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Above ground

9 (17.3%)

Underground

34 (65.4%)

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Total Members Voted: 51

[SlimeOfSteel]

Since 2007 the dawn of time, there is one question that remains unsolved among the Dwarf Fortress community: Which is better, an above ground fortress, or an underground fortress?
After some procrastination, overusing strikethrough text, and making pointless polls on the forums thinking, I wanted to see what the community thinks of this. Along with this, I'm also going to offer my two cents about this.


Aboveground

As far as I know, there's no limit on how high you can build (technically there is one, but it's due to the way computers work). Also, you don't have to worry about aquifers flooding where you want to build or part of your base. However, a downside to an above ground fortress is that the bottom of the fortress is easier to destroy, causing your fortress to become nothing but dust.

Underground

An advantage to an underground fortress is that the bottom of the fortress is harder to access, so an invasion cannot destroy the fortress as easily. However, only miners can mine a hole for your fort. Another thing is that miners can get stuck in the hole, and may die if not attended to quickly.

So what do you think? Is an above ground fortress better, or an underground fortress?

[Madrigal]

“Which is better, an above ground fortress, or an underground fortress?”

Define “better”

Underground is likely to be faster if you have dirt layers to begin with, or if you start with a skilled miner. It takes fewer resources, just miners and picks, instead of potentially thousands of blocks or logs. Mining produces useful resources instead of using them up, too. It’s easier to designate, since there’s no need to pick every single item you’re going to use to build each specific wall or floor, and usually no need for scaffolding unless you’re doing something really fancy. Also, natural walls and floors can be engraved; constructed ones can’t. Aquifers are annoying but can be avoided by picking your embark site carefully (or even modded out, I think). I’ve never stranded a miner so it doesn’t seem like much of a drawback to me. And dwarfs underground are protected from extreme temperatures (except when dunked in magma).

Aboveground, though, can make for some awesome screenshots. You can replicate your favourite buildings, roleplay various scenarios, etc, and that might be worth all the hassle to you. And underground might be easier to defend from invasions, but there are other fun things like caverns down there.

[Grand Sage]

And then there is the question of why you would limit yourself to one, if you can have both. An above-ground building that contains the entrance to the below-ground fort.

[random_odd_guy]

The main problem with an above ground fortress is you have to build the walls. Which means you need stone. Which means...you need to go mining. (Or do a LOT of lumberjacking).

With a below ground fortress...you just need to clear the space for the walls. Which means mining. Except you don't use up the stone you clear away to build the walls. So either way you have to mine. But you need to mine about 4x as much to build above ground because only one in every four spaces mined will actually leave behind rocks to use.


Annnnnnnnd you have to haul all those rocks up to the floors you want to build. Every. Last. One.

So, in summary: building above ground takes much longer and needs you to do about four times as much mining. Whereas if you live underground you can just live in the tunnels you mine out.



Also truth be told: if you actually run out of space to build your fortress underground, your game is probably unplayable due to sheer lag from how much stuff you have going on in your fortress.

[Leonidas]

you need to mine about 4x as much to build above ground because only one in every four spaces mined will actually leave behind rocks to use.

Annnnnnnnd you have to haul all those rocks up to the floors you want to build. Every. Last. One.

Blocks. Turn those boulders into blocks, and then build with the blocks. You'll get one block per tile mined. Your masons will get easy experience. The blocks are much lighter, and therefore faster to carry.

My objection to major above-ground construction is that entering [d] mode makes the whole screen start flashing like a Christmas tree.

[anewaname]

I can't pick just one....

[Bumber]

An above-ground fortress is terrible for FPS. Each item used in a construction is still counted on the stocks screen.

Given a paved embark can be a heavy hit, a tower is bound to be equally so.

[Starver]

Aboveground

As far as I know, there's no limit on how high you can build (technically there is one, but it's due to the way computers work). Also, you don't have to worry about aquifers flooding where you want to build or part of your base. However, a downside to an above ground fortress is that the bottom of the fortress is easier to destroy, causing your fortress to become nothing but dust.

There's a sky-ceiling cap inherent to the map, just like there's a bedrock lower limit (even if you don't count the SMR, magma sea and the little bits extra yet as an impedance, but only (I think) the SMR and some of the less lucrative 'extra' is actually impassible on the way to the lower limit.

(Before current Caverns, when just underground rivers were a complicating thing, in the search for the odd hidden magma tubes and 'extras', I used to generate my maps specifically with double/triple depths just for down-space, and you can do the same for sky (maybe that's what you mean) but the limit is still there and not just the point where a double-unsigned integer overflows or something.)

