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[Melting Sky]

I never use macros for my design. That's a good start for avoiding plain or boring layouts. Basically the way I keep my designs fresh is I sort of weave them into the location and the geology of the area. If there is a waterfall, volcano, weird little mountain, interesting cavern layout etc. I will incorporate those elements into my fortress rather than just clear cutting and strip mining the area into an uber efficient layout. Your dwarves have the power to pretty much mold the world any way they want, but the most joy I get from my fort designs is when I mold my fortress around the world rather than the other way around.

I should add, that you can create some pretty crazy layouts without wrecking your FPS just so long as you are careful with your item, livestock and population management. You can have a sprawling elaborate fort with misters etc. without much issue at 90 dwarves, but if then take that exact same fort and staff it with 160 dwarves along with 80 free roaming cats and dogs then it is a whole other story.

[kicktothehead]

Thank you for all the replies. This current fortress I went a little different with my layout and added a big ol' moat for the first time. My problem is no freakin metal so I cannot build any weapons yet. I have had 2 massive seiges (over 100 enemies in each) and my fortress is so self sustained I just closed the gates until they went away haha. It is in its 7th? year right now.

Still bone crossbows is all we have LOL.

[kicktothehead]

https://postimg.org/image/z7sfm73at/

My current outside layout - 3 draw bridges then a set of stairs leading down behind a couple of walls. All of my farms, butcher, tanner to the right side.

[kicktothehead]

https://postimg.org/image/h54hxmbhf/

My memorial hall ...

If anyone wants other images before this place burns out let me know .. but it is the best I've done yet haha.

[kicktothehead]

I made the mistake on this fortress of not building things within the middle of my screen .. .it all ended up lower right side of the map. Kind of a pain to keep scrolling down and to the right haha

[Russell.s]

I try to build my forts to look cool as a priority, because I like the dwarves to live in some aesthetically pleasing place .
I've posted this before, but my fort Eaglemansions has a good selection of different rooms that may inspire. Some of them (the old fort) are constrained to the environment to a degree; the lower fort is more free-form.

Link is here http://imgur.com/gallery/RSGkN

[kicktothehead]

Russell ... that is PHENOMMMMMENAL .... so much creativity .. I am sooooo taking some of your ideas!!!

Thank you for sharing!

-B

[Dadamh]

I made the mistake on this fortress of not building things within the middle of my screen .. .it all ended up lower right side of the map. Kind of a pain to keep scrolling down and to the right haha

You know you can change where your hotkeys link to, right?  With H?

[Melting Sky]

Thank you for all the replies. This current fortress I went a little different with my layout and added a big ol' moat for the first time. My problem is no freakin metal so I cannot build any weapons yet. I have had 2 massive seiges (over 100 enemies in each) and my fortress is so self sustained I just closed the gates until they went away haha. It is in its 7th? year right now.

Still bone crossbows is all we have LOL.

What are you talking about. There's plenty of metal on your embark. It even gets delivered to your doorstep free of charge so you don't have to bother mining it. The metal is known as goblinite and although you will never find any goblinite ore better than iron, you can melt all that low quality goblin crap down and reforge it into some proper dwarven quality weapons and armor.

The same can be done with anything metal the caravan brings you along with flux if your embark lacks it. Just trade them a bunch of masterwork wooden spiked balls or roasts, and if you have nothing to fight properly with then dig a big deep pit with a single catwalk crossing it at the entrance to your fort and put a bunch of weapons traps filled with those spikey balls along it. Cut some over looking fortifications into the sides of the pit and rain bolts down on the survivors or if bolts are in short supply then carve some wooden spikes and put them on a repeater at the bottom.

Give it a few years and you should be able to outfit your dwarves in full suits of quality armor along with steel weapons. Although its popular to describe Dwarf Fortress as impossibly hard, it really isn't once you get past the initial learning curve and the terrible user interface. It's easy to turtle up and have survivable fort with a bunch of impoverished dwarves dressed in rags and living on nothing but plumb helmets. These forts can pass the survival test but DF isn't about surviving, it's about achieving greatness. There in lies the challenge and what will keep the game fresh. Sure you can build a draw bridge and 1000 cage traps and be perfectly safe, but a real dwarf instead pumps up the molten blood of Armok from deep within the planet and then flings it at relativistic velocities across the map in an over complicated minecart shotgun at the doomed incoming foes. The point is the game is as complex and challenging as you wish to make it for yourself.

