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[Demetrious]

Butchery area: Butcher shop (two if needed), tanner shop (two if needed) two leatherworks, two craftsdwarf shops, cages and the kennel. I also put the refuse area right next door. Craftsdwarf shops are set to auto produce bone bolts and totems, leatherworks makes armor if I have no metal, but usually ends up making a bunch of backpacks and waterskins, a few quivers and lots of bags and clothes. Leather is cheap so I end up buying a lot of it and making all of my clothes out of it.

This is a good idea- planning ahead for an in-door kennel, butchers shop and refuse stockpile all in one. My last few forts, I kind of cobbled it together at the last minute.

Living area: Usually right below the farms, I put my dining hall and statue garden in here, also the dwarven gym (bunch of unlinked pumps that I assign my dwarven reserves to operate for a toughness boost)

Ha! That's good. I've just been jamming unlinked pumps anywhere they'd fit; I never thought of making a separate room for them.

Elf drowner: A sealable chamber with a trade depot in it, and door access seperate from the sealing. Pumps set to add water, grates over the intake, and a channel down into the brook to get rid of the water, with a grate over to keep the clothing inside.

A noble endeavor, but my new fort (being my first magma fort,) is going to have an elf BURNER. Who needs ten thousand loads of cloth? Just more hauling jobs, pff.

When I start screwing with the magma, I tend to seal off the magma itself from the pipe with obsidian, so I can drain the top of the pipe right down.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here...

Anyway, it would be no problem putting a food stockpile there instead of the dining room. I actually always do that on the level above the bedrooms and my dwarves were pretty happy with their food.

That's always interested me- how people handle their dining rooms and food stockpiles. I don't know if I should have a kitchen somewhere remote, with input/output stockpiles, and a stockpile near the dining room that takes from the kitchen's output stockpile, or if I should endeavor to cram the whole shebang in near the Main (dining) hall.

My fortresses are usually 31x31 underground towers. There's a 3x3 staircase in all four corners, halfway between the corner stairs, and one in the middle. From that 31x31 structure, I can make several different designs.

This is probably the most interesting design philosophy I have ever, ever read. I find it especially interesting because I've always toyed with the idea of a gigantic tower that housed an entire fort- storerooms and all. The really appealing thing of this is that you can really keep track of what goes where- with a hard limit on horizontal dimensions, arranging things on Z-levels becomes a bit easier to keep track of (it's all in one long vertical stack.) Wrapping my head around planning on both horizontal and vertical planes really messes with me sometimes.

See, I'm not a big fan of using z-levels. I like to be able to see everything on my screen so I can keep track of what's going on, and when using multiple z-levels you need to keep switching between them. I prefer spreading out horizontally, even though I know it takes dwarves longer to get places.

I can certainly sympathize with that. The one reason I have less trouble with Z-levels and housing is because housing- especially the living pods design- makes for very neat "apartment blocks," so I'll know roughly where the "top" and "bottom" parts of it will go in the other layers. It's the one implementation of z-levels that doesn't tax my poor retard brain nearly as much.

Sometimes, though, I'm drawn to horizontal designs simply because you often end up OVER using z-levels and under-utilizing huge swathes of each individual level. Horizontal expansion is sometimes the best way to go.

[Servu]

I tend to concentrate on aesthetics over efficiency, so for sleeping arrangements every dwarf gets a 2*3 bedroom with the door in the middle of the long wall (I never make diagonal doors anywhere) If there is even a hint of a cliff wall nearby, I make lots of fortification windows to the rooms.

The legendary dining room usually determines the heart of my fortress with booze and food stockpiles nearby along with a food processing area. Every stockpile gets it's own room, as do my workshops. often connected to an appropriate stockpile. I often keep a bunch of dwarves in the ngraving business, so eventually everything is, if not engraved, at least smoothed.

The noble quaters are usually seperated from the main living areas and I like to overly decorate them. The baron wants two armor stands? Make fully engraved room just for them! While I'm at it might just make a black bronze corscrew trap (my last baron liked corscrews and black bronze) in the hallway connecting hi's royal bedroom and grand dining room. I have got the economy going a couple of times and not a single noble has ever tantrumed, nor have any hammerings been assingned.

I also have a bad habit of building a large room filled just with file cabinets, often the bookkeepers office, and also littering cabinets everywhere else to make the place look more bureacratical. I just find it fitting when nothing gets done and the nobles keep making silly mandates.

