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[DethBrand]

So I have been watching a lot of videos in the past week or so, tutorials, LP's and other random bits as I've been trying to learn the game, but one thing that always the same in them is the way people create living space for their dwarves. Carving out a floor full of tiny 3-4 square rooms. So I can't help but wonder why? I mean later in the game when you have to many dwarves who don't do much more then push wheelbarrels I could see that, but what about the dwarves that keep the fortress going? Other then nobles it seems like no one even gets a real room.. I know I'm probably just being a noob, but has anyone ever experimented with trying to build "houses" for their working class dwarves? I think I've only seen one channel on YouTube where someone was thinking along the same lines as me while he was trying to build a "Fully Automadic Fortress" using minecarts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cnu26DIKj0&list=PLA38B117B0E6BA36A&index=1

Just wondering what your thoughts or experiments are like with this sort of thing. I'm still pretty new so I'm not quite at a level where I can really do this sort of thing well yet. -.-

[wierd]

In a word:

NOBLES

Dwarven nobility isn't simply satisfied that they have the finest rooms in the fortress.
Everyone else *MUST* live in squallor, or they fixate on it, and make your life miserable.

Heaven forbid that a peasant have a low quality puddingstone cabinet, if said noble has a fettish for puddingstone.

Prissy nobles can turn a happy, well adjusted fort into a mexican standoff really quick, since nobles are immune to the justice system, but the people they assault are not, and also suffer bad thoughts from being assaulted, and/or, witnessing or being otherwie impacted by such assault.

(Noble kills urist mcCatlady's cat. Cadlady has a fit, and punches a miner. Miner puts a pick in cat lady's brain. Catlady's husband goes on the warpath over his wife's death... on and on and on... all because Urist McNoble was "utterly traumatized" by "the pretentious living arrangements" of one of the peasantry.

Anything bigger than 5 squares is considered "too good" for peasants by nobles, because it raises the class of the room being an "adequate" hovel to being "modest", which is reserved for minor nobles, like the sherrif, the tax collector, the hammerer, and pals, though some of those may demand "decent".

Another consideration later on, is "rent", if you re-enable the economy system with DFHack. Rooms that are too fancy cannot be properly rented by their "owners", and people get kicked to the curb, and rooms go unoccupied.

[Uggh]

I totally agree, most fortresses are probably designed like a factory or penal camp, not like a proper community. I think it depends very much on what you try to achieve. If you intend some kind kind of mega project you simply don't care and do not want to divert resources elsewhere...

In my current fort I started (inspired by this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=118799.msg3770532#msg3770532) to build a real subterranean village, giving every dwarf an apartment of his own with at least a dining and a sleeping room and smoothed walls. Plumbing (wells in each apartment) will be added later. Important dwarves get bigger or more rooms and more engravings but every dwarf is checked for his preferences and these are taken into account when selecting furniture. If required the apartment may include an associated workshop complete with storage area for required materials (one level above) and depending on the goods created a small shop is added (stockpile for produced goods with glass windows facing the street).
There is also some kind of town hall (offices for manager, bookkeeper and a small statue garden), a restaurant (smaller pubs to be added later), a hotel (small bedrooms with internal doors creating a temporary dormitory for incoming migrants), etc.
Some installations like magma smelters, farms, etc. will still be factory-like and located elsewhere but the workers shall all have at least their own little place in the village to recover from the working day.

In summary, completely ineffective and a lot of micromanagement but with a personal touch that I prefer.

I started with a temporary and very ugly fort just beyond the surface and successively move everything down to the real village. I also use a pop limit that I only increase when I feel ready to accommodate more dwarves. Noble rooms are easily made valuable enough (e.g. by placing some artefacts) that nobody feels offended.
Economy has been deactivated and there is no reason to take it into account.

