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[PkGamer]

I go by a very simple but successive way of building my bedrooms.I can fit quite a lot per floor.I dont bother to construct walls so the empty spaces are usualy filled up with small farms or stock piles.





They have work like this :
D=Dirt/stone  B=Bed  S=Space(Space to alow free flowing positive energy.....Thats what designers call it...I call it Space to get the hobos working) +=Door
DDD
DBD
DSD
D+D

They work since dwarf say the have great or good bedrooms =D.

Then we have the VERY FUN...emergancy flooding system.You know incase I get a loose forgotten beast in my fort or crazy merchant.



Also Its a moat.To stop it from flooding the entire fortress I eiter build walls near the main stairwell.




We also have the workshops.I always build them like this but dont add the door.I add the door if a dwarf has a strange mood.Then they go insane and starve or they go berserk and starve.Works either way =D.




And as a some pixel art I made this is usualy what can happen with a crazy dwarf.


Yes I am a pixel artist too!I even added the skulls on a stick thing =D.Yeah it was for something else.Yes dwarfs dont have access to helmets from the future.

And the farms and piles are just a whole z level mined out and flooded to make mud and then I just throw farms inthere and a pile in there !

I really need a military....I get ambushed quite a lot but they cant get through my moat since i have a bridge!

[Catsup]

looks good, very clean and efficient.

[Broseph Stalin]

The workshops are space efficient but how far are they away from your stockpiles? The further dwarves have to carry raw materials the less efficient your workshops are.

[PkGamer]

The workshops are space efficient but how far are they away from your stockpiles? The further dwarves have to carry raw materials the less efficient your workshops are.

I have it made that it looks something like this:

With D being dirt,V being workshop,+ being a door,H being the hallway,And P being the stockpile.

DDDDD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DD+DD
HHHHH
HHHHH
DD+DD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DDDDD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DVVVD
DD+DD
HHHHH
HHHHH
DD+DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
DPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPD
DPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPD

And the pattern would repeat itself.Every now and then there will be a verical hallway every 5,7 workshops so the dwarf dont have to go that far.Also as the fortress grows I disable the hauling jobs for the dwarfs in the workshops allowing them to make master crafts etc earlier as they can focus on their jobs.Oh and heres how to make LOTS of easy money.All you need is wood and a good carpenter.You get him to make wheelbarrows.They usualy sell on a minimum of 50-100 and I sold one for 700 one time.Yes wooden wheelbarrows.Ofcourse dont sell them to the elves.Sell the usualy stone crafts to them.They like stone.

[Tally]

There is a problem that I have and that I often stress out about (maybe too much, but it definitely cuts into my enjoyment of the game), and that is... I simply cannot get any good fortress designs laid out. In the early game, I usually get too caught up in the immediacy of getting people in and accomodated, and then later I have my workshops set in and decide that's good enough.

Past that, sorting and equipping migrant waves because my all-consuming concern. I would probably have better luck with that if I started confining dwarves to burrows that concern only their job. i.e. Blacksmithing burrow, mason's burrow, farmer's burrow. Haulers, engravers, military, etc. would be burrow-less, and the need for dedicated haulers might make migrant sorting an easier job to do.


I suppose where I clash is consolidating the immediate needs of the early game with the much more carefully planned modular caste fortress. There is also the matter of fortress defense and entrance traps that don't mess up trade depot routes, and all that kind of fuss. And of course, the long-arrived point is: Tips please.

[Gentlefish]

I use wheelbarrows in all of my non-bin/barrel stockpiles. All of them. Since I've yet to ever have dedicated haulers, it makes it easier for me to manage large stone stockpiles and wood and furniture and so on. Bin/barrel stockpiles get no love.

But that all becomes basically moot once I get my  B.I.G.S.I.S. (Brobdingnagian Intelligent General Stone Identifier and Sorter), a minecart assembly that sorts stone by color. It eliminates quite a few minecarts.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Brobdingnagian is a great synonym for large.