Unless you do it (or set it up to be doable, by building sections atop of supports, with gangplank access from grounded stairwells using bridges?) nothing non-player, yet, can destroy your aboveground fortress by destroying the lower levels. Unless something's changed that I should have heard of.

Advantages: needs no tools to build walls, only materials. The getting and the hauling of which are left as an exercise to the reader, but scrupulously blocking my rocks. Or 'rock' - I like to stick to either one particular rock (something ubiquitous like marble, or something extravagant like marble) or a limited number of key rocks (outer walls of precious marble, inner roads of gabbro/whatever, roads and rooves of slate - or whatever the geology allowa me), but either way that needs digging.

And no nasty surprises as creating your perfectly planned structure breaches cavern (or touches hot/wet rock) and forces a redesign/work-around (for which I use the approach to first drive shafts straight down, discovering and revealing such voids, then fill in the safe gaps between with underground stuff), because the sky is free space.

Disadvantages:
Materials. You're mostly going to have to mine. Unless you can clearcut enough forest, but. Unless you can do a little of each to power a glass/clay industry,. Unless you're going via the "everything is built in soap!" approach for which you need an industrial butchery-and-the-rest encampment set up. Unless you're doing it in ice (still needs digging, though if renewable you have to juggle your windows of opportunity between freezes and thaws). Unless you pure-cast obsidian (requires magma and water access and Engineering to an arbitrary degree). Unless you have an idea I haven't thought of.

Build order - very strict. Shortcuts and planned backtracks (see discussions about scaffolding) mean it is player-labour intensive, as much or more as it is for the in-game builders.

Vulnerability to the open air (flying enemies, climbing enemies, pesky wildlife, bad weathers, dwarf nauseas, etc) which you can somewhat mitigate only with more restrictions and temporary additions to the build-order.

Underground

An advantage to an underground fortress is that the bottom of the fortress is harder to access, so an invasion cannot destroy the fortress as easily. However, only miners can mine a hole for your fort. Another thing is that miners can get stuck in the hole, and may die if not attended to quickly.

There really isn't that much of a problem with only miners working. I start off with two (occasionally three, if I'm feeling the need for speed) and take any immigrant ones holding a pick (regardless of current skill, it gets trained up easily with on-the-job-training) and sometimes trade for a new pick and choose the new digger myself, but rarely make them myself. I always want more digging done than I'm doing, but that scales with ability towards the general direction of personal madness, if I let it, so rather than going down that spiral I just prioritise better (with designation priorities and miner-specific burrows, as I've described elsewhere, at least the way that works for me).

Advantages:
Easy plan, semi-easy management.

Net resource-source, not resource-sink.

Security and safety implicit (if you quickly account for underground voids, wet spots, hot spots, etc), and if you're into Turtling then once you set up the appropriate barrier(s) at your surface entrance(s) then you don't have to worry too much about surface thieves, siegers, wildlife, traders, immigrants, your own hunters/fisherdwarves/etc...

Disadvantages:
Still a lot of work, always a lot of waste, difficulty of forward planning, chance of a very bad breach (balance against chance of a very bad deconstruct-related overground cave-in if you get your scaffolding/descaffolding wrong!), and basically everything else that makes being a dwarf FUN, if not actual !!FUN!!, that I don't need to mention.



For me, I dig in deep and hard (I increase the default inter-cavern rock thickness, because I love digging so much!) and then use the bounty of rocks (as I find them, I love a large marble layer, but I'll work with other clumps) and simultaneously dig a big ditch around the large aboveground structure(s) that configurably blocks off (and eventually covers) the entryway(s) and as much essential aboveground infrastructure as I feel I can grab. So two (or more) megaprojects: aboveground, belowground and into the ground.

[dwarfhoplite]

You can build an aboveground fortress out of unfired clay. That way there is no need to mine out huge areas of rock.

[SlimeOfSteel]

And then there is the question of why you would limit yourself to one, if you can have both. An above-ground building that contains the entrance to the below-ground fort.

You're right, but wouldn't that fall under an underground fortress, as it's primarily underground?

Unless you do it (or set it up to be doable, by building sections atop of supports, with gangplank access from grounded stairwells using bridges?) nothing non-player, yet, can destroy your aboveground fortress by destroying the lower levels. Unless something's changed that I should have heard of.

I was thinking of cave-ins occurring from the bottommost layer being destroyed. Unless that's not how it works in game.

[Xyon]

Below ground is better.

But! If you embarked on a volcano that was also in a desert, you could make green glass blocks without doing any digging and build an above ground fortress. "Emerald" city anyone?

Though I can't really think of any reason why an above ground fortress would ever be better than a below ground fortress other than for aesthetic purposes.