[Larix]

In a word:

NOBLES

Dwarven nobility isn't simply satisfied that they have the finest rooms in the fortress.
Everyone else *MUST* live in squallor, or they fixate on it, and make your life miserable.
[...]
Anything bigger than 5 squares is considered "too good" for peasants by nobles, because it raises the class of the room being an "adequate" hovel to being "modest"

All nice satire, but not actually good advice. Nobles don't give a tinker's cuss about the actual value of anybody else's dwellings, as long as they're lower than whatever they have. The duchess in one of my forts is ecstatic with not a single bad thought about anybody's dwellings, and four dwarven children are sleeping in 'royal' bedrooms. Not one of the >100 occupied individual bedrooms is below 'quarters' quality, which is one level better than 'modest'.

The main point about being sparing with bedrooms is that ordinary workerdwarfs already get a pretty good thought for a individualised bed in a dormitory, i.e. a 1x1 "room" without walls consisting of the bed alone. 1x2 or 1x3 walled-off niches give good feelings for little effort and reduce dwarven socialising. My experience says that it's perfectly possible to keep a large number of dwarfs happy to ecstatic without individual bedrooms (apart from the few who absolutely require them); just let them crash in a large dormitory and give them a legendary dining room enabled as meeting hall and decorate your fortress with high-quality furniture. Architect-designed constructions also give happy thoughts to peasants, even if they're plain silly stuff like a trade depot in the dining room or a screw pump in the bedroom.

When i do make individual bedrooms, they're never smaller than 3x3 underground. I'm particularly fond of 3x3+1, i.e. a square room with a one-grid niche, which can then be filled with a statue or window.

[wierd]

Really?

It's always been my experience dealing with nobles, that the higher they rise in the nobility food chain, the more detached from objectivity they become.

I have had several fortresses with the duke/dutchess in lavishly opulent rooms, with carved floors and walls, personalized masterwork/artifact furnishings, and all the trimmings, having fits over the mayor be in a 5x5 room with low quality armor stands and weapons racks. I know this is the offending room, because I moved some of the armor stands out of his bedroom and into his office and dining rooms, and urist McPrissyNoble finally started to come down from te hysterics.

Anymore, I give peasants a 1x5 "tube room", with a bed, a cloth bag, and a wooden cabinet. That's usually enough to keep them on could 9, but even then, sometimes nobles will have a fit when the mayor gets booted from office and hasn't been evicted yet.

[toomanysecrets]

I do 2x2 rooms, or 1x4, and never do anything bigger than 3x3 unless it's for the king.  Giving everyone a big room is just too tedious and a waste of energy in my view especially once you have 200 dwarves, and swarms of kids are claiming beds like there's no tomorrow.  It's not hard to do, it just distracts from more dwarfy projects.  Dwarves hardly ever sleep anyway.  Plus, a 1x4 room with decent quality furniture and smoothed walls is more than enough to give your dwarves the "slept in a very good bedroom" thought.

Digging rooms in the middle of a big gold or silver vein is the best way to make sure you get really high value rooms for the king/duke/noble that won't be matched by anyone else.  Sure you could make an enormous room, but exploiting gold walls/floors will make it really easy to get a "Royal" set of rooms that the king demands.  I have never had problems with nobles getting pissed about other people's rooms unless I absent-mindedly smooth some gems or some other precious mineral on a wall/floor in a "lesser" worker's room.

Of course, everyone does their own thing and there is no wrong or right answer.

[Mushroo]

Why do you call a 3-4 square bedroom "tiny"? That is big enough to hold 3-4 dragons, or titans, or forgotten beasts. It is big enough to stockpile a year's worth of food. It is big enough to hold several bins full of weapons, armor, rock blocks, or finished goods. And it is plenty big enough for a non-noble 4' tall humanoid. Real-world humans can (and do) live in much higher population density.

[wierd]

Dwarf fortress features a world with unusual physics, such that there is no limit to information density. (Which is why planepacked can exist.)

[codyorr]

Well, I give either 2x2 or 2x3 to the bulk population, with a cabinet to boot. Sure, it's not the largest room, but it's suitable.

Ditto.

[Telgin]

All nice satire, but not actually good advice. Nobles don't give a tinker's cuss about the actual value of anybody else's dwellings, as long as they're lower than whatever they have.

