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[Rockphed]

I once did an entire level of swastika tesselations for a tomb level. worked out rather well.

Tombs, bedrooms, only the little line in the oval is different.

[Fist_Of_Armok]

I once did an entire level of swastika tesselations for a tomb level. worked out rather well.

Been playing Castle Wolfenstein, have we?

[Yagrum Bagarn]

I'm a big fan of the six room clusters from the wiki.  They're so incredibly dense.  If you build a stack of them (42 beds per level) at the center of your fortress, dwarves never have to go very far for everyday tasks.  Best of all, my five year old computer can handle a hundred dwarves at 50 FPS.

Off to one side, alternate workshops and storage as you see fit.  To the other, put your entrance, the barracks, and another room (well, statue garden, central control lever room).  Utilize z-levels in whatever way is convenient.  On the third side, farm, putting food stockpiles and your legendary dining room in a stack above/below the farms.  On the fourth orthogonal side, place anything else that will get a lot of use.  One of my "sides" tends to be used by a magma pipe other underground feature.

Noble rooms can be placed a bit farther away, since most of them don't do anything anyway.

These are pictures from Beercastle, a succession fortress I just started with two friends.  This is after the initial year in which I basically ignored production to make as big of an initial imprint on the fortress's design as possible.

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Main Level:


Main Level -1

For every level of housing, you get 42 3x1 rooms.  Three levels of that are all that my 100 pop cap fortresses will ever need.  Clear out the rock and do some smoothing and they'll be "modest" to "spendid" depending on if there were any ore or jewels left in as natural walls.  Engrave them after your engraver is legendary for better results.

I need to work on my Noble housing.  The large rooms off to the right are what I use these days.  They're efficient enough, but I'm starting to want to use something a bit more imaginative.

[Satarus]

Lately I have been doing nothing but 4x1 rooms.  Bed, cabinet, coffer, then a door.  Mostly because it is super easy to dig them out.  Just hold shift and hit the direction the room goes.  That digs out enough for 2 rooms and a 3 wide hall way.

[o_O[WTFace]]

I use 2x3 rooms in a massive "residential zone" connected to the rest of the fortresss by exactly one pathway.  Plenty of room for a bed, table, chair, statue and either another statue or a cabinet.  The  entrance pathway eventually becomes a waterfall/shower/artifact museum. 

[jarathor]

Here's what I've been working with recently:

The spiral theme isn't the most imaginative, but it looks pretty cool and is rather space efficient (if not pathing efficient). The small bit in the center also allows me to lock off each level in the event of a siege that gets through my defenses. Although not related to the thread, I am rather proud of the simple workshop center above - with only two levels of each the workshop and the warehouse complexes I can usually provide for a 100-150 dwarf fort.
I still need to work out a good design for a farming/food workshop complex though.

[aaaabaaccaadfda]

I personaly have just learned about this design. Ive been playing with it on DF fort designer, and ive found its quite space efficent. As well as looking reasonably cool. If i could figure out how to upload pics from my hard drive, i could possibly show you what ive found.   

[Hectonkhyres]

I have to ask: Will the changes in the upcoming release drastically alter bedroom design? After all, easy access to wells and soap stockpiles are going to be made necessary and somehow I just know hospital placement is going to throw a monkeywrench in the design of military areas. Any thoughts?

[Poojawa]

I've found the 2x2 room pattern allows for at least 200 rooms without extra hallways, and 188 with. Which on top of the noble housing, and 7 starting dwarves' special residences makes for more than perfect extra space as well.

I also tend to have a pretty large military as well, allowing for children/babies to have their own room when they come of age.

It works out pretty good so far.

[Goinstadi]

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7604

I've been experimenting with a circular design, but I returned to using the living pods for mass room designation.

[jarathor]

I have to ask: Will the changes in the upcoming release drastically alter bedroom design? After all, easy access to wells and soap stockpiles are going to be made necessary and somehow I just know hospital placement is going to throw a monkeywrench in the design of military areas. Any thoughts?

