I redecorated one of the upper rooms, and miget and I built the beginnings of a central spiral staircase. It doesn't look to bad, methinks.
Can you have horizontal portals, now, or do they still have to be vertical? Either way, I propsoe that we make our portal down at bedrock, to simulate DF. They can be bigger in 1.8, so we should probably make use of that, too.
In general, I think we should dig down a few 'levels' and make a standard fortress layout- trap corridor, big storage rooms, airlocked mess room, bedroom wings...
I know we have some of these things already- but in DF, you always end up migrating your dwarves further down, anyway, so I don't think it matters too much.
We should probably make a spreadsheet with plans and designs for traps and superweapons. Also, we should get a voicechat going. Right now, we can only communicate over the ingame chat, which is too vunerable for my liking.
I'd be fine with using either skype or mumble.. What do people here think?
IMPORTANT QUESTION EDIT:
We're digging down a spiral staircase. Now, we're wondering about the distribution of floors. We can either have a new floor every half-turn of the staircase, or every quarter-turn. Half-turn gives you more ceiling space, obviously, but also makes it longer to go between floors on the stairwell.
I recommend you guys check it out and say what you think we should do...
Also, I was thinking of having 4 main floors beneath this one: One for living quarters/common areas, then crafting, then storage halls, then magma smelters and smithing. Does that sound good to you all?