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[Punching Bag]

Whenever I start my fortresses I just have to pre-plan and dig out every single possible chamber I could ever need. My mining team works 24/7 while I build up a huge labyrinth of rooms in order to meet the distant possibility of reaching ~80 dwarves. It's also gotten to the point where each and every dwarf has to have their own room with included bedroom, living room, and study (thankfully, I've crunched that down to a 5x5 area). I get so intent on planning and furniture production that my dwarves waste away because I forgot to put down farms for a year.

I also like having ultra-specialist dwarves, so the moment I have a migrant he'll be assigned to something like masonry or mining (because those are always in demand). They stay like that until I need someone on a new job, in which case I pick one of the newbies (never anyone with high skills in it) out of the pool and he exclusively does that for the rest of his life.

Also, I've got a thing for making my entire fortress out of obsidian. Furniture, walls, everything. It looks cool.

[Agent_Irons]

I totally do that thing where you grab an unskilled cheesemaker and just say "No. No hauling. No cheese. No Lye. You are a glassmaker. Make glass. Don't clean. Don't even look at anything other than sand. The sand is there. Start making glass blocks. I'll tell you when to stop."

And then I forget about him and have 300 green glass blocks. :/

I have always loved glass things, and with the recent bump to wood production I don't even need those workshops that let you cremate remains into ash. Green glass is valuable. Clear glass is absurd.

[Splint]

I totally do that thing where you grab an unskilled cheesemaker and just say "No. No hauling. No cheese. No Lye. You are a glassmaker. Make glass. Don't clean. Don't even look at anything other than sand. The sand is there. Start making glass blocks. I'll tell you when to stop."

And then I forget about him and have 300 green glass blocks. :/

I have always loved glass things, and with the recent bump to wood production I don't even need those workshops that let you cremate remains into ash. Green glass is valuable. Clear glass is absurd.

Clear glass windows in every barracks. EVERY. BARRACKS. Do it.

[Henny]

I totally do that thing where you grab an unskilled cheesemaker and just say "No. No hauling. No cheese. No Lye. You are a glassmaker. Make glass. Don't clean. Don't even look at anything other than sand. The sand is there. Start making glass blocks. I'll tell you when to stop."

And then I forget about him and have 300 green glass blocks. :/

I have always loved glass things, and with the recent bump to wood production I don't even need those workshops that let you cremate remains into ash. Green glass is valuable. Clear glass is absurd.

Time to make a greenhouse!

[rawrcakes]

I prefer shoddily-equipped (read: leather apart from breastplate and helmet) and poorly trained conscripts as defense rather than elaborate trap constructions. Casualties might be high, but hey, who said life in the fort would be easy?

Corridors and important rooms are usually multiple z-levels high.

My main fort needs to be accessable by trading caravans, as I prefer having the trade depot in the fort antechamber. If I start building in second or third cave layer, then I usually build a long, winding descent from the surface.

[TinFoilTopHat]

Plump helmets are my ONLY crop, but I counterbalance the unhappiness by smoothing/engraving EVERYTHING.

[EuphoriaToRegret]

Plump helmets are my ONLY crop, but I counterbalance the unhappiness by smoothing/engraving EVERYTHING.

I have that problem as well.

If I have a idler, I immediately make them an detailer because I feel as if If wasting time.

as for the plump helmets...

Food? Plump Helmets for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.
Drinks? Plump Helmet wine.

And if they do get unhappiness, they take a nice trip into the pit.

[escondida]

I really like making rooms needlessly large, z-level wise, though dorfs never look up. So my dining hall might be a 3-5 level cylinder, with engraved walls and statues all the way up. I also like building totally unnecessary support pillars (preferably 3x3) for any raised structure I build that branches out from a keep, such as a connecting walkway.

Oh, also, I'm fond of creating oubliettes for captured prisoners, vampires, creators of legendary wooden amulets, etc.

Oh, and if I have still-living nobles, I like to hide treasure. For instance, a fort a while back had a warrior queen with no heir, soon to die of old age. I had my armorer make a full suit of adamantium chain and steel plate (masterful, of course)...and then dumped it atop masterful gold chests built into the bottom of the well (beside 4 masterful gold statues of the queen killin' stuff in her youth, of course) as her last wish. She was buried in a steel coffin in a nearby room and the room flooded with magma. Best queen ever.

[Jigowah]

I've spent a lot of time working on various designs for a vampire blood well.  My last design infected 13 of 215 before the blood vanished and the vampire was dead.  The next design should be able to infect absolutely everyone.

I should not have combined the vampire blood well with my goblin death arena but I couldn't resist.  Tossing goblins in to a hungry
vampire was just too tempting a method of bloodletting. 

Ultimately I feel conflicted about how it turned out.  The goblins kept escaping the pitting process and often had to be put down
before any real fun was had. The dwarf pitting the goblin would often also fall into the death well.  My favorite part was that the fist
fights between the goblin, the vampire and the unlucky dwarves would go on for weeks with particular brutality and horror. 
Exploded heads, teeth flying everywhere(including outside the arena), all parties mutilated horrilby in miserable and bloody fistfights.

It was a lot of fun but it did make me feel bad for those poor fools.

[Jasoba]

I build a floor on a floor just to change its colour! I donīt want some random hematite floors near my Microcline floor!
For important room I tend to make a gold/platin floor or a red carpet(hematite) or stuff like that!

Sometimes I mine walls and rebuild them for the same purpose!

