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[Sjiveru]

First off, I'm sure this is unoriginal, but I've not come across any explicit writeups of this concept, so I'm going to try one here. Also - this is a concept that I haven't actually implemented yet. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to plan everything, since it's fundamentally three-dimensional on a scale that seems a bit difficult with QuickFort. I may just buckle down and do it with QF, though.

So, what is the DVF?

The DVF is a fortress concept (maybe more a philosophy) centred around efficiency - reducing the distance that materials and dwarves have to travel on a regular basis. It does what it can to take advantage of how easy it is to go up and down levels in DF - so workshops are ideally placed directly below and/or above relevant stockpiles, with staircases into them right outside the entrance to each workshop. Housing for dwarves is similarly just up or down a staircase from their workshop, with a small food and drink stockpile and a dining room. A small example might look something like this:

Code: [Select]

           [ore stockpile]
[smelter housing]X
             [smelters]    [wood furnaces]
               X     X           X[burner housing]
[metal stockpile]   [fuel stockpile]
               X     X
               [forges]
   [smith housing]X
         [furniture stockpile]

Thus, each dwarf should have a workspace, input and output stockpiles, housing and food/drink all within less than ten moves or so from their own central staircase. They may have to move rather more to get to an individual tile in a large stockpile, but with the overall movement savings over having them wandering all over the fort every time they need to eat/sleep/drink or grab a particular item, it seems like not a big deal. Large stockpiles may be better if broken up over more than one z-level, but large horizontal stockpiles can have the added benefit of allowing connections with more than one industry stack.

The fortress isn't necessarily 100% decentralised, as there's still a use for things like single meeting halls and temples, and some dwarves (miners/engravers especially) don't have a set workspace. Nonetheless, it seems possible to reduce a lot of moving around this way - if you have a dwarf who doesn't do much more than farm, why not keep them near the farm as often as possible?

I imagine it's possible to optimise the layout of this fortress so that it can be used on just about any map, with things like the entrance repositionable as needed.

Any thoughts or ideas? Crippling flaws you've noticed? Thoughts on better ways than QF to plan a fort like this? Also, I'm working on a flowchart of basic industry spaces that I can put up a link to if anyone's interested. I'd love to hear what people think!

[Superdorf]

Seems solid. You'd want to think about how materials move between layers, of course-- is there a contingent of unburrowed haulers moving rocks around? How do you go about, say, lugging all the meltable junk down after a goblin siege? Make the military do it?

As far as stockpile walkdistance goes... well, if you're OK with a bit of exploitation, QSPs are wonderful for that. Or you can just put lots of stairs on the stockpile floors and make the best of it.

I'm curious to see this flowchart of yours. I do love this sort of thing.

[Sarmatian123]

1. Just use automated QSP and you have 1x1 stockpile right on side of workshop in place of 1x1 up/down stairs. Closer, faster, automated and fps friendly. Only issues are to build stop with automatic dump, build mining cart and learn how to set up hauling routs, which h-menu is kind of user unfriendly somehow (for some reason it feels so).

2. DVF concept is actually very useful, but not in manner of how far working in workshop dwarf has to travel to work, but how far working in workshop dwarf has to travel when not working to get a) food, b) drink, c) temple, tavern, barracks, library, hospital, d) bed to sleep. Dwarf Vertical Fortress design makes for compact fortress. Though it takes little experience in placing right locations in right levels for entirety of 220 dwarves. Surely exchanging all central corridors into up/down stairs, speeds things (& fps too) up, in comparison of maintaining just one narrow 3x3 central down/up stairwell.

Specially, if you are setting up a military fortress above ground at border of your dwarven civilization to deal with radical goblin/elven/human issues.

