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[Unit88]

After setting up a basic fortress, now, I started thinking: do people just dig giant rooms to get more ores? I dug into two z-levels and currently I don't have any reason to dig any more rooms, but I only encountered tetrahidrate and I want other ores too.

[Salmeuk]

After digging a massive staircase down to the first cavern, I usually make note of what layers contain what minerals. Should I need more stone of a certain color or ore of a certain yield I simply designate exploratory tunnels around that central staircase, using the native vein-designation tool as I discover resources.

And it's true, you don't really need very large rooms especially if you abuse quantum stockpiles. However, I love to store my goods outside of bins for aesthetic purposes (specifically gems) so I tend to mine out massive storage complexes. Also unnecessarily large farms and whatnot are fun. And multi-z level entrances with majestic, engraved pillars and waterfalls.

[Albedo]

I'll drop a mineshaft down every mega-tile (48x48), and sometimes half-way between that and the center of 4 m-t's.

From there, it's ymmv as to how you explore the rest.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Exploratory_mining

[Unit88]

Thanks for the link, I probably should have looked on the wiki first. I'm gonna use that as the basis

[Albedo]

Np.

And which system you use all depends on what you're trying to find, and how you want your mine tunnels to look afterward. Networking them all together can be handy for hauling, but not so convenient when that Gremlin or a group of magma-men gets loose and starts running around from one to another. (Trust me on this.)

So, if you can plan ahead, and have "bottlenecks" where 1 wall can seal a sub-group of mineshafts and tunnels, that's not a bad thing.


Also, if diving for the Caverns, you want to be able to "instantly" block them up again, so digging down a few-several z-levels, then over 1 tile (creating a space for a wall to be built), then from there diagonally starting the stair-shaft down again (diagonally so the dwarf who builds the wall will stand on the correct side of the wall after it's done!), can save some minor (miner) headaches. (Otherwise, it's dig out the stair to  build a wall over that stair to seal it up, and dig a new stair to create access for that area.)

(Also, note that in new(er) versions, by using [Enter] you can designate digging across z-levels just like you designate a rectangle on one level. SO much better than older versions! Thanks, T!)  \o/

[LMeire]

I usually do it the other way around and repurpose ore veins/clusters for rooms/hallways. There's something about setting up in cramped hallways that the standard geometric designs just seem boring to me now. As for finding more, I just pick an unused 2x2 spot along the wall and dig staircases up or down until I hit something else, minerals tend to chain together so I end up with a lot of metal but not a whole lot of stone.

[TerryDactyl]

If you've got handy access to a computer drawing tablet, it can be great fun plotting designations with a stylus. You'll wind up with a horribly inefficient fortress, but the sprawl can become a very beautiful thing indeed, when it is no longer bound to inorganic cardinality.

[Niddhoger]

I prefer making a network of staircases.  Each staircase reveals all 8 squares around it, so I make rows of shafts spaced just enough apart (two spaces up/down and left/right between each shaft) to reveal 100% of the tiles while only digging out ~11% of them.  You'll find all the gems as well, particularly useful for locating gems that can only appear as singles (emeralds can be in clusters of 1, but the colored diamonds are found inside other diamonds).  Its also helpful to see what floors really look like and how the veins/stone/gem clusters generate without using DFHack.  Its not -that- hard to designate, but if you are just looking for ore veins its usually overkill.  For ore, I find just doing large straight line tunnels from your staircase to generally be enough.  Basically just dig out long straight lines (both horizontal and vertical) every 10 tiles or so- if an ore vein exists you'll quickly hit one.  If not, go to the next floor and queue up a shit ton of stone crafts. 

Safety isn't usually an issue if you have found the caverns beforehand.  Monsters don't just spontaneously generate in dark caverns ala gnomoria, but must arrive from the edge of the map.  You can't really expose the edge of the map either, so its really a non-issue.  You can just focus the defenses at the beginning and end of the shaft, if you need more defenses to create bottlenecks and airlocks throughout your tunnels, then you are probably playing too carelessly in the first place.  I tend to have a separate staircase leading to each cavern layer (and another to the magma sea/candy) that exist as nothing but a staircase with bridges and traps on both ends.  If a forgotten beasts appears, I can selectively close off which cavern it appeared in.  I often build "FB traps" made of bridges near the beginning of these tunnels as well.  All of these access tunnels lead into a barracks before opening up into the fort at large.  I have a separate staircase that leads to my mines, whose tunnels carefully avoid hitting the caverns (that I locate first).  If beasts get into my mines, then I have seriously screwed up somewhere else.  Straight exploratory shafts to find the caverns are perfectly safe as well.  Just dig one tile to the side of the staircase in the tile of the breach and the one above it- a connecting set of an upstairs and down stairs.  Then you remove the up/downstair from the breach and build a wall over it (should be a natural stone boulder within a few tiles).  You can then continue the shaft as you wish, or uncap it later when you are prepared to deal with the cavern in earnest. 

[PatrikLundell]

A refinement of Niddhoger's "discover and plug" strategy pointed out by someone else on the forum:
Instead of digging an up and a down staircase beside the breaching staircase and then plug the bottom of the original staircase with a wall (I used a floor rather than a wall, but basically the same method), you can actually build an Up staircase in your dug up/down staircase. The built Up staircase contains an integrated floor that plugs the breach at the bottom, and dorfs can actually build it without standing beside the tile, so the up and down staircases are not needed. Quite neat, I'd say.

Removing the Up staircase later will reveal the down staircase underneath, but probably the dug Up part of the staircase is gone, so you'd have to reuse the stone used to build the Up staircase to build an Up/Down staircase instead, should you ever want to unplug the staircase.