Unless Toady did something with this in the current version, this was absolutely not the case in .31.25.  I had a noble tantrum and put her pick in someone's lung because of pretentious sleeping arrangements, despite the fact that her room was four times the size and ten times the value of anyone else's.  I haven't tested this for sure in the present version, but I doubt it was changed and I believe I've seen this thought on my current duke.

It's easily lost in their thought spam and doesn't always show up.  I'm not sure what triggers it, actually.  For that matter, from my experimenting in .31.25, they could only get one negative room related thought at a time.  So they might be annoyed at someone's tomb, or someone's bedroom, but never both and never for more than one peasant at a time.

Anyway, on topic I now give my citizens 3x3 rooms with a bit of extra furniture because I like the way it looks and prefer to be nice to them.  It's still pretty artificial feeling in that it's all in nice rows with mechanical precision, however.

[Vercingetorix]

Unless Toady did something with this in the current version, this was absolutely not the case in .31.25.  I had a noble tantrum and put her pick in someone's lung because of pretentious sleeping arrangements, despite the fact that her room was four times the size and ten times the value of anyone else's.  I haven't tested this for sure in the present version, but I doubt it was changed and I believe I've seen this thought on my current duke.

It's easily lost in their thought spam and doesn't always show up.  I'm not sure what triggers it, actually.  For that matter, from my experimenting in .31.25, they could only get one negative room related thought at a time.  So they might be annoyed at someone's tomb, or someone's bedroom, but never both and never for more than one peasant at a time.

Anyway, on topic I now give my citizens 3x3 rooms with a bit of extra furniture because I like the way it looks and prefer to be nice to them.  It's still pretty artificial feeling in that it's all in nice rows with mechanical precision, however.

I checked this in my fort just now; no dwarf in my fortress has lower than modest quarters for their residence and the duchess never gets a bad thought regarding room quality (nor do any of the other nobles).  She's ecstatic in fact with only good room thoughts.  That being said, I've had them go absolutely *nuts* in a shockingly short amount of time if they don't have adequate rooms and/or others consistently have better ones than they do.  To avoid this in this fort I had to kick the mayor out of the mayoral mansion to keep the newly-appointed baron happy long enough for her quarters to be completed.  After that, smooth sailing.

Right now, I'm building every dwarf a 3x3 room with gold furniture to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Figurewhip.

[Telgin]

Interesting, I think you may be right.  I fired up my fort to check it and my duke doesn't have any bad thoughts related to it.  It could just be a fluke in that he just happens to not be annoyed right now, but I'm not sure yet.

I tried my .31.25 fort and sure enough, my duchess is very annoyed at someone's pretentious sleeping arrangements despite having by far the best room in the fort.  Perhaps Toady did change this for .34.x.

An alternative theory I've read is that it's a noble's kids that cause the offending thought.  Their kids aren't labeled as nobles, and the theory was that whenever they slept in the bedroom with mom or dad, it annoyed their parents because there was a peasant (their kid) sleeping in a bedroom as good as theirs.  I'm not sure if anyone has tested this theory much, but it does coincide with what I'm seeing.  My current duke in my .34.11 fort is single, while my duchess from .31.25 is married with 4 kids.  Seems plausible.

[Nuoya]

Dwarfs aren't people. They don't need a dining room cause they'd rather party in the mead hall every day. They don't need closets because 1 tile holds infinity things. They don't need bathrooms because they use 100% of their consumption. And they don't need living rooms because there's drink and industry. They just need a bed behind a door to make babies, and socks.

[Cheedows]

"How can my son sleep in a quality room like ours!  HE SHOULD SLEEP IN THE MINES!"  Frankly I'm a noob and never even got nobles like dukes or barons yet, but my mayor assaulted his wife for not making quivers while she was busy mending the wounded.

[Sutremaine]

You can hit R to get a list of the rooms and various other things in the fortress. The rooms are arranged in order of raw value. Sometimes a room can get a massive value boost from veins or certain gem clusters, and this isn't necessarily noticeable.

You can also dig out large aesthetically-pleasing rooms for your general population but resize the 'room' and place the furniture so that the bedroom only covers the same amount of tiles and objects that a much smaller room would.