My current design opts for 51x51 box with 6-8 floors. Plenty space for everything. Even for large pastures under roof. The only limitation here is water, which needs to be underground to avoid having it freezing into ice. This makes hospital alike under ground farming a bellow surface location. Mass pit (with no mud on level) also works more reliably underground for me. Though pitting depends also on all chained dogs/animals, whom I use in entrances for detecting stealth. If they are still on agro (blinking for no reason), then there is a bug making pitting of some hostiles to fail at 100% rate. Pasturing these dogs/animals and re-chaining solves this bug with mass pit. Else all working, relaxing and sleeping locations I keep above ground to keep cave adaptation ticks to minimum. There should be something underground to keep dwarves from cave adaptation imho.

[Sjiveru]

Seems solid. You'd want to think about how materials move between layers, of course-- is there a contingent of unburrowed haulers moving rocks around? How do you go about, say, lugging all the meltable junk down after a goblin siege? Make the military do it?

Yeah - anyone who has less-than-immediately-useful skills, or anyone whose profession is currently not seeing much work.

As far as stockpile walkdistance goes... well, if you're OK with a bit of exploitation, QSPs are wonderful for that. Or you can just put lots of stairs on the stockpile floors and make the best of it.

I'm not a big fan of QSPs; they seem a bit too exploity to me, and I've never bothered to figure out how to use them. It might be worth it to mess with stockpile shapes and things, though, so the goods get concentrated around staircases rather than in the top left corner.

I'm curious to see this flowchart of yours. I do love this sort of thing.

Here's what I have at the moment. This purely diagrams connections between spaces, and not the relative placement of the spaces themselves. The farms and animal enclosure are connected to the 'outside' node due to wanting them on the highest levels, even if a direct connection to the outside isn't strictly necessary if you can do some irrigation (and aren't doing surface crops). Some of those nodes might be better split or merged, as well - for example, I was experimenting with dividing farms and seed stockpiles by crop type, though in that case it seemed uselessly complex.

1. Just use automated QSP and you have 1x1 stockpile right on side of workshop in place of 1x1 up/down stairs. Closer, faster, automated and fps friendly. Only issues are to build stop with automatic dump, build mining cart and learn how to set up hauling routs, which h-menu is kind of user unfriendly somehow (for some reason it feels so).

Again, I'm not a big fan of QSPs. Plus, this design has the benefit of allowing several workshops to access the same stockpile with about the same level of ease.

2. DVF concept is actually very useful, but not in manner of how far working in workshop dwarf has to travel to work, but how far working in workshop dwarf has to travel when not working to get a) food, b) drink, c) temple, tavern, barracks, library, hospital, d) bed to sleep. Dwarf Vertical Fortress design makes for compact fortress. Though it takes little experience in placing right locations in right levels for entirety of 220 dwarves. Surely exchanging all central corridors into up/down stairs, speeds things (& fps too) up, in comparison of maintaining just one narrow 3x3 central down/up stairwell.

I think both are helpful, but certainly the 'break time problem' seems to be one of the more important issues that fort designers seem to forget about. The whole central staircase concept as well seems popular because it's intuitive and simple, but really is very inefficient. There's nothing wrong with inefficiency if efficiency isn't your goal, but if you're at least interested in efficiency, ditching the central staircase -- or at least greatly deemphasising the central staircase -- is a great place to start.

[Superdorf]

Yeah - anyone who has less-than-immediately-useful skills, or anyone whose profession is currently not seeing much work.

Mm, alright then. Might take some micromanagement to set up... maybe you could put all your dwarves into military squads, sorted by profession, and set up a few alerts to move dwarves between burrows? Fiddly to set up, but you could move whole groups of dwarves around with the touch of a button! (And now you can give 'em all nice uniforms and let them train in the off season-- 220 axe lunatics, every one ready to kill! Watch out for tantrum spirals tho...)

I'm not a big fan of QSPs; they seem a bit too exploity to me, and I've never bothered to figure out how to use them. It might be worth it to mess with stockpile shapes and things, though, so the goods get concentrated around staircases rather than in the top left corner.

