What Does a Dwarf Therapist Do in Dwarf Fortress? Answered

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Any The Sims players know that managing the life of a group of virtual people (and then some) is no easy feat, but Dwarf Fortress does take it to the next level. While managing your early game Fort with a few numbers of dwarves is still practical, what happens when you have 75 of them? 100? 200? The game turns from a time-consuming exercise to micro-management hell. Thus, to make your Dwarf Fortress life much easier, getting a Dwarf Therapist is your best bet.

What is a Dwarf Therapist for Dwarf Fortress – Explained

Simply put, Dwarf Therapist is a third-party utility tool that will help you quickly manage your dwarves and their Labors and Professions. Instead of laboriously clicking each dwarf one by one and then fiddling around with a bunch of Q/T/P/Z/etc keystrokes, the application provides you with its own detailed, easy-to-navigate UI and lets you manage all your dwarf-related concern using only a couple of clicks.

The application was first made by Trey Stout back in 2009. The original application has not been updated for years. However, the one that’s still being updated and currently used by most Dwarf Fortress players is the fork of Splintermind’s Dwarf Therapist, which is a heavily altered version of the original in the first place.

What Does Dwarf Therapist Do in Dwarf Fortress

Screenshot via Dwarf Fortress Wiki, with CC BY-SA 3.0 attribution.

As mentioned above, Dwarf Therapist is a tool for Dwarf Fortress that makes managing your dwarves easier by organizing all of your dwarves and their Attributes, Weapon Skills as well as other relevant abilities into a grid. Selecting, enabling, or disabling Labors for even 50+ dwarves is now as easy as just clicking your left mouse once. It also features a number of community-made add-ons.

Quoting the application’s feature from the original release:

Persistent custom professions – import and manage any number of custom professions across all your forts.
Assign multiple dwarves to a custom profession at once to unify active labors.
Manage labors and professions much more easily than in-game using a flexible UI, allowing quick review of all dwarves at-a-glance.
Display all pending changes before they’re written to the game.
Sort labor columns by associated skill level.
Persistent and customizable display; change colors, reposition/hide information screens.
Group your dwarves by several criteria.

If you need more help using the application, you can head over to the Dwarf Therapist support thread at the Bay12 Forums. And if you think you have stumbled upon a bug while using it, you can file an issue at the GitHub issue tracker — just don’t forget to provide as much information as possible so people can help reproduce and eventually fix the issue.