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[jasonwill2]

In my last fort, a necromancer killed us all. I tried to get my Militia to deal with the problem (they only had gear I brough on embark... just some 'meh' armor and weapons...) while everyone ran into the storeroom, but some stuff got stuck iin the door so I huddled everyone into the unfinished meeting hall where people with no jobs go. I needed a miner/more people before all the zombies ran us over, so unlocked the door to save more than 6ish dwarves but alas a zombie got in and killed em' all. The fort was only lasted one year and ten months... is sad; the fort was really starting to show potental, I just got suprized attacked but never actually saw the necromancers 

It got me wondering, where is the best place, and the best way, to design a safe room? If you make it so that it is near your store room you can get supplies relatively safely should you run out below, but if you put it in your meeting room you can save more dwarves. It needs to be centered enough to get a lot of dwarves in but not too centered that it is quickly gotten to by the attackers. You need to have supplies down in there but not so much that it bothers with the rest of your fort. Having some pickaxes down there too might help, as if it gets REALLY bad you can just dig down and seal off the top, never seeing day light again and use the underground caves for new water supplies and for wood. Surely you can save enough animals to breed for food or you can find some plum helm seeds in your stores down there. If you don't know how to use pumps like me, using gravity, a flood gate, and some creative mining and you can have some come down from a river (if one is on embark) given you are careful enough to not break through your old fort.

Meanwhile you are all sealed underground, waiting for the day that you create a military force powerful enough to drive out the zombie herd... gathering metal from below, smithing, training for the day that you will not see your revenge come full fold, muahaha! just woe be to morons who migrate or traders who do not get the message yet that it's over run... you will have to rely on SEX for new populations...

[caddybear]

I had a safe fort design that involved corridors with drawbridges that also flooded the area between the bridges and could be drained later. My intention was to make a fort that could seal off parts of it in the event of a disaster and survive regardless and I had some emergency smelting/forging facilities and a lot of food and booze ( and a bit of fuel and metal ) stocks in every part. It's not very difficult if you plan for it before starting. The idea was that burrowing everyone alive in the safe zones and and pulling the lever that pulled the bridges and opened the flooding hatch for the corridor when the thing killing everyone is very close.

I got bored before it was fully complete though. Probably should get back to it after this fort falls.

[Loud Whispers]

Best placement? Best design?

The best safe house would be one with at least one pick inside, several slabs (1 for every Dwarf in your fort +20), several lots of booze, food, fungus pastures / dog/pig farms, beds and a secured water supply.
With the entrance sealed from the inside via retractable bridge over open space and a lever.
And several doors.
And an up rampway with lockable hatches.
And guarded by Giant Desert Scorpions.

Or just small rooms that could be linked to each other, bolted around the fort. The main hub could be sealed away from the fort. That way, in case of death, all Dwarves could evacuate to the nearest safe house, and once secured, could begin digging a path to the central self-powered haven. The beauty of it is if the Dwarves failed to secure their respective safe houses - no digging! They'd cancel the job due to accidental goblin axe to the skull.

[Tirion]

It's an unconventional approach. You could maybe do it by building bulkheads: drawbridges with a constructed wall near them. These bulkheads are all connected to a single lever in your meeting hall deep in the fortress, which also contains a food and booze stockpile, optionally for simplicity's sake the jail in the middle of that stockpile so prisoners don't starve to death even if most dwarves are elsewhere, your dormitory/bedrooms, at least some of your noble's rooms including manager, and the barracks. Having a well and a room with egg-layers and nest boxes in each section is a nice plus.

Anyway, if bad things are running around in your fortress, Pull the Lever! Then, open the uninfected sections together by removing that constructed wall, you can rebuild it later. Set the bridges themselves as restricted traffic zones, or even outside of your civilian alert burrow, and pray none of your dwarves stands on them when the lever is pulled.

[jasonwill2]

It's an unconventional approach. You could maybe do it by building bulkheads: drawbridges with a constructed wall near them. These bulkheads are all connected to a single lever in your meeting hall deep in the fortress, which also contains a food and booze stockpile, optionally for simplicity's sake the jail in the middle of that stockpile so prisoners don't starve to death even if most dwarves are elsewhere, your dormitory/bedrooms, at least some of your noble's rooms including manager, and the barracks. Having a well and a room with egg-layers and nest boxes in each section is a nice plus.

Anyway, if bad things are running around in your fortress, Pull the Lever! Then, open the uninfected sections together by removing that constructed wall, you can rebuild it later. Set the bridges themselves as restricted traffic zones, or even outside of your civilian alert burrow, and pray none of your dwarves stands on them when the lever is pulled.

This gave me an idea, but I don't know if this is what you were saying.

But I could make certain parts of the forts cut off from one another, like a quarantine design via said bridges. When a certain part is infected, I have a heavily fortified master control room simply pull the right levers and seal it off. This way if they do get into my fort, they will be stuck in one area. I might even have a dwarf who's only job is to live near these stwitches. I would probably have a small militia force near the control room, far removed, with a bridge of it's own and several doors and traps.

My main problem though was that most of the time I worked on a "dont let it in the fort at all" appoach and it was generally good. Sometimes I was ambushed but my usually large militias took care of the problem easily and very few civillians died. But as it is now the necromancers have added a new element and are sneaky. Before when defenses were breeched everyone would be locked in a store-room/meeting room until the Militia dealt with the issue a couple of floors up.

