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[BirdofPrey]

Some of you want the biggest, or the deepest fort, or to have the most fun, or use the most magma.  Me I want my fort to be the most efficient around.  To that effect, I am wondering about fortress design.  I want to know everything from the general which floor houses what activities to the overly specific on exactly how the workshops and stockpiles are set up.  This includes everything, I have seen bedroom designs, but nothing for entrances, military and security, workshops and stockpiles, common areas, etc.

What's the best way to lay everything out, and does anyone have any specific room groups.
I wanna see it all, hell if you have the best catacomb dungeon, I wanna see it.

For my part, I like building into the side of a hill, so my entryway can start on the ground level, have an indoor moat and make a turn before the trade depot, farms are on upper levels with a protected pasture and above ground farm, over the underground farms and food/booze production with farmers quarters and food stockpile below that.  All this I am happy with.  I have a level of empty space below the entrance then a workshop level with stockpiles below that then a level for common areas (haven't dug anything yet, but I was thinking food hall, offices and a prison, I feel a bit lost as far as this goes).  The bottom is 2 levels of dwarf apartments (each level has 72 2x3 bedrooms).  I am also happy with the bedrooms so far, but I am beginning to think I horribly mis-planned my workshops and the stockiles below.  I am also beginning to wonder if I should have made 2 workshop levels or maybe left some blank levels for militia or machinery use between the stockpiles and the living spaces.

edit: I took some snaps of my current fortress some time ago.  I've expanded the areas, but they additions follow the same basic layout.
http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb169/ghostbirdofprey/dwarf%20fortress/

[MuseOD]

I use a grid technique: seven or so identical floors of stackedness. each room, 6*4 set in a tesselating pattern, joined by 1*1 corridors. Then, a set of seven floors comprising of four 12 4*1 room blocks. All of these are connected by a 3*1 up.down staircase.  Four levels of pretty foodhalls. This takes maybe 3/4 of a year to dig out. and another year and a half to smooth and engrave, but it's worth it SO much.

[BirdofPrey]

So you don't have different designs for different areas (eg. different layouts for the workshops than the stockpiles)?

[MuseOD]

well, stockpiles are a different matter. They live off to the side of the working complex.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

I can't give you any specifics on room layout as I kind of vary things, but I might have some suggestions for efficiency.

1. Place stockpiles near the consumer end: Most of the time, you have dwarves go into production on repeated or otherwise numerous tasks. For example, when you set the brewery, you are likely to set it to repeat or give a certain number of brewing tasks to the manager. So, you have a dwarf who will be in the brewery and will likely start the second, third, etc. brewery job from that location. Having the brewable plants and some barrels in a nearby stockpile should help significantly speed up the process. Hauling to stockpiles, on the other hand, is done more haphazardly, so there is no reason to shorten the way between the farms and the stockpiles for the harvested goods. The stockpiles you may want near your farms are your seeds and maybe fertilizer if you use that.

2. Remember z-levels: Remember that dwarves kind of ignore z-levels making items several z-levels down "closer" to the dwarven mind than something right next to them. So, you should avoid placing workshops and their stockpiles above or below general purpose stockpiles. Instead, stockpiles that belong to workshops should be placed one z-level above or below the workshop, linked to it via a nearby dedicated stairwell. E.g.:

Code: [Select]

X...X
.WWW.
.WWW.
.WWW.
X..>X

and one level below:

XXXXX
X===X
X===X
X===X
XXX<X
XXXXX

X = wall, . = free tile, W = workshop, = = stockpile, > = down stairs, < = up stairs
(note that the 3x3 stockpile is my bad habit.)
3. Make corridors 2 or 3 tiles wide: Dwarves who climb over other dwarves loose a lot of speed, so you don't want them to crawl too often. 3 tile corridors also need a layout that encourages different flows to use different sides of the corridor.

4. Use traffic designations: Use High Traffic Designations to show dwarves the recommended routes between points. This is especially important if you have multiple rooms with multiple exits which may have static dwarves in them (for instance the drink stockpiles).

5. Limit entrances to workshops and the like: This goes along with No. 4 and acts as a fail-safe. Any dwarf who pathes through a workshop's central square without actually having any business in that workshop is in danger of wasting time moving through one or more dwarves actually having something to do there.

These are the standard rules I apply to my own designs when I am trying to increase their efficiency.

Yours,
Deathworks

[davros]

I just make stuff wherever I feel like it. This presumably explains how I manage to occasionally get lost.

[AfroScotsDwarf]

mine, in the past, have always turned out phalus shaped, no word of a lie. food pile at the top, then meeting/dining hall, then the crafts hall with 2 dormatry halls either side in a square shape.

[Loud Whispers]

Not so keen on efficiency. Heavily focused on innovation and above ground forts, generally they consist of a massive super structure connected to a large walled off quarry which gets connected directly to the caverns, and guard towers branching off from the main frame. In the center is a significantly more secure barracks, civilian housing area, a separate booze stockpile, the main stockpile (with it's own booze piles), access to the legendary dining rooms and the main lever swichboard.