[Lich180]

-snip-

I suffer from a similar problem. I tend to overthink my designs, instead of letting my embark dictate how I will build. I like to have things set up right the first time, and HATE when I have to redo an area, just because it didn't flow properly or work the way I wanted it to.

So what I've started doing i forcing myself to NOT CARE about how my fort looks, as long as it is functional and relatively efficient. I still use the vertical shaft design, and base everything around that, but I am now working on a mostly above-ground fort that will be (hopefully) impenetrable with a 90% military recruitment rate. They will get a month off every so often, but everyone will have a crossbow and armor to be ready in case of emergency.

Temporary dorms become more permanent, while I look at my underground situation and debate on how I want to utilize it. Right now I'm just carving out ores and stone as needed for construction and equipment, while everyone non-essential to food, drink, protection, or arming the populace is building blocks, hauling stone, and constructing walls.

Its more difficult to design, but I think it helps with my idea of "once its dug, it stays". I also want to try and hide as much dirt as possible, leaving nothing but smooth stone surfaces anywhere that dirt would show up. Sure, I have an idea of what I want my fort to look like, but that note ends up torn up and in the trash halfway through my first ten years game time, because I decided I wanted something else instead, and the caverns got in the way and I was already committed to a project. Face reality, and build as you can.

If something doesn't fit, force it to. Shave the corners off the square peg and force that sucker into a round hole, just because you are Dwarf.

[Tally]

-snip-

I suffer from a similar problem. I tend to overthink my designs, instead of letting my embark dictate how I will build. I like to have things set up right the first time, and HATE when I have to redo an area, just because it didn't flow properly or work the way I wanted it to.

I think my problem is that I hate to overthink a design such as that, because that results in a very long pause of the game to do so. Although if I'm going to do anything involving water, magma, or minecarts, I'll most definitely have to overthink, which isn't terribly fun to do.

On the opposite of that, however, I want to have a fortress that at least functions elegantly, even if I may not have a need for such. But maybe I should just say screw it, and just dig down past the caverns after 3 or 4 migrant waves partially drafted, because I've held myself back from tackling the challenges of the game.

[Gentlefish]

If you hit caverns, why not brute-force your design and build it with stone blocks? Works just as well and looks much cooler.

[Tally]

If you hit caverns, why not brute-force your design and build it with stone blocks? Works just as well and looks much cooler.

Because in Masterwork, you can use concrete blocks!

[Lich180]

I think my problem is that I hate to overthink a design such as that, because that results in a very long pause of the game to do so. Although if I'm going to do anything involving water, magma, or minecarts, I'll most definitely have to overthink, which isn't terribly fun to do.

On the opposite of that, however, I want to have a fortress that at least functions elegantly, even if I may not have a need for such. But maybe I should just say screw it, and just dig down past the caverns after 3 or 4 migrant waves partially drafted, because I've held myself back from tackling the challenges of the game.

All I can say is go explore the caverns, dig deeply and greedily, and force yourself to overcome the other challenges. I've been playing seriously for about a year and a half, and only just now got to the point where I wanted to tame the caverns. So in the spirit of trying new things, I walled off the map edges, cage trapped the hell out of everything, got a GCS and sprayed webs all over the place, tamed some crundles and draltha, had the draltha go wild and kill a few dwarves, and build a massive, sprawling, inefficient-but-cool fort in the caverns.

Make a new challenge, and just build what you need where you need it instead of trying to plan. Fly by the seat of your pants, its a ton more fun.

[Mr Space Cat]

PTW and probably post some pictures of Axehole when I get around to it.

For planning fortresses I've found that doing it by hand on graph paper can be very satisfying and effective. Scale and size of some constructs can be a problem, and z-levels can be odd, but I can stack papers over one another over a bright light or something like that to check how it lines up. Planning takes some time from running the fort, but at the moment I plan the main parts of the forts out long before I even strike the earth or unpause after embarking.

