New new subject comment on the next thing talked about recently: I often set up ore/metal/alloy/flux/carbon stockpiles, especially, in checkerboard+ configurations, near the magma workshops they feed/feed-upon.
In each (typically) 11x11 room (my standard largest footprint, between my corridor gridding and intersticial walls) I'd assign a full stockpile for item-type-1, then deselct every other {or every n
th) spot and over-stockpile for item-type-2, to reuse the gaps. Repeat as necesary. (The whole point being a snazzy way to have a visual track of the comparative filling of each type, next to each other. The size is unimportant, that's just the tyoical largest thing with 61 slots for A and 60 slots for B or 41+40+40 for A+B+C, etc being quite handy.) It leaves heavily non-contiguous areas (maybe just corners touching) of each type.
So... Liking a lot of the rope/border mockups of the stockpiles, I can only imagine how they'd look in
this situation. Very busy.
Less busy, but might need thought, are my square stockpiles around a stairwell or even a workshop (sometimes seen elsewhere in my designs) typically 5x5 with a 1x1 or 3x3 centre removed for (as mentioned by someone else) non-blinking on the stairway tile, which probably won't happen in a Steam GUI or in order to go around the workshop site.
Not quite as extreme an enclave/exclave situation as my first, but still suggests the need for an inner (convexly defining) rope or border to look like it's such a *clave-boundary to reflect the outer one.
Not that
my peculiar play-style has any bearing on the end solution. Just interested.
(My thoughts, which I can't illustrate with a mock-up just this moment, were a kind of edge-boundry static 'glow', hard edged outwards, fading to transparency in a handful of pixels inwards, like a smudged-inwards version of the 'bar boundry' suggestion, almost. Adjoining tockpile boundaries, especially of different hues, would delineate quite well and it could be ethereal enough not to look too artificial nor physical and still not changing the original floor. And could be followed across diverse underlying floor-types, as often happens to exist in dug-out stores that used to be busy with mineral veins beforehand. Similar, if perhaps with differing edge-scalloping, zoning (pastures)/etc could be given this treatment, though zones yet
can and do overlap in whole or part so maybe that needs yet another idea. Again, I can see this is by far not the only answer.)