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[Jeoshua]

So either Toady was looking into doing exactly this suggestion, more or less, or the OP hit upon something that was in the air already...

Cool.

I like the idea of the breakdown of rock materials into:
Boulders - Dropped while mining.  Slows movement through square heavilly.  Used to make constructions or...
Stones - Broken apart from Boulders.  Slows movement slightly.  Used to make constructions, blocks, or...
Rocks - Broken apart from Stones.  No movement slowing.  Used to make blocks or crafts.

It seems like it would work very well, and even makes some kind of decent sense.  Crowded, uncleared tunnels should be a hard place to get through, but not impossible.  And if you use a big boulder to make a wall construction, it's obviously going to fill one space, the size of a square.  Turning that Boulder into Stones, then Blocks, would allow a more efficient usage of the available rock, and you could cover more ground (probably 5x more or so.  You're only putting up a brick wall, not a line of boulders).

I hope Toady finds a good middleground for this.  It would be nice to have to move some of the rock out of the way before the real fun could commence.

[ab9rf]

The DF "clone" that I work on when I get the gumption (which is rarely) has multiple stone sizes.  Mining out a tile generates a whole scree of different sized stones ranging from large boulders weighing multiple tons down to pebbles and even sand.  It's possible for a low-skill miner to generate over a million "stones" mining out a single tile; higher skill miners tend to yield larger boulders (the best case is four large boulders) and less smaller scree.  The smaller sizes (cobbles, pebbles, and sand) are handled as stacked items so they don't generate huge numbers of objects.  (I handle sand entirely differently than Toady.)

The more stuff is in a tile, the harder it is to move through.  If the tile is more than 75% full it can't be pathed into by a dwarf at all.  When something is dropped in a tile, there's a chance it'll slide into adjacent tiles, if they're less full than the tile dropped into.  This includes the "drop" that occurs when a tile is mined out, so when you mine a tile you usually end up with some of the mined rocks sliding into adjoining mined out space.  This isn't really that hard to deal with, since you only have to do slide checks on object drop.  But dropping a object on top of your tailings pile can cause a fairly large landslide.

This approach necessitates a lot more stone hauling and the use of a tailings pile.  Large boulders can only be moved with a wheelbarrow or other appurtenance; dwarfs are hearty but even they can't lift a four ton stone singlehanded.

[UHaulDwarf]

Theoretically you could have a boulder breaking job that creates smaller rocks when you need them without creating too much spam.

I know its not the same thing, but this sound like what happens already; Taking larger stones and making them in smaller, easier to use blocks.