A Workshop attracts Trolls. The bigger the Workshop, the more workers and finished products it can accommodate at once. Advanced items also have room scale requirements for production.
Manufactured items are emboxed in floating crates in the Workshop, taking up an operational slot there until they are used. Due to the varied demands on space in this type of room, Workshops in Dungeon Keeper tend to be among the larger rooms in a dungeon.
A newly-produced item's crate will appear at a random spot in a random Workshop, should more than one of them exist, accompanied with the same colourful sparkles as when a project is finished in the Library. When the Keeper deploys a Trap, an Imp or Tunneller must carry its crate from the shop to the target tile. A Door, on the other hand, is instantly functional when placed, and its crate simply vanishes from the Workshop.
Items are produced automatically by the workers to be deployed at any time. The Keeper cannot directly decide what to produce, but there is a rigidly-followed order of production that can be influenced by depleting specific items. The workers attempt to maintain an even distribution of all items as they accumulate in the Workshop, going in this order:
For instance if there are 1x Magic Doors, 2x Boulder Traps, and 3x of everything else currently sitting in the shops, the workers will build Magic - Boulder - Magic - Wooden. If a Keeper wishes to install the best doors in his dungeon, he should refrain from placing the weaker ones when they become available. By allowing them to accumulate in the Workshop, his workers will focus on the items that are being deployed as soon as they're built.
Manufacture Level
Workshop Tiles
0
1-9
1
10-16
2
17-19 or 21-25
3
26-36
4
20 or 37+
A priori, these producible items need to be enabled by the map script, or in much rarer cases a crate be captured afield, in order for them to be available for manufacture.
With that satisfied, each door and trap then requires a certain "manufacture level," which is an internal rating derived from the number of Workshop tiles in the dungeon. There is an irregularity in its progression: for some reason, having the magic number of 20 Workshop tiles boosts the manufacture level straight to level 4 (3 in KeeperFX), and 21-25 reduces it back to level 2. This means that Iron Doors, Magic Doors, Boulder Traps, Lava Traps, and Word Of Power Traps can be created with 20 Workshop tiles (despite "requiring" 26 or 37), but not with 21-25 tiles.
Workers[]
Most creatures can be forced into Workshop labour, but the best craftsmen are Trolls. Orcs are also ace artisans, despite the fact that manufacturing is not a default job for them; in fact, once they learn Speed, they are second best only to Trolls who also have Speed. The Bile Demon and Mountain Dwarf also possess artifice to work efficiently in this room. The Mistress, Samurai, and Archer are fairly skilled manufacturers as well, once they have learned Speed.
Imps cannot work in a Workshop. And, being arrogant academic types, the Warlock, Vampire, and Wizard get somewhat annoyed at even being dropped into this room and will absolutely refuse to work there.
Unlike Dungeon Keeper 2, traps and doors in DK1 do not cost gold to produce and may be sold to generate revenue. However, it is a tedious and management-intensive way to raise funds. This room can nevertheless be used to painstakingly pay for expansion of the dungeon and creatures' training when gold is extremely scarce or dangerous to reach. One of the initial difficulties is the need for the Workshop to fund its own construction; it's not unreasonable to expand it into a 10x10 or greater facility (to fit everyone and everything) over time.
The Boulder Trap is the most profitable item for the amount of time required. Which is to say, selling these while stockpiling four or five of all the other items will put the workers into a cycle of continually manufacturing Boulder Traps for maximum profit.
Bugs[]
To do: How, and to what extent, are these fixed in KeeperFX?
Bug #1
Traps are highly-prone to decrement too much when deployed. Specifically, one instance of the trap is decremented when planted, but as soon as the Imp picks it up from the Workshop to carry it to the deployment site, it decrements again. Unless all traps of that type are deployed at once, this will lead to "phantom" crates floating around in the Workshop, taking up space there permanently.
Bug #2
Selling traps only deletes crates that are in the Workshop. Once an Imp is carrying a trap crate out, selling the trap doesn't destroy the crate. The crate will be carried to the vacant deployment site and dropped there; then, an Imp will pick it back up and flash the Trap Crate Found message, as if it was a newly-discovered crate.
