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[TomIrony]

I have problem when starting new forts that my "temporary| settlement to get everyone to safety as soon as possible usually ends up becoming my main settlement.

I'd like to dig a 5-wide tunnel going all the way down to the caverns and then start my fort, but keeping the dorfs alive long enough to stave off !!FUN!! (until maximum !!FUN!! can be achieved) ends up ballooning into my main tasks.

How do others usually go about it? Build a small fort first and then a bigger one lower down later?

[Iamblichos]

Generally I dig a small chamber for everyone, build a butcher shop to take out the draft animals, and then bolt for the caverns with my miners.  Only once I've gotten them a way to get booze and hit magma do I start figuring out where I want the "main fort" to be.  Dwarves are pretty resistant to unhappiness early on, so hanging out in a single room doesn't irritate them much.

[Sanctume]

I just think of my first fortress as public housing for peasant and haulers.
The new above (or below) ground condos are a step up the economic ladder once someone shows interest in specific labors, or military. 
Nobles get the special quarters.

[Tacomagic]

I generally start with a general dormitory/dining room/animal pen room or set of rooms in the dirt level (top stone level if playing in an embark without soil).

Everyone stays there while I work on more permanent rooms in the stone levels below.  Once I have everyone situated with rooms, I bulldoze the temporary area and renovate it into usable space with constructed walls, floors, and whatnot.

If I'm feeling particularly dwarfy, I'll cast the entire level in obsidian and carve from that instead of using constructed walls.

[PwndJa]

If you're turning off aquifers you're messing up, trust me that the extra effort is worth it and you'll be pleasantly surprised with the work you put in and how things fall together after that(Good luck running a fort in a hole in the dirt, no stone, etc). If not, doesn't matter, I start all my forts the same with or without aquifers.
Entrance is necessarily as grandiose as my dining hall, a long 5 wide corridor that serves as the doorway, transitions into 3 wide after I sort the space necessary for my trade depot/wagon access. I've been doing 4 wide -> 2 wide recently just because I think 3 wide hallways through the main chambers are too much even for max capacity, and to keep things looking clean you gotta have standards. But in this long doorway corridor, I set up where I will dig down into caverns 1 and 2, usually a T where the intersection of the T is my staircase to the surface. The left and right of the T, because I'm not digging that deep just yet, are turned into rooms, a meeting hall and a 3x3 dorm with 6 beds, enough for 20 dwarves. Soldiers train at the junction or on the surface depending on how fun the area is, and I always start training asap because I dislike danger rooms.

[Grimlocke]

I dig out a large 1-level high hall where I put all the temp stuff. Stuff gradually gets moved to a more permanent place and eventually I pull out all the furniture and other junk and turn it into storage room, crypt or underground animal pen.

Keeping all the messy temp junk in one big room makes it easier to clear out later, and its ugly enough that I won't be to be lazy and leave it there permanently 

[Salmeuk]

I used to run into this problem, where I never really transitioned to a main fort despite thd need for more space and better workflow.

Now, I tend to skip the temp fort entirely. Instead I opt to always dig out a main hall that can fit all the caravan supplies, food, and early workshops. While I dig out the rest of the fort, this main room serves as a temporary and modular storage / workshop / gathering place. What makes this different from a temporary fortress is that, once I've complete the rest of the fortress proper, I evacuate this main hall and use it for a trade depot / tavern / whatever I need a large, empty room for.

So I guess, never build a temp fortress but instead build an easy-to-dig segment of your main fortress and live in that for a while.

[ManaUser]

I know what you mean. One thing I sometimes do (not saying it helps that much...) is to plan something like: Okay temporary dormitory will become my barracks once I get proper lodgings dug, the trade depot will go in where this mason's workshop is... etc. So in other words try to plan your initial excavation so it'll neatly turn into the outer parts of your final fort. You still need a fair amount of determination to make the transition though.

Another option, as undwarfy as this may be, is to make your temporary buildings out of wood, on the surface. That way you can completely dismantle it when no longer needed, leaving no trace behind.

[Wheeljack]

Since taverns are now a thing, I dig out my public tavern and it's used as a temp place for my dwarves to stay until some of the main fort is dug out below. Once the main fort is going, I can clear out the tavern, and actually set it up for visitors.

[Lurin Diamondfist]

I also have this problem, but it seems to come from never finding deep soil, I just need to bite the bullet and flood some rooms to grow plants.

[Kogan Onulsodel]

I've often run into this, in my latest fort I'm getting around it by entirely skipping the temporary fort.

But this experiment has made me think about the problem a little bit differently. The biggest problem that I see right now is really a trade-off: The surface has soil, water, everything you need for food. It's also quickly accessible, but I don't actually think that's a big problem, because you can always get everyone who's not a miner to haul everything inside while you're digging down and carving out your fort, and your first 7 can survive without beds for a season (or you can throw together a surface carpenter's workshop and just pump out a few beds, it doesn't make much difference). Down in the deeps there's magma. Ores (the other thing I care about most) can be at a lot of different levels, but most iron ore, flux, and coal (I like steel... for obvious reasons) tend to be in sedimentary layers, near the surface. And trees for charcoal are obviously also on the surface.

