Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Jackrabbit]

Namely, how do you lay out your fortresses? Mine all turn into big sprawling messes with no aesthetic design whatsoever. I would love to hear how you make yours.

[Duke 2.0]

 Constrain yourself to a 20x20 vertical shaft. That should make things more organized. For bonus points, have the main vertical method of travel use ramps. For even more of a bonus, have those ramps allow wagons to the bottom of your fortress.

 Trying this now with a vertical superstructure.

[Ivefan]

Always embarking with a purpose in mind, Be it Megaprojects or something else.
Never Digging without planning far ahead and always starting my exploratory mining from the lowest Z, tunneling by using shift+direction.

[Micro102]

i make all my workshops on the floor with the entrance, then below, massive stockiles of food/funiture...everything except stone, then below that a ridiculously large stone stockpile containing over 7000 stone. then above the floor with the entrance, all my beds

nobel places are wherever i feel like it

[Dhargk]

Mine usually are big sprawling messes as well. Don't feel bad.

[woose1]

Mine usually are big sprawling messes as well. Don't feel bad.

Dont worry, your just special!!

Ya, I like a supar cool death-trap fortress namely like the style of Boatmurdered, with things going from left to right.
-Moat +bridge(Remember to sorround the area above your fortress w/th walls so they dont just go around your moat)
-Workshops w/th wood and stone stockpile
-Double-door leading into my fortress
-Trapped hallway (Water room with two floodgates is my favorite way to kill gobs
-food preperation area
-dining hall
-Bedding area w/th seperate dining rooms for important dwarves
And after that it's preety much up to you. Allways check that there is plenty of room for you to expand, and usually farms go under workshop area.

[niaba]

The floor plan of my current fortress, which is a tower fort.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A brief synopsis of each floor:
G. Trade depot and food, drink and misc. stockpiles.
1. Barracks and military bedrooms, each elite dwarf gets a masterpiece armour stand and weapon rack.
2. To the west is the butchery/leatherworks. To the east is the brewery. To the north and south are some nobles' rooms.
3. East is the kitchen, everything else is bedrooms.
4. Northeast is the dining room. South is stone and wood workshops. East is bonecrafting, jemcrafting, jail and captain of the guard's quarters.
5. Cloth processing and bedrooms
6. Another misc. stockpile and nicer nobles quarters with magma based workshops to the south.

Not shown is the basement with farm plots and the crypt with military tombs (non-military get thrown in the magma)
Most pieces of furniture are omitted because I'm lazy

[Shurikane]

I always start with a + shaped arrangement of stairs going down a 7x7 shaft.  A corridor to the right leads to something like a 30x30 utility shaft with stairs, and a bedroom shaft on the left of varying height depending on the map and my mood.  North and south are used for a quick graveyard and a few levers, mostly for the drawbridges.

On the first utility floor, I place my farms and most of the main workshops.

On the second floor, a massive dining hall.

On the third floor, all other misc. and seldom used workshops.

[Creamcorn]

I always do this.

1.Dig a carve three ramps somewhere for the entrance.

2.Create stratigic 3 tile wide entrance hallway, maybe I'll channel out the upper ground, and put marksdwarfs up there when that becomes the fort gate.

3.At the end of stratigic hallway I make my dorfs mine a 9x9 box, from the upper areas plus lower I make 3x3 hallways for rooms, and such. Or vice versa.

4. At the right of those 9x9 boxs I make an exact cut into the earth doing the same thing in the first step or maybe I'll leave a 3x3 hallway leading into a dining room, if the ground stone is flux or magnetite.

So what I have is something like this.

Key
+ wall
. ground
^ Ramp

Fort entrance

Code: [Select]

..........
..........
..........
.^........
.^........
.^........
..........
..........
..........
..........
..........

Fort level one, and so on.