[BlackBronze]

I'm currently trying to draw inspiration from the old city Petra, Jordan, or at least the main entrance to it. Just to get to the entrance, wagons and merchants have to travel through a small canyon, only to enter a massive clearing open to the sky 20-z floors above. Because my fort is situated where two rivers meet at different elevations, I get plenty of cliff to work with.

You could try recreating Venice if you're feeling up to it. The easiest way to get all of the canals would be to embark where there's shallow aquifers and just channel the hell out of it.

[GhostDwemer]

I'm currently trying to draw inspiration from the old city Petra, Jordan, or at least the main entrance to it. Just to get to the entrance, wagons and merchants have to travel through a small canyon, only to enter a massive clearing open to the sky 20-z floors above. Because my fort is situated where two rivers meet at different elevations, I get plenty of cliff to work with.

You could try recreating Venice if you're feeling up to it. The easiest way to get all of the canals would be to embark where there's shallow aquifers and just channel the hell out of it.

Wasn't Petra where they filmed the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? That's like the dwarfiest place on earth!

[Mostali]

I'm currently trying to draw inspiration from the old city Petra, Jordan, or at least the main entrance to it. Just to get to the entrance, wagons and merchants have to travel through a small canyon, only to enter a massive clearing open to the sky 20-z floors above. Because my fort is situated where two rivers meet at different elevations, I get plenty of cliff to work with.

You could try recreating Venice if you're feeling up to it. The easiest way to get all of the canals would be to embark where there's shallow aquifers and just channel the hell out of it.

Wasn't Petra where they filmed the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? That's like the dwarfiest place on earth!

Petra is the Civ 5 wonder that turns a useless desert landscape into the mightiest city on the map.  So yeah, same thing.

[BlackBronze]

I'm currently trying to draw inspiration from the old city Petra, Jordan, or at least the main entrance to it. Just to get to the entrance, wagons and merchants have to travel through a small canyon, only to enter a massive clearing open to the sky 20-z floors above. Because my fort is situated where two rivers meet at different elevations, I get plenty of cliff to work with.

You could try recreating Venice if you're feeling up to it. The easiest way to get all of the canals would be to embark where there's shallow aquifers and just channel the hell out of it.

Wasn't Petra where they filmed the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? That's like the dwarfiest place on earth!

Petra is the Civ 5 wonder that turns a useless desert landscape into the mightiest city on the map.  So yeah, same thing.

Yeah, it's pretty cool! Petra has been used in a lot of films. Not just Indiana Jones, but also Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, the second Transformer movie, and more. I love drawing inspiration from awesome stuff like that. Plus, the end result takes ages to finish, so it essentially keeps me busy for ages. To be honest, my forts usually die before they're anywhere close to finished, though.

[FantasticDorf]

Use excessive amounts of wall grates is my design tip, and purposely use single tile retractable bridges as stopping plugs over instead floodgates because you can blend them into the floor, and in a emergency retract them onto a layer with exposed pools of aquifers to drain

++B++
  B
+A+A+

(Same as the key in the diagram below, but A is exposed aquifers)

Also works as decorative pillars for traps, should you want to flood someone (or alternatively put out fires/irrigate but you dont want to have to cut a hole or put down a floodgate)

Obsidianising plug - Bridge drops water that should disperse to 7/7 in the room or otherwise covers a bordering aquifer wall of that height of 1 z level, while the screw pump above it pushes magma ontop of the 7/7, a emergency water valve above can remove spare magma and you can dig away at the obsidian at your leisure.

WWWWWWWW
+0+++H++
+B
SB
+B

(W is water, 0 is the hole between the bridge, B is the bridge, + are solid tiles and S is the screw pump)

I like to put wall grates everywhere, because they can be seen though and are basically cheaper and more aesthetically pleasing iron prison bars (which really need more love) they make great animal containment, Z level pit containment (as long as no item breakers are present they cannot be escaped out of) for cage matches and impromptu zoos and functional windows for areas like training grounds which i put opposite my entrances and important areas so dwarves always maintain a line of sight with the enemy and can pull themselves off whatever task to go fight.

Doors have to be put against wall tiles, but wall grates can go wherever, so go ham (3 wide entrances with 2 doors and one grate between works well enough)