As for workshop efficiency, z-levels are your friend. I've done 3x3 booths for workshops on one floor with a small specific stockpile for each shop located directly above it connected via up and down stairs and stocked by the useless hauler peasants in underground forts. It's pretty efficient in terms of travel time to retrieve ingredients, although all the manual hauling labor can be a negative (positive for me, useless migrant gits.)

[Eric Blank]

I am potentially one of the least-efficient, craziest dorfchitects out there. My fortress layouts have some basic principles in common, but that's usually about it. I don't like to get too grandiose with my architecture because then I'd have a tendency to never get it done at all. These are big images, I warn you.

So starting from the top, my outdoor area in my current fort looks like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This fortress was built between two rivers and the edge of a lake. The river to the south provides a nice natural defense for the moment, and I made a moat around the rest of the perimeter to supplement that. I like using moats to set up a perimeter quickly, but usually they aren't this wide. The stockpiles are temporary, but I haven't endeavored to set up many below ground. Likewise the mess of old workshops was part of my very first setup and I've simply neglected to remove them. The farms support all five of the local plants; hide root, longland grass, wild strawberries, prickle berries, and dinner bunions. The main stairwell/rampway is a recent addition, and I had to plug the aquifer below to get it through the entire fortress. The old 1x1 stairwell isn't as necessary now but most of the fort was designed around it anyway. The dog pillboxes are for spotting the local threats; dragonman ambushes and kobold thieves. I don't have to worry about building destroyers so much so I didn't raise but one of them. The trap bridge i the south-west is my favorite: that's where the caged animals and dragonmen come from!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the main dorm level. I haven't added cabinets to the rooms yet and not everyone has a room, but the dorm to the west is open to all. Between the surface and here is a big jumbly mess of farms and farm-related stockpiles, as well as the trade depot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the level immediately below, where the old dining hall is to the north, and the new one is being furnished to the south. The new one has a row of waterfalls across it, hence the grates, but I've got them switched off right now for maintenance. The new dining hall also features an artifact grate and I intend to install the artifact hematite table as well. I plan to convert the old meeting hall/dining hall into a carpentry workspace.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the main clothing industry floor and the villa of my retired legendary werebeast-battlemage-druid adventuress. She's not allowed to leave currently, but she'd have a nice three-story villa to enjoy if she'd stop breaking all the furniture! The workshops represent my most common design; an 11x11 room, usually with three shops along opposite walls and either another three in the middle or a stockpile.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the lowest level of the fortress; the smithy. Everything in-between I skipped because it's more a mess of twisting tunnels and water pipes, and doesn't display any new archtiecture. The smithy here is actually pretty self-explanatory, but it's a design I use over and over exclusively for my magma forges and smelters.

[DethBrand]

Actually that's not a bad idea, we could have a succession fort dedicated to functional and aesthetically pleasing designs.

Well you already have 1 sub if that happens. =)

[Centigrade]

This is the layout for my dining hall and living quarters in most fortresses.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And here it is mostly completed.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is room to house and seat 8 dozen dwarfs on this level, though putting another level directly above and below this one (so that the great dining hall is in the "middle" of three housing levels) would allow each non-dining level to house 12 dozen dwarfs, for a total of 32*12=384 individual 1x3 rooms (bed, cabinet, chest), and a legendary dining hall that can easily seat more than a third of them at once.

I am thinking about ways to improve this design, such as perhaps adding baths around the edges (channel a 3-wide rim around the tables and fill it with 3/7 water for cleaning and training swimming), and perhaps adding waterfalls at the corners of the table design (e.g., 4 at the intersections of the cross, maybe 8 more at the ends of tables). Another option is to just make statues and place them every other tile, centered in that 1x3 gap between chairs and wall. Of course, everything would be prettied up and made to look uniform by the time the project is officially "done": all tables and chairs would be of uniform materials, all walls and floors would be engraved, etc.