made into 4 dimensional objects? It is well known that decorations do not increase an object's mass significantly, and that stone objects always have less mass then a boulder of the same kind of stone; the pocket dimension theory explains this. Then again I've never heard anything that explains how every variety of furniture has more mass than the metal bars used to create it.......

[contheman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-dimensional_space#Physics

That might check out
...or Toady has been secretly implementing in-game alchemy this whole time.