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[malimbar04]

Artifacts are often the least useful but most valuable things in a fort, and the good ones are worth a lot of money. My question is how people store these artifacts. Do they sit to rot in the crafting stations? Are the left in the kings quarters? the jail?

I have recently taken to making a stockpile for all artifacts in its' own show room. To get to it you have to cross a pit in the middle of the fort, down stairs, and through several traps.

[Savolainen5]

I usually just let them stay in whatever stockpile they go.  Naturally, the doors and other furnitures I use with my noble housing or public areas.

[CapnUrist]

Once I build an artifact storage cabinet, after having one of my artifacts stolen by a Rhesus Macaque. It looked like this:



Those grey X's aren't floodgates, they're lead bins, one holding crafts and the other useless weapons (at the time only a bone spear).

[Urist Imiknorris]

I generally use them (or at least the magma-safe ones and those whose creators have since died) to build kobold traps:

I put an artifact (hereafter known as the bait) at the end of a long hallway. I fill the hallway with magma-safe doors, and every third tile of the hallway is connected to my magma plumbing from the side. When a kobold goes after the bait, it opens each of the doors in succession, spewing magma all over it. When it dies, its corpse and items lodge the door it died on open until the magma burns it all up. The door then closes, and the hallway is ready for another victim. In the event of magma-safe equipment, each connection to the magma plumbing is controlled by a floodgate a few tiles away from the hallway, with a pump above it. If the door is jammed open by, say, a steel dagger, I can close the floodgates on the magma channels up to the item, drain the space between the floodgates and the doors, and send in a dwarf to retrieve the item. Should a creature make it all the way to the bait, they still have to come all the way back, and if the bait isn't magma-safe, I just have to place new bait. If it is, I simply have to put it back.

[Daveorock]

I put a hallway starting from one of my most walked through hallways to a room that only has that one entrance, with multiple airlocks in the room, and whatever artifacts I can build I do in there (they can't be stolen then... I don't think they can), and I have an artifact only stockpile at the end. Plus in the afore mentioned hallway, there are doors (nearly always locked) on both ends and traps all the way down, no bridge though, didn't feel necessary.

[iEpinephrine]

Pfah, artefacts aren't for displaying, they're for coveting, and storing amongst piles of gems and gold in guarded vaults deep beneath the earth's crust, illuminated by the red glow of flowing magma, and protected by countless ingenious traps.

Needless to say I keep mine in steel-doored vaults in the very heart of the fortress, through a guardhouse stationed with my best soldiers , past various deadly traps, and behind steel floodgates that can be opened only by levers in my king's room. 

I had a kobold steal a craft artefact once... resulted in instant ragequit of the fortress.  Never again!

[Urist Imiknorris]

Pfah, artefacts aren't for displaying, they're for coveting, and storing amongst piles of gems and gold in guarded vaults deep beneath the earth's crust, illuminated by the red glow of flowing magma, and protected by countless ingenious traps.

No, they're for making your enemies kill themselves.

[Uristocrat]

When I get enough useless crap artifacts, I make a grand artifact vault (smoothed + engraved) and seal them away in splendor.

I kind of wish the display case mod would go into the main version, though.

[iEpinephrine]

No, they're for making your enemies kill themselves.

I really don't need to put my lovely artefacts at risk to do such a thing.  My main entrance does it nicely for me, and if that ever failed me I would risk my expensive military gear first by sending out my army before I risked my super-expensive artefacts...

But that's the joy of this game, one dwarf's cat tallow soap is another dwarf's 500z high tribute statue to Armok!

[cog disso]

I usually build a temple aboveground as a show-off area for my artifacts and more elite captives. I'm fond of using bauxite or olivine for this. If I can capture an FB or MB, it goes in the temple, and if it's a mini-boss beast like a cyclops or a minotaur, it goes outside on large pillars. I also like to surround the artifact hoards with coins and treasures, and pave the surrounding area with weapon traps.

I'm mildly obsessed with this.

[zephyr_hound]

I used to have the Display Case mod but I keep forgetting to reinstall it. Mine are usually in a specially built vault nowadays. Here's the current one. It's pretty easy to see which room it is.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The artifact vault is only accessibly by going through my gem vault (notice the jeweler's workshop built from gold), which itself is only accessible by going through the weapons stockpile, which has a war dog chained outside. Most of the doors are open in this image but they are all lever-operated; the gem vault and weapons/armor stockpile are opened from the dining room, the artifact vault is accessible from a gem-studded lever in the mayor's bedroom and is only opened when a new artifact needs to be stored. The door to the artifact vault is masterwork platinum decorated with masterwork star ruby and is ridiculously valuable (12000, better than a lot of my artifacts).

Most of the stuff is just fluff, it's not like I even need war dogs when the vault is locked 99% of the time. I just really like the idea of having an impregnable Fort Knox style vault, but I'd love it even more if there was some "perfect storm" situation to allow thieves to actually raid it and be caught on the way out. Wonder if there's any way to mod kobolds to pull levers like gremlins...

[Zaerosz]

Display cases. I have a dedicated museum hall at the bottom of one of my forts, just above the magma sea. It zigzags from the top-left corner of the map in a three-wide corridor, all the way back and forth across the map, with little alcoves on every second row of tiles.

Oddly enough, that's also where I bury my fallen heroes.