I hadn't even thought about that - I guess it's going to be trial and error to find out what works best regarding dwarves needing to clean themselves, such as either small bathrooms in or near each bedroom or large communal bathrooms in the center of living complexes.
Dwarves will clean themselves just before going to bed, right?
As for the hospitals, I'm not sure how that'll affect my designs. I try to build my barracks in two sections on either side of my entrance, with a tunnel under the main hallway connecting the two. I think I'd prefer it if my hospital would be more secure, but I don't know where I would put it.

[Hectonkhyres]

I've been trying to work out what a proper bathroom would look like and I have one or two thoughts. Its simplest form has to be a two tile room: one occupied by a well and another holding a single bin of soap. Three tiles if Toady tosses in something common sense like our requiring a bucket for the job. To do differently runs the risk of some dwarf running halfway across the fortress for a single damn bar of soap and then running all the way back every time he wants to go to sleep.

A two (or three) tile bathroom will, however, suffer from the whole bottleneck hallway issue we see in high traffic areas. Every time two dwarves have to pass through the same tile at the same time the game goes a little bit crazy, dropping framerates like it was going out of fashion. A well likely to be used often should probably have several spaces next to it for a dwarf to stand in and more than one door. Two (or three) tile bathrooms should probably be reserved as add-ons to the dwellings of dwarves who you have constant demand for.

Another issue is that I'm not sure you can stack wells. If you can't, it blows to hell a lot of the symmetrical fractal designs that we have come to love... or at least I think it does. It might be easiest to have a public bathroom on only one floor but jam the thing right next to the central staircase column. Its still quite a walk... but it should be vastly simpler than what you would have to do to have bathrooms every level. You could, I suppose, have a 2x5 room with a 1x4 strip of that channeled out and a well on the remaining tile. Each level you go up you would place that level's well one tile to the right so no two wells are directly on top of each other. Its complex, but I think it would work.

I might just be talking out my ass though.

[forsaken1111]

Personally I'm going with roman style public baths, possibly heated with underfloor magma, with small soap stockpiles off to one side. Possibly designed with a water system to flush and replenish the water if it becomes progressively dirtier as people bathe.

[Lav]

I'm glad someone bumped this thread, I always forget to beg for a response here:

In a portion of my fortress, I'm planning to build a sort of dorf apartment building.  The idea is that it will be a perfectly circular cylinder with an overhang of one tile. The idea here is that each room has a 2x1-tile balcony beneath this overhang such that when water is constantly poured onto the top of the building (via the underground river), the balconies willbe one tile away from a constant, uniform waterfall.

Short version: Does anybody have a perfectly circular series of bedrooms? Specifically one with an "odd" number of tiles in diameter so water dumped onto its center flows evenly in all directions?

Or.. does DF work like that?

Well, it's not quite easy to fit the requirements. I got a pretty-looking result after a bit of tinkering, with 28 2nd class rooms and 4 1st class rooms per floor (2nd class is 1x3 room with 1x2 balcony, 1st class is 2x2 room with 2 1x2 balconies). There's also a large space inside with roughly-rectangular shape, you can use it to fit additional 3rd class rooms, staircases or whatever.

Note however that for DF physics, movement in the SE-NW and SW-NE directions is the same as in the N-W or W-E directions. So to provide a truly uniform (statistically speaking) waterflow from all sides of your tower, the tower must be a square, not a circle. With a circle design rooms located in the NW, NE, SW and SE sections of the circle will get much more water and thus more mist.

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[Hectonkhyres]

Personally I'm going with roman style public baths, possibly heated with underfloor magma, with small soap stockpiles off to one side. Possibly designed with a water system to flush and replenish the water if it becomes progressively dirtier as people bathe.

So a row of ramps leading into a trough of water with a depth of 4/7? Certainly better from a roleplaying standpoint than wells... but I'm not sure anything is in the works that will make dwarves prefer your blinged-out hypocaust to that well that just happens to be in the main dining room or next to the hospital. Unless it is really conveniently located, you might get a grand total of two visitors a year.