Code: [Select]

+.+.+++.+.+
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
^.........^
+.+.+++.+.+

[Lord_Shadow]

Large grid, 4 z levels tall. Fortress is ringed, and crossed by a 5 wide corrador. All work areas (stone works, metal works, leatherworks, kitchens/stills/fisheries,) in there own seperate semi isolated areas. The Z level above is used from unfinish items (barrels, stones, bars, raw leather(tanned hides), cut gems), the lower z level (food, furnature, weapons), the lowest z level has bedrooms, graves, dining room, thronerooms, and barracks, all carved out of stone... all the rest of the lower levels are mined out. The whole grid is then surrounded by a moat, magma preferably, a wall is build around within the moat, with balastas every 9 spaces, above is a catwalk with fortification, over balastas are towers housing amo for marksdwarves, balista's and catapults, over the amo dumps are catapults. Ind the center is tower, normally build to the maximum highest point with fortications on every level. The entry way is a large bridge normally facing south by tradition. On the other end of the bridge is a dual bridge system used for the capturing of megabeasts and a large array of weapon traps (normally 10 giant steel battle axes per trap, roughly 100 traps)...

The design is by my reconing the most efficent, dwarves normally only have to travel at the most 4 steps to a staircase, then up on z level to get items, and down one to store... the system allows haulers to keep up with even lengendary builders....

BRND666 lies he is sitting next to me fyi

i really did...

the whole spralling mess, yeah well, they all died ok, i hit a magma pipe, it wasn't pretty well it was but umm yeah i was noob..

you spent an entire year building a stupid tower to house 'your' grave and used half of the darn fortress gold!

NOOOOO!!!!

ANGER!!!!

[Brdn666]

Five wide downwards staircases that go down as far as need be, at least 3 down. This leads to my 5 wide main hallway, with branching 3 wide minor hallways for stuff like the food area and whatnot. The wide hallway is great for traffic. No one ever seems to get clogged up with this. I like having a quantum stockpile for my loads of stone. All you have to do is a have a dump zone below the floor with stairs going down. The deeper the better. Make sure to designate the zone at the topmost area. You can keep the mason/mechanics areas right next to this pit, allowing for the highest efficiency possible. Also, keep the carpenter/wood area near the entrance because wood hauling is far.

I think that if you have a large 5 wide hallway, that should solve the huge sprawling mess thing. Also, make sure you make the stockpiles larger than you think you need. Group similar stockpiles together, k? My RL friend lordshadow used to have horrible, HORRIBLE messes. Really is quite the opposite to his normal mathy scienceness. Oh well. He once pronounced frolicking, fro (as in hair) licking. He really did. We are sitting within 2 feet of each other now, posting on the same thread. Yeah, I once used one of his messes, our bad attempt at community fortress and I couldn't see an ambush. Till the babies heads rolled...

IT WAS AWESOME!!!!!!

WE HAVE TO GO HOME NOW!!!!

ANGER!!!!

[Grumman]

I use one large tower, containing workshops, living quarters and drinking halls, with additional towers for farms, gatehouses and the like.

[wildfire]

(aboveground)Barracks, Trade depot with retractable bridge to cut the fortress off. Plus I have a big tower with green glass windows, currently empty.
Farms and meeting hall
workshops and storage (this takes up the entire map level of 4x4 at this point)
empty
empty
empty
empty
good bedrooms + some noble rooms
kings chambers
bad bedrooms + shopping mall
empty
empty
jail+HFS
empty+HFS
extensive tombs system(currently 150+ full tombs and a grand mausoleum for all my military dwarves + guards + royal guards)

[Jackrabbit]

good lord and them some. I am awed

[Marlowe]

Can't compete with that, but this is Fogcrystal, spring 207:


First level underground: Barracks and armoury
Second Level: Stores
Third level: (First rock layer) workshops.
Fourth level: Accomodation, well, dining hall.
Fifth level: Nobles quarters.
Sixth-Fourteenth: Exploratory mining.
Fifteenth: Tombs.