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[exoleet]

Most of my fortresses turn out to be clusterfucks of rooms built when they're needed.

Does anyone have any advise on how to organize my fortress from the start for optimal results?

[Aqizzar]

When you start, build long wide corridors for other rooms to branch off of.  You don't have actually let them be dug, just designate them in black space where your miners can't get to them.  Try to leave space for hallways to eventually be expanded to five or six tiles wide for main areas, three or four for other places.

You can also designate rooms this way to plan space out - try to think of every industry you'll wind up using, and plan a couple 7x7 rooms for each as workshop and storage space.  Living quarters, meeting areas, drink storage, and other such idle spaces should be centralized, to decrease walking time.

[Flaede]

why make hallways THAT large?

[andrea]

my fortresses have always similar

first floor, soil, stockpiles(huge) and farms
under stockpiles there is a big room with workshops
then under that bedrooms, then noble quarters.
only one thing per floor.

but if order and planning is what you look for, build aboveground, and use much wood. you will be forced to build slowly, so you will plan more.
look at my signature... a ten years old fortress.  but no clusters of room built where they were needed (that might also be because it is a tower)

[pushy]

why make hallways THAT large?

Narrow corridors with heavy traffic result in significantly slower movement because only one dwarf can stand on a tile at any one time, so you get dwarves taking a step or two then having to get down as another dwarf stands on top of them, then they get up, then down again as another dwarf comes by, then up again, along another tile or two (standing on other dwarves), ad nauseum. It's possible to abuse pathfinding AI to have workable corridors that are 2 or 3 tiles wide but 5 usually works perfectly fine with or without abusing the AI.

[chaoticag]

All corridors need to be at least 3 tiles wide. The farm should have a seed stockpile, and a room by your dining hall should house your food stockpile. Build all food related workshops in that room.

Have a part of the fortress as a workshop extravaganza, with assorted stockpiles nearby.

Don't spread your bedrooms across one z-level, and keep them relatively close to your dining hall. Use a zone as a meeting zone, as using a dining hall causes dwarves to throw parties the entire time.

[Cheshire Cat]

wow, five tile wide corridoors. ive never done that. i have 2 tile wide passages everywyere, and normally i go three for really really busy areas at the most, though i do notice it gets crowded even in them once my fortress gets really really big. perhaps i need to smarten up my act.

i try and always have my workshops all on one level with storage areas for raw materials directly above and below, with stairways leading up and down. the one level makes it easier for me to jump to one place and micromanage production. all the workshops are sealable by door or floor hatch in case of fey moods gone wrong. i normally store my most valuable things like really good gems and metal bars directly above and below my workshops, as dwarves see that as closest when picking materials to make an artifact from.

when i start i normally have my very first workshops outside, and my first big sleeping area in the place my indoors trade depot eventually ends up. i normally have huge rooms near the depo for all my finished goods to go in, and those are great early game for shoving sleeping areas, workshops and anything else i may need into during the very start of a fort. you can get really really clever about fort design by placing certain workshops in certain areas near bedrooms and food stores so that many dwarves never even have to wander out into the rest of your fort and gum things up, though that takes more thinking then i can normally be bothered with.

[blue emu]

My hallways are usually only two or three tiles wide... and I almost always regret it later on.

Fortunately, it's always possible to widen them later, and build new walls.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

One aspect is to think in rectangles. A classic would be 3x3. If you want a large storage area or dining room, use connected 3x3 rooms. This gives you a somewhat regular grid and also allows for room shuffling in case of emergency.

Another aspect is the surface. Unless you are in very dangerous surroudings, consider building all spontaneous, quickly needed workshops outside and use them there (this also helps against cave adaptation). As your resources permit, plan and carve out your "real" workshop rooms and other supplies at your leisure and move workshops only into the final areas once they are finished.

The same goes double for stockpiles, except for food, of course. Just make sure to protect your finished goods stockpiles against raccoons or macaques, of course :) :)

If you have a soil layer, use that for those preliminary food storages, barracks, and the first meeting place (the latter two need to be inside as well, after all). This way, once you are all settled in, you can simply destroy the entire layer and it will seem as if nothing has ever happened. And you have not wasted a single tile of engravable tunnel.

Finally, keeping the grid in mind, you can make manufacturing corridors where certain manufacturing workshops are grouped together. Each workshop can have its own 3x3 room and if there are any stockpiles it needs, they will also be 3x3 in size to make for a regular look. You can have all the rooms directly connected to the corridor, or you could place either the stockpile or the workshop connected to the corridor, while the other can only be reached through the first. This makes for a regular design that doesn't look bad.

In addition, also start carving out a grid for your big assemblies: tombs and bed rooms. Eventually, you will need a lot of those, so you should at least reserve a fitting area/z-level for each of them. Using standardized rooms helps again keep the eye unaware of the clutter.

Deathworks

[Raphite1]

Just a note - be wary if you design most of your fortress on paper before embarking! The first time I did this, I immediately paused the game upon embark, and did mining designations for my ENTIRE FORT before unpausing. Not smart. Even though I brought three proficient miners, it took them a year or more to dig out all the necessary areas to make the fort livable. I refused to un-designate certain areas, or make certain areas inaccessible, BECAUSE IT WAS PERFECT DAMMIT. My dwarves spent the year sleeping by the trade depot outside, fighting off attacks by foul blendecs and werewolves. I lost all my war dogs and one of my dwarves before the fort was livable, and all the rest were about to snap from unhappy thoughts.

