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[Urist McVoyager]

3x3 bedrooms with beds, cabinets, chests, and doors. I don't have an issue with the tedium, I really do find the repetition relaxing. Loose wires in my brain or something. I've done dorms too, before, but considering I aim for natural growth in my own fortresses, I tend to micromanage even those to some degree.

[i2amroy]

Use macros.

This is an excellent piece of advice, especially if you use DFHack's "planning" feature ahead of time. I honestly don't even bother to plan out the macro's ahead of time, just ctrl+r, build a single bedroom in planning mode, then ctrl+r again to save it and then run it over and over again.

Generally I also tend to run larger communal bedrooms (generally 8 dwarves to a 4x5 room) since they encourages socialization between my dwarves and I love to play multi-generational "grow it yourself" forts.

[mek42]

3x3 bedrooms with beds, cabinets, chests, and doors. I don't have an issue with the tedium, I really do find the repetition relaxing. Loose wires in my brain or something. I've done dorms too, before, but considering I aim for natural growth in my own fortresses, I tend to micromanage even those to some degree.

I'm doing 3x3 rooms too.  start with beds and doors, add cabinets as the masons are freed up from other tasks.  Hadn't thought about chests.

I use a 21x21 block throughout the fort, typically.  I use 2 tile wide corridors, and make a staircase every 2 shifts, which works out to 21 tiles between stairs.  I've been trying to optimize the space, which is proving more difficult than optimizing for workshops in the same block size ( 3 rows of 5 workshops, with a 3 tile wide full length (21 tiles) storage area between each row, often with a single stair exactly in the middle of the storage area to access full block storage above and below).  What I'm settling on now is a horseshoe U of 3x3 rooms and then I can have 2 sets of three 4x4 rooms for nobles.  Each set may be replaced by either a crypt with 14 two tile tombs with a two tile wide main corridor, or I can make 6 4x4 single rooms (I like to reward legends and heroes with a 4x4 room).  The 3 4x4 rooms leave an extra wall from the block corridor, which I excavate to install statues.

[Flarp]

Macros are definitely the path of least resistence, but unless you're modifying your pop cap upwards, I don't think it's that hard to do this by hand.

Usually there's a brief lull in between obtaining a self-sustaining 20-dwarf fort and the inevitable huge migrant waves that result from cooking nice food, etc. Usually my miners don't have a whole lot to do in that interval, so I just dig out ~150 bedrooms, dump the resulting stone, and have 2-3 engravers spend the next year smoothing them out

The trick is to avoid making bedrooms in stages. If you have a surplus of 10 bedrooms, the capricious hand of fate will make sure your next migrant wave contains 20 single dwarves.

[jcnorris00]

My bedrooms are long and narrow, 1x5, with the bed at the end so that the dwarf has to walk past all of the pretty furniture (door, cabinet, coffer, miscellaneous) every time he comes and goes.  Here's a scaled-down example (only room for a bed and a door):

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My layout lets me designate bedrooms on multiple floors simultaneously fairly quickly.  First I designate the whole area for digging, then cancel the designation for the middle part (only the outer hallways are left), then designate all the way across the area on each row where the bedrooms go, then cancel the designation N/S twice to separate the left and right bedrooms in each quarter, the designate the  N/S and E/W hallways, then add the stairs.  As long as I remember to change Z levels during each designation/undesignation, I can do as many floors as I want.

[greycat]

I've been doing 3x2 bedrooms, in blocks of 10.  It works out pretty well for me -- there's a bunch of digging designation, but it only takes a minute or so.  I request 10 beds and 10 doors, which is the max size of the workshop queue, and hope I don't get any no-quality ones (I never let my dwaves install no-quality furniture, unless it's a dire emergency; if I get a no-quality door or bed, it gets atom-smashed or magma-dumped and I request a replacement).  When the area is dug and the doors and beds are ready, I install 'em, q-r the rooms, and voila.  Luxuries like smoothing, cabinets, or restraints can all wait, or may never get done at all, depending on my mood and other goals.

