Print

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

[Plex]

Tell me, is there some secret to meticulously digging out, furnishing and assigning a crap ton of tiny 2x2 bedrooms without burning yourself out? I'm quite experienced in the game but a year or so ago I was building a bunch of bedrooms until I snapped and had to stop playing for a couple of months.

How do you do it? I can't take it anymore, everyone has a beautiful, sparkling underground citadel with hundreds and hundreds of neat little identical one-person rooms adorned with platinum statues of elves getting their asses whipped with fungiwood lashes by giant cicada women. And I don't!

I'm just curious. My strategy is to build a 10x10 dorm filled with beds, and I would like to treat my dwarves with something better.

Cheers!

[Gamer47]

I used to do it all by hand (or whatever) but i started going crazy too.
Then I discovered this nifty little tool called Quickfort (which comes bundled with "The DF Starter Pack"
It allows you to design a layout in a spreadsheet program (Excel or a gdoc) and then you can load the document into Quickfort and it will simulate all the keyboard shortcuts necessary to make it happen.

It is easy to make your own maps but if you want I can just send you my quick bedrooms design. It's a simple 4 tile bedroom type. the kind made out of an 11x11 block

[mirrizin]

The DF Wiki has some layouts that I've gotten pretty good at throwing down quickly. Then use the manager to designated a bunch of furniture.

It's tedious, kind of like typing the same words over and over again, but not horrible. I think pump stacks are far more annoying to build, though sometimes worth it.

Another idea is to build custom suites for the dwarves you think are particularly important, and then building a large, monotonous apartment complex for the rest. And build it out a few at a time so you don't get overwhelmed, also keeping your food stocks low so that you don't get overwhelming migrant waves.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

My strategy is to build a 10x10 dorm filled with beds

Make each bed a 10x10 bedroom. Since each room has 1/4 of the total values of the overlapped areas, you might end up having 100 royal bedrooms.

[Plex]

Hmm, I might have to look into that mod.

And no, I'm not even going to bother with migrants. I just let them pile in and every so often a freak accident totally not my fault kills off about half of the population.

[Trollhammaren]

My strategy is to build a 10x10 dorm filled with beds

Make each bed a 10x10 bedroom. Since each room has 1/4 of the total values of the overlapped areas, you might end up having 100 royal bedrooms.

If you feel like being cheap, add 1 trap with 10 good silver spiked balls. The dwarves will cry tears of joy.

[Plex]

Nope, I'm saving my serrated disks for trading.

I'm currently looking into the spreadsheet doohickey.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I give my dorfs 3x3 rooms with bed, cabinet and door each.
Manager makes the furniture simple (looking forward to excluding certain workshops in the next update though).

Designating all the rooms can be kind of tedious, but macros help. And working out where to put the next corridor, where to throw in temples, where the Captain of the Guard is going to go and stuff is kind of fun. Besides, you only have to dig out 10-20 at a time. It's not like anyone gets too stressed sleeping on the floor nowadays.

[Chevaleresse]

I do the same thing, usually with an "overflow" dorm. It looks reasonably nice, is easy to navigate and doesn't require fucking about to expand. probably not the most efficient thing ever but w/e

[PopTart]

To set a bed, I have a rhythm: b-click-click. B-click-click.

[Garrette]

Can't you record building designs and repeat them right inside of the game like a macro?

[Sadrice]

Use macros.  I always set up some macros for repetitive designating the bedrooms, and usually another one to place beds and another to set as bedrooms.

[Geltor]

Use macros.  I always set up some macros for repetitive designating the bedrooms, and usually another one to place beds and another to set as bedrooms.

im genuinely surprised it took this long for someone to mention ingame macros...

-record yourself digging out a room (Ctrl + R)
-play the the recording (Ctrl + P)  x times for x rooms
-after they have been dug, record yourself furnishing a room
-play for all rooms
-record yourself designating one room, play

when i first started the game and wasnt aware of ingame macros,  i would always make 1 huge dorm

[Shonai_Dweller]

Use macros.  I always set up some macros for repetitive designating the bedrooms, and usually another one to place beds and another to set as bedrooms.

im genuinely surprised it took this long for someone to mention ingame macros...

Well sorry for taking two whole hours to reply to this thread and mention macros...

[Sadrice]

I usually either make my macros per floor, if I have a complex design, or I make simple ones like "dig bedroom and move over", and I can use that on repeat to make ten rooms in a row, and designate the doorways and halls myself.


I believe there's a way to rotate macros, but I can never remember how, so I end up making different ones for different directions.  If you keep it simple, they're very quick and easy to make.

Edit: to answer the original question, since even with macros you have to designate by hand at least once, I personally rather enjoy making bedrooms, or at least the designating.  Filling with beds and activating them as bedrooms is pretty tedious.  I find the repetitive rhythmic key presses to be very meditative, and I like to make a game of figuring out more efficient ways to lay things out, like setting it up so you can use 11 step shifts instead of individual key presses.

One thing that I find helps is working backwards.  Designate a lot, and then use d-x to draw walls onto the designated space.