The one thing, I think, that can be trickier about going straight for the depths is food and drink. You need to get farms up before too long, or you may be in trouble if you're blessed/cursed with a large initial migrant wave. Of course, I think you can survive without farming, but you have to have a steady stream of caravans. Anyway, my solution to this problem is that I bring a LOT of food and drink at embark, and I also bring 3-4 picks (more picks means that you get started faster, and the only thing that's kind of slow is flooding your farm plots... but if you prioritize that, it doesn't end up being a big problem, especially if you give yourself a big reserve at the start).

I've also had essentially two forts before. It's a bit tricky to manage efficiently, because if you're not careful you'll have dwarves running the 100+ tiles between the upper and lower fort just because they want a +cave spider silk sock+, and you can lose a lot of time to that. Burrows, careful stockpile management, things like that can help, and if you plan ahead to make sure that your two forts are separated by the minimum number of steps, that can make a big difference. It can also be FUN if you're not careful about where your military is stationed... okay, you can make that easy if you seal off the caverns, then your military can just be stationed in the upper fort... but where's the fun in that? Anyway, I've gotten that working decently well once or twice, but never really optimally. I expect that if you were really optimal about it, you could get some wins in efficiency, as your near surface dwellers could easily specialize in all of your farm production, carpentry, etc., while your deep dwarves can dedicate their lives to smithing. You need haulers to move things between the two forts, but you kind of need that anyway if you want to produce steel at magma smelters/forges (since all the supplies are located at shallow depths), so if you really do it carefully and right, I think the two forts can get you the best of both worlds. So I think that's another approach to temporary forts: plan from the beginning on it being an "upper fort" that supplies things for the "lower fort," heads up the defenses, and actually does trade. You lay it out so that it'll be optimized for that, make sure that every workshop you build up there is really better near the surface, maybe even hold off on metalworking until you get the lower fort going (though, if you don't make it a priority, you won't have a forge set up until two years in, and you won't have decent weapons to combat early invaders), and be careful about how you make the connection (though caverns can destroy the best laid plans).

Of course, whenever I do a volcano embark, I end up just building my fort near the surface, the only thing I usually want from the deeps is candy, and that stuff is so light that it's fine if I have to haul it to the surface.

[Aslandus]

I usually build my main fortress at the surface anyway, building my main kitchen and other crafting areas where they will be close to the trade depot and have easy access to soil, and then create little "break areas" in the deeper sections with stockpiles of food and booze and maybe a few ammo bins. It just seems a lot more useful in general to keep your main production near the source and output locations...

[ManaUser]

Yeah, there's really no practical reasons your fortress can't be right near the surface. As an aesthetic choice I don't like the permanent fort to be dirt. It just seems wrong. But generally I build in the upper stone layers anyway.

[Salmeuk]

Yeah, there's really no practical reasons your fortress can't be right near the surface. As an aesthetic choice I don't like the permanent fort to be dirt. It just seems wrong. But generally I build in the upper stone layers anyway.

To add onto this, I absolutely despise the brown stones like chert and mudstone. Something about a lack of dwarvdn refinement, or the "lesser" nature of sedimentary rock, or perhaps just because white and black stones have better contrast against furniture and dwarves. This is sometimes the only reason I abandon a surface fortress for the depths, where I can dig out a proper marble dining hall.

[Kogan Onulsodel]

Yeah, there's really no practical reasons your fortress can't be right near the surface. As an aesthetic choice I don't like the permanent fort to be dirt. It just seems wrong. But generally I build in the upper stone layers anyway.

To add onto this, I absolutely despise the brown stones like chert and mudstone. Something about a lack of dwarvdn refinement, or the "lesser" nature of sedimentary rock, or perhaps just because white and black stones have better contrast against furniture and dwarves. This is sometimes the only reason I abandon a surface fortress for the depths, where I can dig out a proper marble dining hall.

I like granite and marble. Granite just feels dwarfy to me, it's a truly solid, bedrock stone. Oh, and I would probably like building in some of the uniquely colored stones, like microcline and cobaltite, if only they formed layers. I mean, who wouldn't want a fortress carved out of fools' adamantine?

But, yeah, I like being close to the magma sea really as an aesthetic choice... like a statement of "We're real dwarves, not top-dwelling elves!" But I think for pure efficiency you're probably better off being near the surface (easy farming, water, iron ore, flux, and the entrance for defense and trade). Probably best to transport magma for forges and furnaces near the surface if you want that, and candy is so light that it's not a big deal to haul it up near the surface (the other thing that's exclusively deep). But I persist (at least in my current fort). My dwarves are DWARVES, and this time it means that they will live near the heart of the earth even if it kills them!