Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wheeljack]

Depends on what I'm after really. Most of my forts hug the surface within the first ten or so layers of stone, mainly because I hate skipping levels or stretching the fortress too much over the z levels. I like being to have the above ground farms and pasture space, too, but a nice mossy cavern can work too.

If I'm going for the lava sea, I set up shop down there and stay down there. Caravans can come through the caverns if they want to, but I'm perfectly able to thrive without them. With that set up, it's usually the ten levels right above the lava that get claimed, with a very rudimentary check point at the surface. I've actually seal off the surface a few times and was just fine ignoring the petty grievances of surface dwellers. XD

[Jervill]

I build it in the first stone levels near the surface, and only allow dirt walls for the farming areas.  If part of the fort has dirt walls and isn't a farm, the walls are replaced by stone.  I also prefer to build fortresses that have at least a small presence on the surface and stretch down.

I only have waystations near the cavern levels and below.

[Broseph Stalin]

Rarely more than 5z's for actual fortress business. Farms, Stockpiles, Workshops, Quarters, Dining/Tombs/Jails/Noble Quarters.

[IndigoFenix]

I usually concentrate the majority of the population near the surface where the stone is softer and easier to dig, using the lower caverns mainly for utilitarian purposes.  Sometimes I'll put the smelters and forges down there, to minimize hauling of ore.  However, if I encounter a marble or other flux layer later on and have a bunch of spare miners, I like to hollow it out and gradually migrate the fort down there.  Marble floors make for more valuable living space, which helps keep dwarves happy.

[TD1]

I dig really close to the top at first, then make a smelting/crafting/smithing village down near the bottom.

[wobbly]

I tend to like part-map aquifiers & digging round the aquifier rather then through, so usually I'll dig a temporary dirt fort right next to the wagon then shift over to a real fort in the 1st patch of stone I can find & then start stretching downwards.

[Aslandus]

I usually build all my workshops  in rooms near the entrance to start, then after I get more settled in I spread stuff out more, moving forges closer to where fuel is produced, kilns near where clay is and glass furnaces near the sand (unless magma is available, then near the magma). I'll often end up with most of my rooms near the surface, with sleeping quarters below and jail, hospital, etc near the residential area. I'll also have small mini-dining rooms throughout with stockpiles for food and drink and tables and chairs so my dwarves don't have to climb 50 sets of stairs for some plump helmet stew and potato wine before going back down 50 sets of stairs to build more rock chairs...

[Sutremaine]

Occasionally I've actually started a fort all the way down to lava in order to get decent forges running. This is, of course, absolutely impractical. Hauling all of your goods to the bottom alone occupies most of my time when I do this.

I chuck it all down the stairs onto a general stockpile, ensuring first that nobody will be walking up and down said staircase during the dumping.

One could also dump straight onto the top level of stairs and then channel out that tile to have everything fall down at once, but I literally just thought that up so I don't know the specifics of how it would work.

[Foxite]

My current default design involves digging a 3-wide hallway, and a 3x3 central stairway for the whole fort. Five zlevels lower I dig out the "workfloor" - the general purpose stockpile, workshops and their stockpiles, ad anything related to industry. One zlevel under that I dig out the "civ floor" - the dining room, the kitchen, the nobles' rooms, and later bedroom for every dwarf. After reaching self-sustainingness, I start various projects including the graveyard, water reservoir and well, appartments, and much later, when making coke starts to annoy me, a magma-powered metal industry.