Spoiler: Pre-Raven bomb disaster image of Silentthunders (click to show/hide)

[Deathworks]

Hello!

I forgot to mention another aspect of traffic designations important for any fortress that does regular surface tree harvesting:

4b. Use traffic designations aggressively on the surface: By marking "paths" via traffic designations and using restricted/low traffic designations to make areas off limit, you get a dual benefit for your surface world: By bundling the dwarven traffic, you make your dwarves create trails where no tree (read: obstacle) will grow to maturity, thus keeping the traffic routes open even if you don't want to pave them. By marking most areas of the maps as off-limits, you create a lot of space where trees can mature undisturbed and thus increase the efficiency of your surface wood production.

Yours,
Deathworks

[Graebeard]

Deathworks really hit the nail on the head.

Here are my thoughts after looking at the pictures you posted:

• I'd widen your hallways to 3 wide.  Once your population starts really shooting up, 2 tile wide hallways are not big enough for high traffic areas.  Consider making the middle a low-traffic area and each side a high traffic area.  This tends to have the effect of sorting opposite traffic onto opposite sides of a hallway during bouts of congestion.  You may also want to expand your central stairway into a 3x3 to account for traffic.  That also conveniently fits in nicely with 3 wide hallways.
• If you're storing raw materials on different floors from the workshops they're used in you should have stairways connecting them.  Be sure to put these in areas that are convenient for your workers but that are still out of the way from heavy traffic.  Nothing worse than your whole fort deciding to use your stone blocks access stairway as the primary connection between the dining room and fortress entrance.
• As Dethworks noted, the algorithm a dwarf uses to find raw material is different from the pathing algorithm, and seems to select whatever item is physically closest (in a 3-D absolute distance sense) rather than what has the shortest path.  Use this to your benefit by placing stockpiles both above and below your workshops.  This is particularly handy for shops like craftdwarf shops, where you could have a stone stockpile immediately above, and a bone stockpile immediately below.  This pattern also lends itself to easy expansion, as you just alternate stockpile and workshop floors.
• Be sure you're thinking in 3-D.  Moving up one level on a stair takes the same amount of time that moving over one tile does.  For this reason, the most pathing-efficient forts tend to be cubical and incorporate many more z-levels than is intuative given the game's 2-D interface.
• If you burrow your primary worker dwarfs (recommended) be sure that the burrow has access to everything they need, including food, drink, sleeping quarters and a dining area.  Burrowing related groups together (like all magma-industry) can reduce micromanagement. 
• Your depot location seems good from a defensive point of view, but not from a hauling point of view.  I usually keep mine adjacent to the central stairwell to reduce hauling distance and surround it with a 1-2 tile wide stockpile (7x7 or 9x9 square centered on the depot) that accepts only goods I plan on trading.  That reduces hauling time and makes trading a lot less tedious.
• Don't forget about well placement.  It's easy to write it off when you have a lot of booze, but for cleaning, hospital and as a backup you'll need something close.  It's always a good idea to have a centrally located, artificial, underground cistern that is at least 2 levels deep.

If you decide that you don't like your setup and that you'd like to do things differently, don't fret!  You can always tear down everything you've built/designated and replace it with the perfect setup.  All it takes is a little patience and forethought!

[roughedge]

I progress ever deeper towards the center of the earth while putting excess stone in the main 3 tile wide hall full of stone traps. Forbidding old fortress parts and taking only the most important: booze and picks. Many airlocks (bridges with lever) activated from secret tunnels. Some tunnels lead to secluded caverns full of happy dwarves safe behind many bridges and traps. Separating population is always useful. Also, I take care to have a lot of slabs for all the ghosts of the dead migrants on the surface. Digging is the most important activity.

[decius]

For the most efficient forts, don't use stairs. Use ramp corridors:

Code: [Select]

WUWUWUWU
DFDFDFDFDF
FDFDFDFDFD
UWUWUWUW
Alternating by z-level with

Code: [Select]

FDFDFDFDFD
WUWUWUWU
UWUWUWUW
DFDFDFDFDF
(F is empty floor U is up ramp, D is down ramp, W is wall.)
Basically, all destinations joined by this corridor have travel distance equal to the maximum of their x-distance and their z-distance; better than if the entire thing was stairs (which would be x + z).

[BirdofPrey]

Deathworks really hit the nail on the head.

Here are my thoughts after looking at the pictures you posted:

• I'd widen your hallways to 3 wide.  Once your population starts really shooting up, 2 tile wide hallways are not big enough for high traffic areas.  Consider making the middle a low-traffic area and each side a high traffic area.  This tends to have the effect of sorting opposite traffic onto opposite sides of a hallway during bouts of congestion.  You may also want to expand your central stairway into a 3x3 to account for traffic.  That also conveniently fits in nicely with 3 wide hallways.