Bug #3
When an Imp is carrying a trap crate through the Workshop, and something unexpected happens (such as if the imp is slapped, or panics at the sight of the enemy, or the Workshop has become full while he is trying to store a crate in it), the crate will become one of the aforementioned "phantom" crates.
Bugs #2 and #3 might be witnessed (and #2 exploited) by players pushing a "Workshop economy" to its limits.
Bug #1 is a serious matter for anyone utilizing traps, at all, in their dungeon. To keep traps from subtracting themselves twice from the manufacturing panel, place all the traps of a specific type at once, reducing their count in the panel to zero. Drop Imps into the Workshop to have them get the crates out promptly. There is a legitimate reason why this bug exists: ordinarily, once a trap has exhausted all of its charges against intruders, Imps have to take a fresh crate from the Workshop to reload it. Imps will also carry "phantom" crates out of the shop this process (with the only other way to get rid of them being to sell the Workshop).
Dungeon Keeper 2[]
Concept Art
The Workshop is where traps and doors are manufactured, to impede and injure your enemies. It is a furnished room, though not as dense as the others: it has work stations on every other inner square and one on every even section of straight reinforced wall. The Workshop can accommodate one worker per work station plus one.
A functioning Workshop attracts Trolls, and Bile Demons provided you have a large enough Hatchery. The only other creatures prepared to work in a Workshop are Giants, who must first be converted (or attracted through a Mercenary Portal, or be a sacrifice recipe result in a Temple), but work much faster than Trolls or Bile Demons.
Before any manufacturing can be done, a Keeper must place door and trap blueprints where they want them to appear. Blueprints cost gold to place and must be placed on the Keeper's claimed path tiles.
The order of production exactly corresponds to the order in which blueprints were placed. It is therefore important to scale the number of jobs to the level and number of workers available.
While working, creatures generate manufacturing points until the trap or door in question is finished.
Then the Mentor gives a notification e.g. "A Wooden Door has been created in your Workshop", the Workshop lights up in a sparkly fanfare and a Wooden Door crate is created. After a while, an Imp will collect the crate and place it where the blueprint is. The Wooden Door is now fitted.
The Workshop can store a maximum of three crates per tile that does not have a work station on it. Some levels also have crates secreted on them. Imps will take these to the nearest Workshop, after which the Keeper can place blueprints for these items and get them for free.
Given the low number of workers prepared to work in a Workshop and the very high crate capacity, there is no need to make it very large. About 4 x 4 or 4 x 5 is normally sufficient. Mostly even 3x3.
Tips[]
You only need a 1 tile dysfunctional Workshop to start blueprint placement! (Which may come off as odd.)
If you (perhaps accidentally) delete all tiles of your Workshops, actually blue blueprints will flash red as indication.
As a Portal attraction clarification: Any minimum functional size built Workshop will attract both your evil creatures that may work in it, IF your Hatchery is either 5x5 in dimensions or has overall 25 tiles in any configuration for your Bile Demon. The Troll will join you with 1 tile of Hatchery.
The closer your Hatchery, Treasury, and the Lair or Lairs of the workers are, the less time they spend away from their job. Especially the Bile Demon.
If you don't plan to manufacture as much as to confuse your Imps with extra tasks or not planning on owning many manufacturer creatures, an 1x3 room is enough right next to either Reinforced Wall, Solid Rock, or the combination of the two. Contrary to tooltips, they also have a workstation for two workers, crate space, and thus functionality.
You must leave any possible door to the Workshop unlocked for Imps or Dwarves to reach manufacture crates.
Make sure your Imps and Dwarves don't have too many potential constant jobs active at a time, like always having an option to fit with 2 other mates of them to one or more Gem digging slots, so it doesn't seem like they do not care about installation crates.
Crate dragging Imps and Dwarves can be scared off by the threat of hostile creature melee attacks unless amidst a ton of allied creatures. Ranged attacks do not tend to have this effect but it still may happen. Against ranged traps, proximity is more of a factor. The closer an Imp goes the more scared it may get.
Door and trap health cannot be repaired by Imps and crates, they heal over time.
Crate dragging can happen through water, but be careful! If the Imp gets scared and drops the crate there, you will have the extra task of recovering it with a bridge.
