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[FantasticDorf]

The undercity fuels the upward growth of the over-city, like a tree and its roots depends how purist the Urist you want it.

Clay can be a good option for initial ground floors to preserve resources or if you want a basic hut/improvisory feel aethetically, all you require is a manager and to set clay production quota for the amount of clay boulders you want (providing you have a kiln present) and dwarves will exceed 10 max you can normally get (though you should disable important dwarves like brewers or planters from hauling clay so you dont have to mass cancel the manager command and provide enough storage, splitting up collectors & builders)

If you have fuel availible/charcoal/(lava?) you can replace some parts of it with bricks or deconstruct fully, using a floor-grate (mason or carpenter and Wall or floor option in (b) will let you collect without grass (or moss) covering over the tile, which you can expose by building a dirt path over it.

> ! Dwarves dont cope very well aboveground for point of reference, the new 44.11 mechanics either make them nature lover (urgh) or even more psychotically hateful of nature & angry (cool but stop sliding into beserk mental breakdown please Urist) if they dwell and intellectually change because they got rained on once.

> If you dont mind cheating, you can just add a workshop/reaction to make wood split into 6 block (some masterwork mod addons have mass production things like this)

[Sver]

Logs only produce one block... The advantage of blocks verse stone/logs is quicker construction. That quicker construction time pays off with stone blocks, not with wood blocks, unless you are using those wood blocks because you have no stone yet and need to dig through an aquifer first.

Construction speed is fairly important when you do a lot of building. Indeed, making blocks is much more important with stone, but mining and masonry take much more time than woodworking, due to very slow hauling and raw resources inevitably being scattered around the mining quarry. Also, blocks get a nice value boost, which is important for a low-value material, such as wood.

FantasticDorf proposed a good alternative use for those abundant trees, though. If you have a source of clay, you can easily set up the brick industry right next to it, while the logs for charcoal will be hauled there fairly quickly. It's more of a cosmetic change, though, because bricks are produced one at a time too.

[Cathar]

Benefits from wooden blocks? Raising your carpenter skill level to legendary under a year and providing better aesthetics under armok vision.
But mostly, it trains your carpenter, really, really, really fast.

[Saiko Kila]

Carpenter is kinda useless in my opinion (in the long run), though not as much a woodworker. Building beds and wooden balls (in the beginning) trains him well enough.

Stone blocks are the best option for bigger aboveground fortress, from my experience. Stone is created incredibly fast, proper stockpiles with wheelbarrows allow it to be collected quickly. Aboveground forts can take thousands of blocks, and wood has better uses (like making charcoal, ash, or training bolts if there are no bones, and of course beds and sometimes siege engines, which require lots of wood just for training). I don't use wooden blocks much, and usually are very close to my elven wood quota.

Plus stone blocks are created fast - dwarves build with high priority, and I constantly have to refill blocks storage, even after years of building. I was comparing how fast legendary carpenter can make blocks, when I needed some floor padded, and how quickly a mason can make. Of course mason wins.

Wood blocks have their niche uses in my forts:
1. padding for places I expect my dwarves to fall (usually willow blocks)
2. aesthetics

[Fleeting Frames]

Builing wooden wall neither uses nor boosts carpentry. Wooden blocks are also useful for making screw pump from 3 wood given by embark wagon, though. That, building walls in aquifer, and building bridges faster are only times I use them.

And of course mason wins blockmaking, they make four times as much per job. (Though I find carpenter more useful overall than mason.)

[LoSboccacc]

Logs only produce one block... The advantage of blocks verse stone/logs is quicker construction. That quicker construction time pays off with stone blocks, not with wood blocks, unless you are using those wood blocks because you have no stone yet and need to dig through an aquifer first.

and the ability to move bins of them between masons and the construction site

[Cathar]

Carpenter is kinda useless in my opinion (in the long run), though not as much a woodworker. Building beds and wooden balls (in the beginning) trains him well enough.

Yes but this is the point. You have a limited use for beds and usual furnitures (chests, cabinets etc.) and a big interest in having them as valuable as possible. So sure, you can make infinity beds and sell the rest, or you can train up your carpentry by doing something not as much useful, but still useful until you're good enough to reliably make masterwork beds.

Note that is my personal strategy, other may have a different opinion or elect to go for stone or metal furnitures. But those come with their personal problems, especially if you play in an aquifer heavy world. In the end I guess it's a matter of choice, but building wooden blocks is a way for me to keep my carpenter's hands busy since I will need high end furnitures every now and then and would rather have him ready for the time I need him.

[Spriggans]

Never thought of wood blocks production to get my starting carpenter Legendary.
I usually embark with a +5 carpenter. He does the initial stuff and then transitions into manager / brooker stuff.
If I'm lucky, he gets a strange mood and goes Legendary.
I think I never bothered to train a carpenter to Legendary yet, because I don't really care about ☼ beds ☼ (and you "often" aquire one or two artifact stone beds for important dwarves)

[FantasticDorf]

☼ beds ☼ are objectively useless because of bugs, they dont contribute to room value anyway so they'd only count as a rare auxillary object.

[Dragonborn]

Yikes!  So all that effort I go through to get masterwork beds for nobles has been a complete waste of time?

I could've sworn I've seen a bedroom's value greatly increase after installing an artifact bed and making a bedroom out of it.

[Telgin]

That's the first I've heard of that too, and while I don't have evidence one way or another, I'm pretty sure at least in older versions it did improve a room's value.

Anyway, I'll second the suggestion to train carpenters by making blocks for outdoor constructions.  I mostly build above ground these days, and it's an excellent way to get carpenters up to very high skill levels.

[shikushiku]

Yeah, I usually make a bunch of standard rooms that all come out about the same quality, and sometimes I get an artifact bed and stick it in one of them in place of the regular bed to make it acceptable for a noble and the reported quality goes way up.