First the question: What's something you've done/created/invented (that can be done in vanilla raws) to make your fort run smoother that you think others might benefit from? Mine is a bit of a tale.
Ok so I'm sitting at work bored and poking around an older fort on my laptop and I've come across something I'd forgotten all about, which prompted this. I had a a fort in it's early stages of mid-life. Almost no trees, a tiny patch of soil on a single z level and no coal. This was one of my forts where I was testing a few new types of glass I was tinkering with making. My main fort and forges had been relocated 90 zlvls to the magma sea, leaving my tiny patches of sand and clay a long walk from the glass furnaces.
I decided to try relocating said sand and clay and.. damn if it didn't work. I dug out a 3x3 room under the sand tile and then channeled straight down to an empty tile very near my forges. after walling off the landing zone, I carefully channeled our around the single sand tile and it caused the expected cave-in, depositing the red sand tile 89 zlvls below in my forge area..nice and clean and still a valid sand collection zone.
I had read various thread about dropping plugs to bypass aquifers before but I didn't really think about being able to use a cave-in to move sand/clay all the way down to my magma forges. It seems like a common sense thing to try now that I've done it but before...
What little tricks have you come up with?