[peterix]

I just do what feels right for the place and don't really use templates for rooms... I like symetry tho.
Also, real stairs:

Code: [Select]

_>##
#<>#
##<>
###<(as seen from the side, # is wall, _ is floor, > is down stair, < is up stair)

Stacking stairs like DF allows is ridiculous. They are more like ladders than stairs.

[MC Dirty]

Stacking stairs like DF allows is ridiculous. They are more like ladders than stairs.

Well, I don't think so. I always thought of them as spiral staircases and those are perfectly stackable. However, the difference between up- and down-stairs doesn't make any sense and I have no idea how they would look like in real life. Or are normal DF stairs just half-stairs hanging around in the middle of a Z-level?

[Albedo]

With bedrooms, I always use .... If anyone has any good ideas I'm open.

I like a variant of this:
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Bedroom_design#Living_Pods

I expand it a bit, and by reducing some of the the central rooms I add a central main stairway plus waterfall to the lobby.

It holds as much as yours in about 1/4 the footprint.  Another 16 rooms can be added 1 level up/down, and they are only 1 tile further (1 stair) than the previous level's 16.

[peterix]

Stacking stairs like DF allows is ridiculous. They are more like ladders than stairs.

Well, I don't think so. I always thought of them as spiral staircases and those are perfectly stackable. However, the difference between up- and down-stairs doesn't make any sense and I have no idea how they would look like in real life. Or are normal DF stairs just half-stairs hanging around in the middle of a Z-level?

Well. When I want to build a spiral staircase, it's easy enough. I just put them in a spiral shape instead of a straight line. I envision the 'down' parts simply as an area with the floor missing or as a hole with solid sides (to account for the possibility of carving a whole area into 'down stairs'). This fits into visualizers without looking totally ridiculous or out of scale.

I can't imagine how an area of 'up stairs' should look. Probably lots of ladders.

[Funk]

i make these to drown things

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

XXX
X  D
XXX
X  D
XXX<

level 2
XXX
XGX
XXX
XGX<
XXX>
next 3

FFF
F  F
FFF
F  F>
FFF

key
X=wall
F=floor
G+grate

i try to make a houseing/water tower but dug it over the barracks and flood my fort when i changed the flooring.

[Chromie]

Aesthetic:
Lately I've been making dining halls with a few 3x3 alcoves in the sides full of one-type booze stockpiles, to simulate ginormous mega-kegs.

After seeing it in someone's superfort, I tend to make my cheap post-economy housing in a 'sewer district' which is a little windy, where the walkways are grates over a half-full channel of water, with lots of upward staircases to the business areas of the fort. 

Practical:
a grid of 10x10 stockpiles above or below (depending on fort design) my trade depot so I can have a good at a glance idea of how much crap goods-wise is in my fort.

a barracks complex (barracks, hospital/immigrant napzone of unassigned beds, archery targets) near my entrance.

Once I've built a grate-protected drinking/fishing area, I tend to make at least a gopher moat as well.

[Time Kitten]

Living area... usually 2x3 bedrooms tastefully aranged around a dining room that could have NEVER fit a workshop or have been used for anything else.

Halways between areas tend to be winding and cave like.

Magma and farming areas tends to be almost completely separate from the rest of the fort. farms tend to be at the edge of the map, in the second soil level down if can be, with a no entrance to the outside tower for ourside farming and windmil power. Magma area varries, but usually gets some pretty nice stonework going on.

[Sensei]

An entire nobles' wing, filled entirely with bauxite furniture.

[MC Dirty]

An entire nobles' wing, filled entirely with bauxite furniture.

Bauxite furniture? Say, do those noble rooms coincidentally have a little, innocent looking grate in the ceiling?

[Skorpion]

A noble endeavor, but my new fort (being my first magma fort,) is going to have an elf BURNER. Who needs ten thousand loads of cloth? Just more hauling jobs, pff.

Cloth? The elves only bring me wood now, since that's all I ever bought off them, save some berries, two big cats, and a few bins of cloth for the bins.
It's not worth trading with them, now. Their entire caravan is worth less than a single bin of crafts.
Not including the high-quality metal bins born out of my total lack of wood for bins. 'Make copper bins/R' trained the dungeonmaster almost as fast as recycling and magnetite.