Well, I planned on adding additional side hallways and staircases.  Is that not enough to relieve traffic?

• If you're storing raw materials on different floors from the workshops they're used in you should have stairways connecting them.  Be sure to put these in areas that are convenient for your workers but that are still out of the way from heavy traffic.  Nothing worse than your whole fort deciding to use your stone blocks access stairway as the primary connection between the dining room and fortress entrance.

My current workshop design has pairs of workshops with a 2x3 material cache between them and in between 4 of these pairs is a 1x1 staircase that leads to a pair of stockpiles to hold inputs and outputs.
I am looking for better layouts.

• As Dethworks noted, the algorithm a dwarf uses to find raw material is different from the pathing algorithm, and seems to select whatever item is physically closest (in a 3-D absolute distance sense) rather than what has the shortest path.  Use this to your benefit by placing stockpiles both above and below your workshops.  This is particularly handy for shops like craftdwarf shops, where you could have a stone stockpile immediately above, and a bone stockpile immediately below.  This pattern also lends itself to easy expansion, as you just alternate stockpile and workshop floors.

yeah, already knew about that, I have stockpiles right below the workshops, for my next fort I think I might have 2 stockiple levels to seperate inputs and outputs.  I'm not sure if I want the inputs or the outputs above the workshops, though.

• Be sure you're thinking in 3-D.  Moving up one level on a stair takes the same amount of time that moving over one tile does.  For this reason, the most pathing-efficient forts tend to be cubical and incorporate many more z-levels than is intuative given the game's 2-D interface.

I'm trying to think in 3d.

• If you burrow your primary worker dwarfs (recommended) be sure that the burrow has access to everything they need, including food, drink, sleeping quarters and a dining area.  Burrowing related groups together (like all magma-industry) can reduce micromanagement. 

Not really sure how to utilize burrows yet.  Also at the moment, I don't think my fort is set up to allow them to be used properly since food storage is centralized and I have laid it out with entire floors being set for a specific type of room (ie. all my workshops are on a workshop level, most of my bedrooms are on a bedroom level)

• Your depot location seems good from a defensive point of view, but not from a hauling point of view.  I usually keep mine adjacent to the central stairwell to reduce hauling distance and surround it with a 1-2 tile wide stockpile (7x7 or 9x9 square centered on the depot) that accepts only goods I plan on trading.  That reduces hauling time and makes trading a lot less tedious.

It's not that far from the stockpiles, they are only 3 floors down.  What I have listed as temporary stockpile on my pictures is now a wood stockpile so the cutter can bring wood there and another dwarf can bring it inside, and also stores trap components.  I can set it to carry other stuff if needed for a trading cache.

• Don't forget about well placement.  It's easy to write it off when you have a lot of booze, but for cleaning, hospital and as a backup you'll need something close.  It's always a good idea to have a centrally located, artificial, underground cistern that is at least 2 levels deep.

I have a water collection zone set up on one of the ponds aboveground.  I need to find a good cavern spot to bring up water before I can get a well going.

If you decide that you don't like your setup and that you'd like to do things differently, don't fret!  You can always tear down everything you've built/designated and replace it with the perfect setup.  All it takes is a little patience and forethought!

Yep

For the most efficient forts, don't use stairs. Use ramp corridors:

[/list]

Code: [Select]

WUWUWUWU
DFDFDFDFDF
FDFDFDFDFD
UWUWUWUW
Alternating by z-level with

Code: [Select]

FDFDFDFDFD
WUWUWUWU
UWUWUWUW
DFDFDFDFDF
(F is empty floor U is up ramp, D is down ramp, W is wall.)
Basically, all destinations joined by this corridor have travel distance equal to the maximum of their x-distance and their z-distance; better than if the entire thing was stairs (which would be x + z).

I was wondering if I could use ramps instead of stairs for some things.   I'll have to take a look at this.
===
Does anyone have any good examples of efficient workshop/stockpile design.
I am also unsure I am making the common areas right.  I would love examples of everything.

Anyways, thanks for the tips so far.

[Speakafreak22]

I usually make big 12x12 rooms and put stockpiles and workshops in them.
I place wood stocks and the carpenters shop together, the furniture, masonry, and mechanics shop together, the stills, booze, and farmers workshop together, and the general goods, gems, jewelcrafting, and craftsdwarves workshops together.
It doesn't look fancy at all, but it's pretty efficient as far as I can tell.
I put a 5 tile wide hallway between them.

[BirdofPrey]

Hmm I am beginning to wonder if there is also a better order to do everything.  I breached the caverns so I could get some underground pastures and tree farms going, and have begun flooring the soil I don't want stuff growing on, and keep having to tear down workshops and move furniture, I've also got a few stockpiles on the soil and those are always a pain in the ass to move.   Next time I might put down flooring first.

Are there any other things I should preferable do before others?