Plus, this design has the benefit of allowing several workshops to access the same stockpile with about the same level of ease.

They are indeed very exploity, and you seem to be doing well without. A lot of my thinking on things like this comes from my habit of building tiny little microfortresses for FPS reasons, where every urist of space is precious...

Here's what I have at the moment.

Aww cool. You've really thought this through... I may have to steal this for my next fort.

I'll just mention-- you can avoid the need for a lot of stockpiles by storing stuff in the workshops themselves. Stuff like thread, say, can just stay in the farmer's workshop if it's close enough to the loom. Clutter only becomes a problem if you're trying to squeeze a really ludicrous amount of junk into a single workshop... but maybe that's a bit exploity in itself? In principle, it's not all that different from a QSP I suppose.

The whole central staircase concept as well seems popular because it's intuitive and simple, but really is very inefficient. There's nothing wrong with inefficiency if efficiency isn't your goal, but if you're at least interested in efficiency, ditching the central staircase -- or at least greatly deemphasising the central staircase -- is a great place to start.

Wait, central staircases are inefficient? By themselves, sure, but... what about your connection between goblinite and the magma sea? Surely it's faster to make that trip the shortest possible?

(I mean, maybe you have a volcano, or your fort's old enough that you've made the magma come to you. But still!)

[mikekchar]

I've tried essentially this a couple of times.  I've never made a particularly big fortress with it, but it was quite fun.  Here's what I've learned:

- The start is super hard because there is no place to put anything and there is a tendency to try to avoid building central spaces.

- At the beginning you've got a few dwarfs doing everything and it's hard to know how to split everything up.  Later you have one or more dwarfs doing each thing, but now you have to "refactor" your spaces.  So you might have a dwarf brewing and planting and weaving, so you feel like putting all that stuff near him, but later you have a dedicated planter, so you feel like you need to move all that stuff where they are.

- Dwarfs have families and the families do not necessarily have compatible skills.  So the brewer might be married to the weapon smith.

- Interestingly, I found that I had no trouble keeping dwarfs where they are supposed to me.  If I put their bedroom, dining room, private altar, and workshop all in the same general place, the dwarf stayed there for the most part.  Since I kept families together, this gave lots of happy thoughts of being with family.  I *also* got a lot of kids being born -- however, I think that mostly happens near the beginning when husband and wife migrants have similar sleep schedules.  Not completely sure.  But one of my dwarfs had something like 7 kids -- one every year!

In the end, I really liked it.  I've done 3 fortresses this way and have abandoned when I've decided that I had too many hard problems to solve and needed to start again.  My current thought is that it's best to plan right from the beginning to have central spaces (right in the center, possibly even with a central staircase ;-) ).  That allows you to do the normal "dump everything in this room until I can sort it out" thing and later turn it into a tavern or something.

I found that having wheelbarrows for as many of my large feeder stockpiles as possible was really useful.  This limits the number of haulers from that stockpile to 3.  The idea is that if you chop down a tree and have 20 logs, you don't want to have 20 dwarfs running out to pick up logs because that puts a lot of them in the wrong place.  Even with restricting hauling types, this really helped me a lot.  I decided to avoid burrows because having quite a lot of experience with them, I think they are more hassle than they are worth in normal cases (I once created a fortress which was divided into groups of 7 dwarfs.  None of the groups met the other groups.  I wanted to test how friend making was working -- it doesn't.  But the short story is that burrows don't work the way you want them to for that kind of application and it's just not worth the bother).

I really got fond of the idea of every adult dwarf in the fortress having a least 1 workstation.  I even assigned the workstation to the correct dwarf and labelled it.  Thematically, it was very pleasing and I could set up shops, etc, that made the fortress seem a lot more alive to me.  For me, this is the driving force rather than efficiency.  I don't know much about efficiency anyway, because I play with small fortresses at low FPS (I intentionally set it to 20).

Looking forward to hearing more updates if you decide to do it!