Everything worked out, though, and within a couple years we were booming, my hunters were accidently killing dragons, and a single legendary wrestler/speardwarf was making sieges trivial.

[Martin]

Once you embark, take a few minutes with the game paused to scout around the map and figure out where you are going to build and get a general sense of what kind of fortress you want - aboveground, deep, shallow and sprawling, etc. My first order of business is ALWAYS identifying where I think the underground farms will go and building around that spot.

Then consider the resources you have available - trees, obsidian, magma and figure out what kind of economy you are going to start out with. You need to trade *something* in the beginning. Pick one thing and build around that. Don't worry about bedrooms and such in the beginning. You can always plop 4 beds down in the corner of a room and let them hotbunk for a season, and later remove them to use the room for what you intended.

Once you figure out your early economy and farms and some basic fortress design, build one component of that design. Maybe the farms and a trade hall where you'll have your depot and finished goods later. Dig only that out. 7 dwarves don't need much space. I might dig out a 9x9 farmable area, build a 9x1 farm plot, and stick my brewer, kitchen, and butcher shop in there for the beginning along with a small stockpile. Get your basic economy up and running in the smallest reasonable space - you'll minimize hauling jobs, which are what kill small population fortresses. Once everything is inside and food is planted, *then* plan out your expansion.

Give one miner the task so he'll become legendary as soon as possible. Once he's legendary, make him a hauler (or some other job) and skill up another guy. Don't give him 3000 tiles to dig out, or he'll sprawl all over the place and yield no usable space until he's done. Give him 200-300 tiles to dig, wait until they are done, then give him 200-300 more. That way you'll get space to expand on a regular basis. You can then take a room and just stuff in one of each workshop, just so that you have them when you need them or if a mood strikes. You can take them down later when things are laid out better.

My advise on a basic economy would be prepared food. If you get an immigrant rush, you'll need it desperately, and with easy meals your cook will skill up pretty fast and those things will have a decent value. It's also an economy that doesn't take much space, works even when under attack, and allows you to slow the pace of things down a bit so you don't always feel rushed. Plus, you need those buildings and skills anyway.

As for overall layout, I tend to organize things by z-level. One level will have all workshops, or all workshops of a certain type (all food/plant, all stone, etc.) Above and below 1-2 z levels will be storage for those shops. Dwarves can walk down 10 flights of stairs as quickly as they can cross a 10-wide room. Take advantage of that. I can fit 200 dwarves and a full economy (4-8 of every building) VERY comfortably in a 50x50 area. That includes 2x3 bedrooms, farms, storage, tombs, noble quarters, etc. It'll be 20-25 stories tall, but a dwarf can walk from one end to the other in no time.

[Duke 2.0]

 I apparently have the horrible opposite of what you have. I plan too much and end up with inefficient fortresses because of a style I'm trying to achieve.

 "No, the housing district cannot be made yet. We still need to dig out the 100x100x20 tile empty space!"

[Captain Xenon]

i tend to go with 3-tile wide hallways, around a group of four 11x11 room blocks. i then stack these rooms verticaly, and use the 3-wide spaces on other floors to add a few more workshops. the 11x11 space has a staircase going up and down, and is used for storage of things the workshops need. main staircase is 3x3 at a intersection near the food.

do make sure to put your trade depot inside (3-wide wagon hallways), and to leave space verticaly for pits under the raising bridges that keep siege out. and use plenty of traps. really, i like putting a tunnel to near the edge of the map, ramp up and road the last bit to the edge. then trap the bejesus out of the hallway! that way your merchants should arrive right by the safe tunnel, and quickly get where you can defend them.

[Mephansteras]

My fortresses all tend to be very similar. The upper levels are for farms, store rooms, and workshops. Then comes a dining and food storage level. Then about 4-6 levels below them are the living quarters, tombs, and jails. Intervening layers are used mostly for mining, and maybe more storage or water/magma movement.

I try to use 4-5 wide hallways for the important areas. The major exceptions being access tunnels to archery towers and smaller bedroom tunnels, which are 2 wide. I figure they have low enough traffic that dwarves can just go around each other.

[LegacyCWAL]

I have the worst of both underplanning AND overplanning.

I've gotten to the point where I know most of the "tricks of the trade". Utilize z-levels instead of spreading out, use wide hallways, put similar workshops together, manipulate food/drink/seed stockpiles to increase efficiency, etc.  I'll plan out a pretty good design that utilizes this stuff, but I'll wind up looking ahead just one step too few.

A good example is in my current fort.  Recently, as part of my overarching fortress plan, I began expanding upwards...and found out the hard way that one of the stairwells would cut through the already-built and fully-engraved King's quarters.  So now, thanks to not planning far enough ahead, I have to either move the entire stairwell or leave it broken on that level.  Unfortunately, thanks to planning so far ahead, moving the stairwell would require moving it AND two others AND gutting and reconstructing a significant fraction of almost every single z-level