[wuphonsreach]

I usually design my forts around:

(surface fort) -- (firewall corridor) -- (main fort) -- (firewall) -- (magma workshops)

And there may be small, self-sufficient burrows here and there also connected via some sort of firewall corridor. My firewall corridors are very simple design.

Code: [Select]

(side view)
D_..BD
##\_##
Basically, you have in those 6 tiles:
- a door (D)
- a one tile landing
- a raising drawbridge over a 2-tile wide channel
- a one tile landing (anchor for the bridge at point 'B')
- a door (D)

The ramps next to the anchor side of the bridge get removed.  Once the bridge goes up, any critter who gets between the doors can't get at the raised drawbridge (unless they both fly and can batter down the drawbridge).  If you're willing to spend another 3 tiles you can build the following which lets you seal it from either (or both) ends.

Code: [Select]

(side view)
DB.._..BD
##_/#\_##
I put doors at both ends so that I can quickly lock them before throwing the lever.  This prevents untimely dwarfy accidents.

You can also shorten it up by making the landing which doesn't anchor the bridge do double-duty as a stairway up from below.

[Hanslanda]

This is awesome. You're all telling me I can build an entire unused section of my fort specifically in the case of unwanted fun, with a myriad of methods to protect it from the fun. My forts will be even more invincible now.

[Friendstrange]

Bridges solve everything. No really, they do.

[imperium3]

My old fort had an emergency "bunker" which was built after taking a lot of casualties to thirst and unhappiness in previous incidents, when the evacuation policy consisted of hiding at the bottom of an old mineshaft.

It consisted of two large halls, one over the other. The upper hall was half a dining room and half a dormitory, though all beds and tables were forbidden until needed. This section was engraved to try and keep the dwarves happy. The lower section was a half/half food and drink store, specifically laid up by overproduction and then forbidden until needed. The food included plump helmets etc which could provide seeds for long-term farming if necessary.

Security was provided by the only entrance being a narrow bridge over the fort's reservoir, which could be destroyed in time of need. The bunker-side shore of the reservoir was muddied to support farming.

The bunker was never actually used as the fort succumbed to FPS death first, but I think it would have worked to keep the dwarves happy until the danger was dealt with. If I were to build it again I'd include better security though, maybe an entrance that can be blocked by cave-in (since the current design has no defence against fliers) and I'd recommend putting the lever control centre down there too so that the fort's various deathtraps don't have to be abandoned to the enemy.

[Shmo]

A more extreme possibility is to keep a completely isolated, self-sustained "sleeper cell" of a few dwarves walled off in a completely disconnected part of the map, with an ability to remotely seal off your main fort from this bunker. Then, when some evil makes it into your fort, you just seal it inside and start anew! Bonus points if instead of sealing off your main fort, the emergency lever collapses the entire thing, destroying all inside.

[weenog]

It got me wondering, where is the best place, and the best way, to design a safe room?

Setting aside the details for a moment, the answer to this most basic question is obvious.  By definition, a fortress is a big safe room (or more accurately, a safe room is a tiny, emasculated fortress).  Design your hole in the ground with this in mind at all times, if you're going to be throwing the fortress term around.

If you're planning for what happens when things get inside, you're planning to fail.  Perhaps you should instead be planning to prevent nasty things from getting inside.

[Osmosis Jones]

Vampire+pick+slabs+control levers for all major doomsday devices. Wall off completely. Done.

[Triaxx2]

Dwarf fortress, where a fortress in a fortress in a mystery in a flaming booze powered enigma is just business as usual.

A Hanging Tower. I designed this for use in Battlecat's Towersoared. It's a tower hanging out over a magma pool, with the bottom level actually sitting on the magma. It also has an enclosed pump system linking to water which runs manually, but besides that, it's completely sealed off. It's built for a single dwarf, but it could be relatively easily expanded for more. Since it's open to the caverns by fortifications, muddying the floor will generate trees and thus wood, or space for crops. But it also has bridges built into the shooting balconies to close them in case of dust attack.

[jasonwill2]

It got me wondering, where is the best place, and the best way, to design a safe room?

Setting aside the details for a moment, the answer to this most basic question is obvious.  By definition, a fortress is a big safe room (or more accurately, a safe room is a tiny, emasculated fortress).  Design your hole in the ground with this in mind at all times, if you're going to be throwing the fortress term around.

If you're planning for what happens when things get inside, you're planning to fail.  Perhaps you should instead be planning to prevent nasty things from getting inside.

I tried that, and zombies still made it inside. No, I need a safe room inside a safe room... no need to think that many layers area bad idea 

[Hanslanda]

Hm. Bridges. Apparently they solve everything.

So, you do the double trench idea mentioned before, with one side being your fortress proper, and the other side being the Panic Room. The panic room would be (most likely) just a smaller fortress with basic supplies stashed. Once your dwarves get inside it, you seal the bridges, then build a wall over the entrance. Hopefully your safe room is uncompromised by teh ZOOMBEEHZ.

Or, alternatively, your small individual safe rooms are unconnected to the Panic Room itself, and you either have to dig to it, or deconstruct a wall, also as someone suggested. That way, any one compromised section is automatically prevented from entering the Panic Room. You could combine these both, and have the individual rooms have a double trench/bridge entrance, then a wall/tunnelable section to the main panic room, which would have its own, smaller panic room.
Until, eventually, its thirty five dwarves in a 1x1 space with quantum stockpiled plump helmets and wine. At which point, you might ought just consider retrying the whole 'Fortress' thing...