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[Rafal99]

Straighness of the path has a lot to do with how much tiles have to be checked.
Unoptimally long paths are bad not only for dwarf-efficiency but also for the pathfinder.

A straight path through the whole map is good. But a path with obstacles is bad, even if the distance to the target is shorter.

[Tharwen]

Surely the best fortress for pathfinding would be just one massive, linear tunnel with only one potential path and no access to the outside or the caverns. That way there's only one route to everything in the fortress.

[Duntada Man]

Best pathfinding is no pathfinding. Burrow them in their factories, China style.

Hmm that could take a lot of work, but I wonder if that would help FPS. If the majority of dwarves had a kitchen, room and workshop all in one. Everything they need to survive all crammed into one room that they can never leave, then a small dedicated staff that does nothing but move food, drinks and raw good into the workshops, and finished goods out of the workshops.

Unfortunately this means that the only dwarves running the risk of horrible death know every single dwarf in your fortress.

[Rafal99]

The problem is that in typical fortress 80% of the workload is hauling or construction, so dwarves have to walk some distance no matter how efficient your stockpiles are.

[Wastedlabor]

I'm thinking about making a circuit of factories with chained storages and a small team of haulers burrowed in each corridor section. So, H team #1 hauls stuff from storage #1 to storage #2, H team #2 hauls from #2 to #3, etc.

To avoid drying the food and drinks storages in the forward factories, the f & d storages not in the kitchens/stills would be small. H team #0 would bring materials from the depot or the mines to a large input store that would feed Factory #1's storage. H team #n would bring goods from the end of the factory chain to the output store.

Squads and nobles would have a burrow each within the chain, too. The miner squad would be burrowed also when not working. That leaves H team #0 only to roam around freely collecting stone and traded goods.

[Meph]

Sound like you gonna have a lot of job cancelation spams

[Rafal99]

Burrows don't work well with large scale hauling.
The problem is that a certain amount of hauling jobs is generated. But this doesn't respect burrows. So you can have all hauling jobs generated for items outside burrow while all your dwarves will be assigned to haul items in the burrow. Then they will be idle because they have no jobs to do in their burrow. And the jobs won't get generated because there is a lot of hauling jobs already (but all outside the burrow).
This seems to be bug and is reported in the Bug Tracker already. 

PS. The solution would be to forbid all items in areas where no haulers are assigned, so no hauling jobs are generated there. A hell of a micromanagement.

[Couchmonster]

Long distance is not a problem in calculating.
Possibilities are.
So a 1z fort is the most efficient while multi-z have to involve multi stair calculation.
The wiki also states that stairs suck the fps right out of your fort.

[Meph]

Most efficient in FPS and Pathfinding algorithm, YES
Most efficient in production/time a dwarf needs to do anything: NO

[Maklak]

If you want a flat fort, that's easy. Strip mine a whole Z-level, and there should be enough room for everything, and no obstacles to pathfinding. The biggest problems with this are needs for magma access and ore.

[Lord Dullard]

Even if it would kill FPS, the 'giant cube of stairs' idea would be rather interesting to envision, as a fortress...

It'd be like having your dwarves live in a gigantic, badass version of one of those McDonald's play places.

[Wastedlabor]

Scrub burrowing the haulers. That gave me another idea.

If there's a long path between the item and the stockpile, the pathfinding algorithm will have to test a lot of possible paths. To cut on that, we could place small chained stockpiles in the corridors, in direct sight from each other. Once an item is placed in the chain, the dwarves will have to path only for very short straight lines between links, until the item reaches the destination. To help further, the path between links can be marked as high traffic area.

I've done a quick test and some dwarves drop and pick the item all the way through the chain. Others will haul for a few links and then go do something else. It's like having a small army of maildwarves carrying packages from post office to post office.

[Sizik]

{b}>{C}>{f}ing

You could just say "building floors".

[Alastar]

I've had quite a few Escheresque fortresses where every tile that didn't have something constructed on it consisted of staris. Efficient for dwarves, but about as FPS-friendly as it was sanity-friendly... and just a tiny bit fragile.

[daishi5]

I think excessive stockpiles contribute to FPS death as well.  I am not sure exactly how they work, but my best fps forts don't have a huge number of stockpiles.  I have also tried many small stockpiles to increase hauling efficiency, but the game seemed to bog down a lot.  However, I did not thoroughly test for the cause of the slow down.  (My theory is that each stockpile is looking for goods generate a hauling job for, and that more stockpiles means more scanning for goods. )