[Starver]

Unless you do it (or set it up to be doable, by building sections atop of supports, with gangplank access from grounded stairwells using bridges?) nothing non-player, yet, can destroy your aboveground fortress by destroying the lower levels. Unless something's changed that I should have heard of.

I was thinking of cave-ins occurring from the bottommost layer being destroyed. Unless that's not how it works in game.

It is how it works, a cave-in happening, but only if the bottommost layers are destroyed. You basically have to be complicit with the destruction, if not do it yourself.  Building Destroyers cannot destroy structural walls (and nothing can yet excavate 'natural' tiles out, apart from ypu) and only one 'building' can be a structural element. Thus you'd have to engineer it so that one Support (or more than one, for that little more tension!) holds the fort-proper aloft, without any other weight-bearing linkage of whatever tenuousness, whilst being a tempting target for the next BD that randomly wanders in.

You could have used one soap wall/stairwell as the sole support and it wouldn't dissolve away even in a flood. If you can build it out of ice, it'll withstand magma being let loose around it (though natural ice in the same spot will thaw either seasonally or in the presence of localised heat). If there's a vulnerability then it's either a computational bug, a new development or something (like the unfired clay! I missed that possibility, good catch!) that escapes my mind still, assuming I ever knew of it.

I'm open to correction/enlightenment myself, still, even with my confidence in saying this.


Xyon: it'a much it's aesthetics mixed with particular logistical needs, for me. And has to be compelling, as it takes disproportionately more dwarf-hours to do most things overground that you can do underground. Surface (or sunken!) farming and other 'biodome airlock' isolationism is what drives me to megaproject in the aboveground space. And it takes a lot of (standard) belowground fortressing to make my aboveground stuff happen (even if I could just make it upward-facing, as already discussed).

[Schmaven]

Hollowing out a volcanic mountain peak and building spires menacingly out of the top of it seems like a fun combination of the two.

I usually prefer below ground forts for all the reasons mentioned above, but every now and then I get the strange idea to build above ground.  I made one fort in the middle of a heavy forest where I could not cut the trees fast enough, and it was really easy to make a wide several story tower and then wall off almost the entire map for a fruit orchard.  One benefit to building above ground is it is really easy to build sky bridges out to the trees that Dwarfs like to get stuck in while gathering.  Although it does get frustrating sometimes when the trees are cut down and the sky bridges crush the lumberdwarcks. 

[Saiko Kila]

I always build a combination of both. My dwarves live underground, and deep enough that industrial area noise doesn't bother them, but most of actual building is above.

The absolute minimum are two structures:
1. A tower surrounding military training area, often with retractable roof (or no roof at all - this to prevent cave adaptation). This tower is sometimes 5-6 tiles high above ground, and about the same deep below ground. It often has two bridges as roof (one is too small). It has shooter area on top, to shoot on converging zombies or goblins, and often passages (bridges to the walls or other structures, high above ground).

2. Walls with several gates. Completing walls often takes years, but I like it.

Other surface structures I often build are drop-towers, water pressure towers, magma chutes (to incinerate select places around my territory), water chutes (to fight fires in select places around my territory, and main entry), landmines, "high altitude bombardment" structures, sentry posts (often with animal, accessible only from underground), bait-mazes (troll and thief defence), primary waste heap with atom smasher, windmill housing (this is mostly for powering up kitchen, water mist generator in the main hall several tiles below, and pumps for drowning area near main entry), some structures for controlling invaders or caravans, including above ground passageways (dodge-traps).

So, while all dwarves sleep underground, and more than half of them work there, most interesting and time consuming(*) pieces are above ground, and area on surface, near entry, is my main zoom point. I build all my structures in matching colour and stone/glass/bricks, and exclusively from blocks. I never use raw materials, even for workshops.

The only time I would consider fully underground fortress would be in evil biome with funny weather, or maybe in some extreme cold glacier.

*)Well, except an underground farming area, which is artificial cave like 20x10x5 tiles, and I try to have at least a couple of them. This one takes much more time to construct than above ground buildings, thanks to enormous amount of stone which has to be transported away.

[Daniel the Finlander]

building aboveground is a gigantic pain (mostly because of how time-consuming it is compared to mining), though the end result is much more visually appealing. Defence is harder because you can't just dig a single tunnel and then fill it with traps, you have to dig a moat and wait for it to fill and build a long defensive wall. Farming is easy unless you embark on a desert, same with wood acquisition. Embarking on an aquifer is no problem whatsoever unless you decide to build a lot of stone buildings. In fact, an aquifer is really good if there's no river on the map.