If you see an enemy Imp dragging a crate, you won't see the installed and concealed trap, and in the place of a Secret Door something that very much resembles a Reinforced Wall will appear. If you want to identify the enemy Keeper's traps you'll need to keep an eye on the enemy Workshop what crates get made - or one of your creatures need to encounter them, possibly in possession.
A highly micromanaging player may possess a Monk and cast Haste Creature on any Imps, or more importantly, way slower Dwarves, that may either go to crates or are dragging crates to blueprints. If time is of the essence.
Even if traps and doors are practically useless for the highly skilled or veteran player, or the extremely rapid multiplayer matches, most of them can still be really entertaining to have around at the appropriate useful places to have a chance to look at more world variety, to spice up the game experience, and to experience all the game has to offer.
Workers manufacturing in a Workshop is always a nice visual to see.
Bugs[]
Crate finding door-and-trap placement manufacturing orders and found crate usage is extremelybroken. If you find a crate, you still almost always need to pay for building anything and workers will almost always likely be required to manufacture it anyway, thereby making crate-finding absolutely useless and confusing. Not to mention a wasted resource on each level where originally placed.
Like with bodies and corpses, Imps sometimes do not care at all, even if they do not have any jobs and have access to both crate and destination.
Once abandoned crate reclaiming and continuing with it to target blueprint system can a lot of times be bugged. You may experience many examples of the Imp or Dwarf needing to take the crate back to a Workshop where he or a workmate of his can regain the information where to put the crate, even if it was taken 1-2 tiles from the destination.
Trivia[]
Three center appliances can be seen in the middle of a room. A rotary saw on a carpenter's table, a heated coal furnace, and an anvil, the latter two usually also appear as wall appliances where possible.
You can hit them in possession with a melee attack.
The rotary saw may probably be a sort of industrial revolution anachronism in the game's pseudo-medieval fantasy setting.
This room, while having appliances, nicely makes use of space on tiles which do not have them, placing crates there.
The normal baseline operation of door and trap placement which post release players and A.I. Keepers need to adhere to is one owned tile can only accommodate either one door or one trap, never both, and the same system is mostly encountered in Hero territories. However, exceptions might be witnessed at some places which may be remnants of the game's non-finalized pre-release ruleset which possibly slipped through into the release version(s). Example: Some hero tiles can have both doors and traps in the "Fairy Fortress" of Lord Volstagg on campaign level 15 - Crusade / Storm - Fluttershine. Mostly Braced and Magic Doors sharing a tile with Spike Traps. These exceptions may also be reproduced in certain complex map editors for fan-made levels.
Judging by development screenshots, Workshops were latecomers in the hard project of simply being ready. Initially they had more brownish floor tiles, and were missing all kinds of appliances for longer phases of overall game completion.
Dungeon Keeper Mobile[]
concept art
Overview[]
The Workshop was a 3x3 room that unlocked a Keeper's ability to place traps, as well as recruit Trolls. This room was warded by its defence: the Homing Buzzsaw, which targeted a single unit over a modest distance, dealing damage upon impact, and was able to fly over walls and other obstacles.
Upgrading a Workshop augmented trap capacity, in addition to unlocking new ones. Another byproduct of upgrading was that your Trolls would be able to be trained to higher levels.
Levels 30 and above required max level stone storage as well as Quarries upgraded for extra storage, or to be upgraded during the Half Cost Building Event.
Ironically, despite mallets being the symbol of Workshops and manufacturing, the best manufacturers in Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2 (Trolls and Giants,[Note 1] respectively) carry and use clubs rather than mallets. In Dungeon Keeper, mallets are used by some lesser manufacturers, such as Orcs and Barbarians.
References[]
↑Dungeon Keeper 2 : Prima's Official Strategy Guide. pp. 109,112.
Rocklin, CA:
Prima Games. (1999).
ISBN 978-0-7615-1805-1.
Sale Value
Wooden Door
Alarm Trap
Poison Gas Trap
Braced Door
Lightning Trap
Iron Door
Boulder Trap
Lava Trap
Magic Door
Word of Power Trap
Bug #1
Wooden Door
Braced Door
Steel Door
Magic Door
Barricade
Secret Door
Alarm Trap
Guard Post
Gas Trap
Boulder Trap
Fear Trap
Fireburst Trap
Freeze Trap
Lightning Trap
Sentry Trap
Spike Trap
Trigger Trap