Describing my design strategy in a script would be like this:
Embark site requires some or little soil, shallow metals(some form of iron especially), deep metals and flux. Needs a suitable hill, the side of which must be at least 30 tiles away from the surface. Aquifers are to be avoided but tolerated. Any temperature, but trees must be "Woodland" or more. Plenty of other vegetation is preferred. Alignment must be "calm", "wilderness", or "mirthful". If I'm feeling lucky "untamed wilds", "Serene", or "Sinster". River should be avoided but is tolerated. Area must cover 3x3 that meets all these requirements.
1. Start by designating 5 trees to be chopped and digging out one-wide hallway, 20 tiles long, followed by central stairwell for entire fort. If no suitable hills to dig into are present, abandon and search for another site. Also designate 10x10 refuse stockpile, preferably far from the enterance.
2. 5 zlevels below surface, dig out general purpose stockpile with everything except refuse, corpses, wood, and stone. Next to that dig out workshop area with a carpenter's, mason's, and mechanic's, along with a stone and wood stockpile. 1x1 garbage dump, too.
3. Under that, dig out a 10 tile wide hallway with a 10x10 dining hall at the end. In the meantime, order 5 wooden tables, 5 rock thrones, and a rock door to be made. These will be placed in the dining hall later later.
4. Dig out kitchen area. Room should be 10x10 large. Room has a kitchen(workshop), still, and a fishery. A 3x3 room behind a door has the butcher's shop. The remaining space is filled with a stockpile that accepts everything in the food category, except for seeds, and also allows barrels and pots.
5. Dig out room for the metal industry. Unless we haven't had migrants yet, put a forge and 3 smelters. Start digging out metal ores and coal. If no coal is present, build a wood furnace and set make charcoal to work fulltime. Assign a bookkeeper and manager which both are the same dwarf, preferably some unskilled farmer or such. Remove all of his labors. Bookkeeping precision will start at low and will be increased every time I see inaccurate numbers. Order 30 barrels and once ten are made, set making booze on repeat.
6. Order 5 beds to be made and dig out a dormitory.
7. Start making 30 bins, routinely every 2 seasons until the 3rd year.
8. Stuff the hallway with three rows of stone falls, 4 cage traps, and 5 weapon traps in that order. Weapon traps are equipped with 3 iron discs, 3 iron spikes, and 3 iron spiked balls each.
9. Select ten unused dwarves and draft them into the militia. Order 10 iron axes, and 10 iron breastplates, leggings, and helmets, to be made, and ten wooden shields. Make a barracks just outside the front gate. After the 4th migrant wave, start making steel and replace all iron armor and weapons with steel versions. Melt all iron equipment. From that point, draft more migrants until we have an axe squad, a sword squad, a crossbow squad, and a mace squad, with 10 soldiers each. Prepare burrows and alert levels. Training rotation is at least 6 dwarves at all times all year.
9. By now we're self-sustaining. Many projects will follow. The first one will be a water reservoir filled with water from the caverns. (If there's no water, then, well shit) The windmill battery to power the pump stack will be reused in the future for other powered stuff. The second project is building every type of workshop, largely useless but always useful to have ready.
10. The third major project is a large outer wall around the enterance, with plenty of inner space, a roof, and fortifications. Draft many unoccupied dwarves with the carpenter labor regardless if they have skill. Don't bother disabling after the wall is done.
11. The fourth major project is appartments. A 3x3 room for every dwarf, with a cabinet in each room. Smoothe and engrave the whole thing afterwards.
12. After a while, making coke will become annoying. Dig down to magma. Try to avoid the caverns and do not explore them. To save FPS.
13. After reaching the 150 population milestone, and with at least 2 legendary melee squads, dig candy. Start by replacing the weapons with candy ones, except for the maces.
14. From this point, the fort will be subject to boredom and !!SCIENCE!!. After lots of boredom, retire and visit in adventure mode.

[Uristides]

Always on the first few levels because that's where the soil usually is, I hate skipping z levels and I love having lots of green pastures for all my alpacas, llamas and yaks. The most far down buildings I have are usually military outposts near the caverns. By the time I breach them I usually have so many idlers the constant hauling doesn't bother me at all.
I really want to try a deeper embark some time and have fun with magma, but I always end up doing something quite like what I always do whenever I set out to try something new, can't be helped.

[Madventurer]

I tend to dig a long, twisting tunnel 3 tiles wide until I have 3-5 levels of solid stone above me. Depending on embark, that's 5-10 levels underground.

[Badger Storm]

I almost always build into a mountainside, either at the base on on the slopes, and generally only have, at most, 5-6 layers.  The first stone layer always gets used as dwarf living quarters.

[Urist McVoyager]

I tend to try finding perfectly flat embarks. My farms sit on the lowest soil layer before stone, with the dining hall sitting in the top stone layer. The bedrooms are never less than seven layers down because the wiki mentions sound traveling that far from woodcutting and surface life.

[Thisfox]

I used to have my construction levels a couple of levels below the aquifer, the dining/living area a level or two below that, then bedrooms and crypts below that. There's usually enough room between aquifer and caverns for this to happen.

More recently, with my magma experiments, I've been digging down to about halfway, where with any luck there's nice ore or marble. If so, I put in a second dining/living area, complete with offices, and dining rooms, and a second waterfall and dwarfwash with sculpture garden. Then I dig again, to the magma levels at the bottom, and put in a third dining/living area. Same again, of course, waterfall, dwarfwash, private and public dining, etc.

So I've got three "dining" rooms and I call them "Upper", "midlevel" and "lower" dining rooms. I then put in new accomodation down on the lower dining area, a few levels above it, usually, and move my metalworkers, miners and etc down to those rooms instead of the rooms they had upstairs. This means that they have no real reason to go upstairs for food, bed, or socialisation. And I find that they then just choose to stay down there, so long as the transporters carrying the food and booze remember to refill the lower dining kitchens with fresh produce.

People keep telling me it's possible to pumpstack the magma up to a holding area upstairs, but so far I haven't had much luck doing that, so this is my solution. It's basically three forts, at different levels in my map. I even put in a huge hatchcover set halfway between each living area, so if necessary, I could even forbid the movement between the three forts.

[Hielkeoh]

Quite close to the surface, mostly in the beginning for wood and later just because everything is there. Once I have a basic fort I start digging down for some candy and !FUN! fluids.