[Ruludos]

I build a floor on a floor just to change its colour! I donīt want some random hematite floors near my Microcline floor!
For important room I tend to make a gold/platin floor or a red carpet(hematite) or stuff like that!

Sometimes I mine walls and rebuild them for the same purpose!

On a related note, half-dirt half-stone complexes drive me insane. I have to floor over all the dirt so it looks like the smooth stone, and carve out all the dirt walls so they look like smooth stone. But then half the fort has this weird dirt frame from the revealed walls behind the constructions, so I have to carve out all the walls. Nothing gets done until then.

Lately I've been going to great depths to avoid this.

[Baffler]

On a related note, half-dirt half-stone complexes drive me insane. I have to floor over all the dirt so it looks like the smooth stone, and carve out all the dirt walls so they look like smooth stone. But then half the fort has this weird dirt frame from the revealed walls behind the constructions, so I have to carve out all the walls. Nothing gets done until then.

Lately I've been going to great depths to avoid this.

You have no idea how relieving it is to learn that I'm not the only one immensely bothered by this. I even change the color of different stone layers in the RAW's to match the rest of the area if I cross into a differently colored layer, to make the entire fortress uniform.

[Agdune]

Oh man, so many of these. We're all one, big, Obsessive-compulsive family, eh? Many a dwarf of mine has died waiting for me to set up a hospital, because the room wasn't ready. Or gone insane with misery because I didn't want to give anyone a bedroom until I had at the very least, exceptional furniture made of a uniform material for everyone. And a millitary? What's that? That sounds a lot like the thing I only start making once I have a full magma industry with legendary weaponsmiths/armoursmiths and access to steel. Even if I have to harvest goblinite with a battery of serrated copper spinning blades, I'm not sending anyone out there without full Armour! ...or at least, not planning to anyway. Sometimes migrants have to fight their way in, if they're unlucky.

I only (FINALLY) got rid of one of my core habits as of 40.09... Like some others talked about, I've had the thing with 7x7 rooms due to playing since 2D. Mine weren't 7x7 though, they were 13x13 (-1). Leave a single tile in the middle to act as a pillar and you had a big store room that wouldn't have a cave-in because no part of the ceiling was more than 7 tiles from a wall. Also no chance that a tantruming dwarf would break the (once breakable) constructed pillar supports.

Just gotta place the corner, then... two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen along the X axis, then count out again (under your breath, so you don't look too weird to anyone else in the room) for the Y axis, then eyeball the centre strut to be un-designated. Once you've counted out one room, you can just copy the length for the next one and only have to count out one side. Either have them in batteries of 2x2 rooms, surrounded by 3x3 corridors, or if it's a low-traffic area, 3x3 rooms with 3x3 corridors. Only the foundry gets 4x3 rooms, because they have a lot of raw materials they have to work with.

It's only taken me... what... 4 years? 6? I can't remember when the first release happened... to get rid of that habit.

...I now count 15, because then it can mesh with the default ones I found on quickfort. I feel trapped by my own compulsions.

Though I did manage to make the kitchen/farms a non-standardised size in my last fort! They were all long, rectangular and I didn't even know how many tiles long they were! That kinda counts as progress, right? They could've been anything! 20, 30, maybe even 40 tiles long!

They weren't even symmetrical. Was kinda proud of my self-restraint.

[Jigowah]

I'm sure there is a really broad spectrum of compulsion.  I can completely appreciate the desire for symmetry and order that building a fortress can inspire.  I decided to embrace all of the imperfections in color, shape and material.  I like the organic way everything looks with ribbons of different stuff in the fortress, and otherwise I would just get nothing done.

I admit that I need my walls to be uniformly made.  Dwarf construction shouldn't just look like garbage...

[Skullsploder]

I conscript the entire fort. I just hate dealing with worn clothing, so I put everyone in a squad, hand them some leather crap that counts as armour, a crossbow, and mention that the monthly goblin shoot takes place on level 13.

However, I soon become dissatisfied with the leather crap. So by this stage, with 120+ dwarves, I decide that everyone is getting steel gauntlets, helms, and mail shirts. Every time.

This takes years and years of dwarf time, HUGE amounts of very valuable resources and results in my entire fort dropping their gauntlets and running around to pick up someone else's everytime a new masterwork set is made (not to mention all my dwarves being seriously slow due to wearing steel without any armour user skill), but goddamn it's cool to be able to look at any dwarf's inventory and see a full set of steel armour. Also cool is seeing your dwarves bravely stand their gorund when they encounter the goblin ambush, sometimes even surviving long enough for the military to arrive.

That's another thing: I never build vast surface forts that control the entire flow of traffic over the surface. I'll make a small motte-and-bailey type thing, or a walled tower or something, that sits in the centre of the map, so that my hunters, fishers, and gathers really are braving the wilderness, and I never just seal up the fort until the enemy goes away or sit behind rows and rows of traps. My dwarves die fight with courage.

Also, since everyone is in the military, I seperate people into squads based on profession, with everyone in the squad having the same job set. So there's the haulers, the labourers, the masons, etc. People are never shifted between squads, unless it's from a civilian squad to a pure military squad.

And, needless to say, everything has to be masterwork. I always set up vast furnace floors with a huge stockpile for any non-masterwork metal stuff. Half my haulers are always busy hauling goblinite or similar, and I often have a full ten dwarves in my furnace operators' squad.

Any artifact armour I give to my commander/militia captains, any artifact anything else I make sure is placed in its creator's bedroom.

I've gotten over my multi-z everything obsession though, despite the reduction in beauty, and I've also moved away from the 7x7 rooms.