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[EBannion]

There is a shared door, but I've read (though not tested) that doors aren't included in room value, so that should just be saved effort.

From my experience, this has to do with how room designations happen. If the door is up before you designate the room, it will be just like a wall, so not included in the room, but unlike a wall, it doesn't have an influence on the total value.

However, if you designate the room first, or set the door to internal before designating the room, you can get the door included inside of the room.

I only have anecdotal evidence for this, but it seemed pretty reliable to me. My experience came from an artifact door and my travails in getting it to make my noble happy.

[Smarmet]

There is a shared door, but I've read (though not tested) that doors aren't included in room value, so that should just be saved effort.

From my experience, this has to do with how room designations happen. If the door is up before you designate the room, it will be just like a wall, so not included in the room, but unlike a wall, it doesn't have an influence on the total value.

However, if you designate the room first, or set the door to internal before designating the room, you can get the door included inside of the room.

I only have anecdotal evidence for this, but it seemed pretty reliable to me. My experience came from an artifact door and my travails in getting it to make my noble happy.

This is my Understanding as well. The problem as I hear it is that designating the room with an open space on the border automatically lowers the value by 1/4. So in terms of general use the shared door shouldn't be an issue, unless the door is worth more than 1/4 of the room (as may be the case for an artifact.)

On the walk efficiency note, I still have no idea where the wiki's numbers come from. I do think my earlier design can be improved on in large fortresses by building larger crosses closer to the top (or wherever your access to the stack is) and steadily decreasing the size of the crosses as you go down. The differences here are moot of course, but !!Science!! must root out the last decimals of mean walk efficiency. Someday we may have to move magma to 200 individual melting chambers after all, and we need it to get there fast.

Edit: Did some engineering and the best I can do is a 44 room cross followed by a 36, 2 28s, 2 20s and 2 12s. Average distance works out to 8.84, including Z-Lvls. Max Distance is only 12, on the very top floor at that.

[AlwayzL3git]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I use this one. Supports 224 dorfs.
It is possible to support 313 if you re-size it.

[Veylon]

I like this pattern:

Sixty apartments, each 3x2, and wide open plazas for dining, parties, storage, or workshops.

[DWC]

A lot of those 'fractal' bedroom layouts with the one set of stairs in the center are terrible for pathfinding, dorfs end up searching through every single bedroom, nook and cranny and maze-like hallway on every z-level to get into just about any room. Some of them are bad enough that you could not even intentionally design a layout worse for pathfinding. The more compact ones with straight hallways are the best.

Also, although bedroom doors don't add to room value normally, they do tend to get admired by their occupant fairly often, especially when they are just hanging out in their rooms on break.

[Koremu]

I never quite understand why people insist on having a single bedroom structure.

All of my forts have different sub-forts with the relevant workers sealed (burrowed, often physically sealed once I got the railroads working right) inside their work zone.

So the farming and cloth manufacture zone has its own internal workforce, with no outside contact, as does the metalwork zone, etc...

Also cuts down on the number of friendships & lessens the chance of tantrum spirals.

[gabandre]

from my modular fortress system:

[wierd]

A lot of those 'fractal' bedroom layouts with the one set of stairs in the center are terrible for pathfinding, dorfs end up searching through every single bedroom, nook and cranny and maze-like hallway on every z-level to get into just about any room. Some of them are bad enough that you could not even intentionally design a layout worse for pathfinding. The more compact ones with straight hallways are the best.

Also, although bedroom doors don't add to room value normally, they do tend to get admired by their occupant fairly often, especially when they are just hanging out in their rooms on break.

How would you rate my layout on page 1? With the 3 tile wide hallway modification, up/down stairs can be put at the intersections, reducing total path distances between discrete locations to mimal integer amounts, but I am curious about the computation costs. The uniformity of the layout may cause penalties where many routes have the same cost, and the ai has to pick one.

[DWC]

The 'der commissar' layout seems pretty efficient, narrow hallways and short dead-ends are about the best you can do for pathfinding. 3 wide hallways are not great, because the algorithm has to search those too, wider hallways are more to prevent congestion with a lot of moving dorfs, but bedroom complexes don't get much traffic, especially if you use meeting areas, so it's fine to use 2-wide or even 1 wide hallways.

That said, in architecture, hallways are to be avoided when possible because they are basically wasted space, more space used for hallways the worse but it's difficult to make any complex layout without using hallways. So your noble quarters would be better if it was just 4 big rooms connected with doors without any hallways.

