So, the King has arrived unexpectedly early in my fort, must've been that blasted early adamantine (I swear I didn't use the Trade Depot trick). Well, I guess he's not that early, I have pretty much every operation covered with high quality workers. But I'm having trouble getting his rooms up to the Royal level. Any tips? Here's the layout of the room, if it helps:
+
+++
+++++
+++++++
++++X+++D
+++++++
+++++
+++
+
where X is the object that designates the room,
and D is the door (rotated based on axis of entry)
I have four of these arranged in a meta-diamond
I've already smoothed and engraved every square inch of all the rooms, and I tried to get it so they all got an equal amount of engravings, but it wasn't enough (and I'm not just going to carve out more space). So, what are some dense and uber-quality objects I can put in his rooms? I don't have any artifact furniture (they all asked for turtle shells I didn't have), and I'm not going to wait for four. The King has already tantrumed and given one of my Seven a brown upper spinal injury, which sucks, but I've managed to get him from becoming miserable again.
Also, to avoid a "ladder" of text, I'm going to hide my related questions. Please take a look, but I've already asked my main point, so if you can answer that I will be grateful.
Uh, how do I get turtle shells? I've lost three people to a lack of them, but I HAVE turtles, which annoys me to no end. I've fished the turtles, they become raw turtle, I've tried preparing them or cooking them raw, but no dice. I just have no clue how to keep the shell off the turtle. I suspect if I had a dead turtle that was in my refuse pile, caught by a cat perhaps, it would leave a shell, but my cats aren't catching any.
I've noticed you can build gem windows out of three gems; is the value of the window just the combined value of the gems used? Since they can't be moved, I can't remove it or it'll just fragment into its constituents, and they don't show up on the stocks screen. Are they any good in the first place?
Statues act as walls when it comes to defining a room, I've noticed. At one point, I had slowly filled one of the King's rooms until it had a couple layers of them, when I noticed that many of the blue X's that define a room were dark. How does this affect the value of the room? I guess I know dark X's add value to the room without defining it, per se, but what about multiple layers of them? Let's say you had a core sample of Engraved Wall + Statue/Engraved Floor + Statue/Engraved Floor + Engraved Floor. Do the last wall's engravings still count? Or the engravings under the last statue, or the statue itself for that matter? I'm not sure how the game handles multiple walls, I guess.
I get the feeling I had another question, but it has slipped my mind... Anyways, this is a start, and hopefully pretty close to the end of my understanding of room quality. Any and all comments on the subject are welcome. Thanks.