OK, my recommendation largely revolves around a single concept: Moderation. I know it's hard to judge in this game, but you should figure out how much you need, and stop before you trip yourself up with your own excesses. DO NOT just leave things running on repeat just because you can. That fortress is insanely sprawling, and almost all of it appears to be excess materials you can't find a use for.
Well, OK, two concepts: Make your fortress vertical. This is a ridiculously flat layout of fortress, and it makes haulers have to work 10 times as hard as they need to.
Why do you have a giant outdoor pasture? Most animals don't need pasture, and are best left in a single-tile pasture in a cavern, virtually all egg-layers included. Even pasture animals are generally best underground in soil layers where they can graze away the cavern moss without opening up your fortress to aerial attack. If you aren't breeding them, and they don't need to graze, cage them. Your FPS will thank you.
With climbers, a wall like that isn't very secure. Put everything underground. You can dig down to the next-to-last soil layer (or layer right above the aquifer) and floor over the spaces (possibly with some extra walls building up for more z-space) to make a "greenhouse" for aboveground trees if you want your forest. You don't need nearly so giant a space as you have.
Judging by the absolute dearth of trees inside your walls and the cheek-to-jowl packing of trees outside, plus the copious amounts of logs, I'm assuming you are habitually clear-cutting the surface without regard for your capacity to actually store or use that much wood. While I can applaud your wanton provocation of the elves, that's exactly the sort of thing that causes your fortress to have a hauling nightmare. Only cut when you're actually low.
Your food production is INSANELY oversized. You only need about 1-2 tiles of farm per dwarf. If you have made a giant boxy stockpile out of basically a quarter of a z-level of your entire embark, just use minecarts to create a quantum food stockpile. (Better yet, tone down food production. You don't get an anything but more rats for producing enough food to feed a fortress 10 times your size.)
The same goes for most of your other stockpiles. If you can't consume the bones and other things in a reasonable manner, use a channel going down the vertical length of your fortress as a pit for garbage dumping, and make a drawbridge at the bottom to atom-smash it all once a season or so to keep FPS under control. Armok forbid a necromancer found that body part stockpile.
In fact, it appears as though you have a large number of random boulders lying around in the finished goods storage you dug out just because you didn't have enough room to fit all the other excess goods you were producing. So you're making a mess trying to find room to clean up the mess you already have...
Why on earth would you need three or more of every kind of workshop?
Your living quarters and working quarters both are based upon completely horizontal design, as well, which vastly increases distance traveled for every job, and by extension, time taken in hauling. You can generally do with only one of every type of crafter (or split a single crafter between several disciplines) if you just compact your production line.
My personal preferred method is to build a dining hall in the center in the first stone layer, and make residences attached via stairs or ramps directly below the corners of the dining hall.
See this article for multi-level housing, which vastly reduces useless hallway space. My personal favorite is the six-bedroom cluster. Seven of those per floor five floors deep is enough to house everyone but the nobles and fit entirely within a 25x29x5 space, which makes it cram into a 2x2 embark easily. (Just put nobles the next floors down with merged room space.)
Make each industry have its own separate stairwell or rampway in a ring around the central living areas. Stockpiles go in the soil above, and workshops are just one (or two if you like doors) tiles from the stairs to the stockpiles, extending downward, not outward, if necessary. Total trip from stockpile to workshop and back should not be more than 10 steps, maximum.
All told that can compact your whole primary fortress to within about 50x50x10 tiles. (Not counting wood production or mining.) Such is MASSIVELY easier to handle.
If you want to go "pretty" and make some interesting patterns, that's one thing, but excavating giant square caverns (which generates tons of boulders) just to hold the boulders you already have is a nightmare and nearly the worst thing possible for FPS...
Anyway, even with an efficient fortress, you probably want about 10% of your fortress as dedicated haulers. (Although infrequent jobs like shearer or milker are fine.) If you are aggressively quarrying the site, make it up to 70%. I'm at the start of my second year in a fort right now, and nearly everyone who isn't a soldier, or miner is working on my magma-moving projects by either hauling or engraving tracks. (I have one farmer, brewer, carpenter/woodcutter, and mason working on basic sustainability, and the carpenter is mainly for barrels and beds.)
Keep in mind that a "mature" fortress does not need much in terms of production. You need one clothier, one spinner, one dyer/thresher, two growers, a brewer, a cook, and some weaponsmiths to keep churning out bolts if necessary. Virtually everything else can be produced on an as-needed basis.
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Topic: Nestboxes, eggs and hauling jobs (Read 1628 times)