[wierd]

The issues I usually run into are "cat lady with 50 bazillion kittens following her" congesting the dormatory hallway. Two wide halls congest under furball infestations, and for some reason catladies are unimpressed with attempts to euthanize. (I often have to pen them up inside a "very special" pen/pasture, directly under a raising bridge, with walls all around it so nobody can see the deed. Even then, scary cat lady tends to get psychic vampired by more cats later, and killing the catlady isn't an option unless you want the tantrum spiral. Somehow catladies always have deep friendship trees.)

[DWC]

Yeah, I feel you with the cat lady problem, why I now usually don't bring animals at all to the fort and tend to conduct periodic purges of the strays from migrant pets to keep it from getting out of hand. I'm all for the occasional pet donkey or whatnot, but cats are especially dangerous. Best method for rehabilitating cat ladies I've found is to establish a large pet cemetery and a danger room.

A lever set on repeat in a small field of upright spike traps with training spears can help the afflicted dorf break free of the cat's terrible psychic stranglehold.

I've been experimenting with hallway-less fortresses, just having a central room with rooms connected to rooms, stacked on top of other rooms, but I'm thinking all the open spaces is probably not ideal for pathfinding, so maybe making 'virtual hallways' with traffic zones and lots of stairs then I might end up running into congestion in these pathways and in the stairs. So I suppose there is a happy medium, depending on how that area is used, that I'm not really sure how to find.

[jonanlsh]

to prevent catsplosions, i have all my cats held in a pasture far, far away from dwarf traffic. when kittens are born, i butcher all the females and let the males live. occasionally, if i am feeling gracious, i keep a female kitten alive to continue to breed and produce more butcherable fluff-balls.

[Smarmet]

A lot of those 'fractal' bedroom layouts with the one set of stairs in the center are terrible for pathfinding, dorfs end up searching through every single bedroom, nook and cranny and maze-like hallway on every z-level to get into just about any room. Some of them are bad enough that you could not even intentionally design a layout worse for pathfinding. The more compact ones with straight hallways are the best.

Also, although bedroom doors don't add to room value normally, they do tend to get admired by their occupant fairly often, especially when they are just hanging out in their rooms on break.

A shared door can be admired just as easily as a separate one though, so I'm pretty sure door sharing isn't an issue in this version.

The pathfinding thing has much less to do with the central staircase than with having rooms behind other rooms. That's quite easy to do even without stairs (OP's design is actually quite bad in this respect, as is the der kommisar.) Besides, even an inefficient search for a 5 step path is likely going to terminate faster than an ideal search for 50 steps. The greek cross actually has very good pathing properties.

I never quite understand why people insist on having a single bedroom structure.

All of my forts have different sub-forts with the relevant workers sealed (burrowed, often physically sealed once I got the railroads working right) inside their work zone.

So the farming and cloth manufacture zone has its own internal workforce, with no outside contact, as does the metalwork zone, etc...

Also cuts down on the number of friendships & lessens the chance of tantrum spirals.

Certainly sub forts can improve the efficiency and survivability of a fort, and are usually a good idea. They don't change the bedroom mechanics much though; each burrow still needs bedrooms. It just advocates for the smaller, more compact bedroom designs.

As to the cat ladies, if you're facing that problem you have larger concerns than bedroom design.

[bottles]

Last week I got really high and came up with this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(It's on my other computer, so I'll come back and replace that with a better screenshot later.)

I think it can be expanded outward while keeping to the same design well enough, though I haven't tried. I prefer to just make a few z-levels of these. At 40 bedrooms per floor, I don't think I'll ever play a fort without getting bored long enough to even need more than one and a half of these (with married dwarves and whatnot). Dunno yet what to do with the empty spaces in this design (in the corners and around the center stairwell).

[jonanlsh]

Last week I got really high and came up with this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(It's on my other computer, so I'll come back and replace that with a better screenshot later.)

I think it can be expanded outward while keeping to the same design well enough, though I haven't tried. I prefer to just make a few z-levels of these. At 40 bedrooms per floor, I don't think I'll ever play a fort without getting bored long enough to even need more than one and a half of these (with married dwarves and whatnot). Dunno yet what to do with the empty spaces in this design (in the corners and around the center stairwell).

Make them spaces into statue gardens. Beautiful statue gardens. Make ALL your bedroom entrances into statue gardens. I'm NOT sure if it helps with happiness by forcing happy thoughts but its worth a shot.