Since I just do 10 rooms at a time (or maybe 20-30 if the inevitable big Spring Of Year Two migrant wave forces my hand) I don't get too burned out by it.  And hell, it's not like beds are a life-or-death item these days.  If a dwarf has to sleep on the floor for a while, meh, she'll get over it.  It's not like the old days when every dwarf was constantly balanced on the knife-edge of insanity.

[darkflagrance]

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.

You can save macros to filenames too, so I basically use the same bedroom macros for every fort. Basically just write one macro that designates the entire floor full of bedrooms, and then another that fills them with beds.

Comes in handy when you need throwaway forts en mass to test a mod.

[Findulidas]

I usually go for 3x3 and I do very large ones at once so I dont have to do it very often. I dedicate one floor solely to sleeping quarters and add additional ones as I go along. Usually end up having 2-3 big ones. I dont find it very tedious or boring. Its much more annoying when I decide (which I usually do) to engrave as much as possible while still leaving room for cabinets, table and chair, beds, etc which I always plan to add in all of these bedrooms. Just cause it gives dwarves happy thoughts to live in great bedrooms.

[RocheLimit]

I used to use macros to create 'residential towers', circular arrangements of rooms, about 6/level.  Believe I still have the macro saved in the copy of df I am playing.

My current fort, however, squeezes 190 dwarves into 3 separate dorms.  Each dorm has an artifact built in it, each bed overlaps the entire room, and everyone constantly talks about that Palace-like bedroom.  Macros were used for creating rooms from the beds.  It is only temporary housing though; long-term plan is to build those aforementioned residential towers as actual towers.  That's about 30 levels of level-by-level floor, stair, & wall construction orders.

[Mostali]

I don't really see this aspect as any different from any other simulation.  In city builder games I typically spend a lot of time determining perfect size plots so housing comes out the way I want it, despite there being tools to draw out large tracts of land and let sims build where they want.

If it matters to you, you can be very detailed and individually customize rooms.  If it doesn't, plop down a bunch of beds all around your fort and dwarves will find them when they want to sleep.

[Plex]

I am perfectly okay with digging out the bedrooms. The problem is that furnishing the rooms is fucking tedious and takes half an hour to do furnish and assign one z-level of bedrooms. I'd rather give my dwarves one giant dorm than burn myself out with box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump to next room, box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump. Box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump. Box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump. Box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump. Box, cabinet, bed, assign, jump. Repeat 294 more times for the rest of the fortress population. *sigh*

[TheHossofMoss]

My starting seven get good rooms that are 3 by 3, and the rest (except for exemplary dwarfs) get 2x3 rooms. I add beds first, then cabinets. After a while, I finally get around to chests. I find it oddly satisfying.

[Sanctume]

Do chests, coffers, or bags actually get used for storage in bedrooms?

I think cabinets are only being used for storage.

I know that nobles mandate chests, coffers, or bags.

[Mostali]

Coffers are now being used to store trinkets, like amulets and such.  It wasn't always so.

As for bedrooms, I'm trying something new (for me) in my new fort.  I'm trying a hybrid of the overlapping bedroom and the pre-honeymoon suite.  When possible I'm pairing up dwarves into a bedroom/dining room.  In one case I have a male and three female dwarves all in the same age range, so they all share a room in hopes that a bond will eventually form.  That's 4 beds, coffers, cabinets, armor stands, tables, chairs plus 2 silver statues in 8 overlapping rooms all in one 5x6 physical space.

[Saiko Kila]

Coffers are now being used to store trinkets, like amulets and such.  It wasn't always so.

Basically everything they like, hehe. One of my soldiers loves seahorse. She has several roasts containing seahorses on the floor, and stuffed some of them into a bag, bolted to the floor (I prefer bags to coffers). Another likes silver, so keeps silver arrows in her bag. Rummaging through the bags' contents tells something about their owners.

However, actual wearable trinkets (like amulets or earrings) are usually worn by my dwarves. They basically steal all jewellery and show it off.