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[Carusun]

I'm one of those people who have to plan out my fortress from the start, designating all the areas to be dug before the first day is out.

However, I'm not that good at surviving long enough to find out what would be needed in a bustling high population fortress.

I thought I'd start this topic to ask a couple of things:
a) What kind of rooms will I need to have to keep my dwarves happy? (non-obvious ones, like a sculpture garden which I only just found out about in the wiki)
b) How do you lay out your fortress for efficiency and aesthetics?

I'll start with how I'm attempting to lay my fortress out at the moment, so you can point out where/if I'm going wrong:

I tend to embark to flat areas, with a brook and a soil/sand layer or two

My entrance is a small ramp onto a corkscrew pattern circling my central staircase, going down to the bottom z-layer, like so:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Floor 1:


Floor 2:

Once there, it leads onto my trade depot, which is next to my barracks, for ease of dispatching of kobold and goblin filth, should they attack. The barracks have large finished goods stockpiles on either side, so that my various crafts are at hand for trading.

I've split my workshops into two groups, one for farm and food related items, such as the butcher, weaver, and kitchen, and another for stone, metal and wood items. The first group is up in the soil layers, keeping my workers fed, and the second is on the layer just above my trade depot (with the actual workshops out of noise range of the beds in the barracks, obviously). The layer just below/above the workshop groups is reserved for stockpiling the items to be used, such as wood, stone, or unprepared food.

A couple of layers above the lower workshop stockpiles, I have my small bedrooms; 3 squares apiece, to hold a chest and a bed. I build enough of those for the majority of the population cap. Above those, I have larger rooms, for any nobles who decide to stay.

Below the upper workshop stockpiles, I have a large stockpile of prepared foods and drinks, and a large dining room. I try to let it hold at least 50 dining dwarves at a time, to be on the safe side.

Beyond all that, is there anything that I'm missing? And how do you guys set up your fortresses, anyway?

Many thanks for listening to my rambling, and I hope that I've not been blind and missed another post along these lines that I should have posted in instead

[woose1]

And how do you guys set up your fortresses, anyway?

Inside a active volcano inside a fortress inside another active volcano.

The whole "Ramp" thing you have going on is very popular, but I'm not sure about a main shaft inside it, unless you are planning on putting walls outside to protect it.

EDIT: And make all your hallways 3 tiles or wider. You will thank me later.

[Carusun]

Inside a active volcano inside a fortress inside another active volcano.

hehe, I'll wait until I've got a better handle on the game before I start trying to do things like that

The whole "Ramp" thing you have going on is very popular, but I'm not sure about a main shaft inside it, unless you are planning on putting walls outside to protect it.

The central shaft doesn't actually reach the surface, but instead stops just below it, so I can reach the top soil layers without having gobbos or kobolds able to just saunter into my food production area

EDIT: And make all your hallways 3 tiles or wider. You will thank me later.

Yeah, already starting on that atm I'm using 5 wide for areas that I'm anticipating high traffic in, and then 3 wide everywhere else.

[SolarShado]

Inside a active volcano inside a fortress inside another active volcano.

hehe, I'll wait until I've got a better handle on the game before I start trying to do things like that

This is an inside joke... it's actually impossible atm.
Someone feel free to prove me wrong!

The whole "Ramp" thing you have going on is very popular, but I'm not sure about a main shaft inside it, unless you are planning on putting walls outside to protect it.

The central shaft doesn't actually reach the surface, but instead stops just below it, so I can reach the top soil layers without having gobbos or kobolds able to just saunter into my food production area

makes sense, just don't have the bottom of the shaft too close to the bottom of the ramp. don't want gobbos' cutting you off from your farms (and whatever else you put in in the soil layers).

EDIT: And make all your hallways 3 tiles or wider. You will thank me later.

Yeah, already starting on that atm I'm using 5 wide for areas that I'm anticipating high traffic in, and then 3 wide everywhere else.

5 wide might be overkill...

[Uninvited Guest]

i put a waterfall in the middle of the dining room. dwarfs would get blasted with mist as they ate and they got serious happy thoughts.
i think you need running water though. i made mine by robbing a lake and it didn't last more than a year before drying up.

[jplur]

Fortress design that makes dwarves happy.. I think the best thing you could do is to separate the  workshops from the bedrooms by at least 6 tiles. 

Dwarves can be perfectly happy in a cramped poorly designed fortress, so maybe you should ask how fortress design can make *you* happy.

I recently switched from 3 wide hallways to 4 wide, I don't think 5 wide is too extreme if you want efficiency.

[woose1]

i put a waterfall in the middle of the dining room. dwarfs would get blasted with mist as they ate and they got serious happy thoughts.
i think you need running water though. i made mine by robbing a lake and it didn't last more than a year before drying up.

Because everyone knows dwarves love getting blasted by tonnes of water, making their food sogging wet, over the sound of a waterfall crashing, roughly reminicent of a jet plane engine.

[Savok]

I may rethink my dining room amidst pillars of thundering water.

[SolarShado]

Because everyone knows dwarves love getting blasted by tonnes of water, making their food sogging wet, over the sound of a waterfall crashing, roughly reminicent of a jet plane engine.

lol.

that all depends on the size of the waterfall. i wouldn't think a one z drop would be all that loud.

[alcaz0r]

I'm still fairly new to DF, but for my last few forts I have had great succes using the "borg cube" layout described by Martin in this thread.
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=30630.msg415469#msg415469

It really is efficient! I left my last fort with 120ish dwarves, 30 full-time military, and 40 basically full-time idlers. 2500 prepared meals and 1500 booze stockpiled and climbing fast. For defense I made the surface a courtyard the same size as my fort, sealable by a drawbridge, and two 9x9 guard towers (only accessible from inside the fort) over-looking the long row of walls leading up to the entrance. The guard towers had levels underneath for barracks, food and booze stockpile, dining room, so the marksdwarves wouldn't have to go far from their posts.

It was a boring map though (no magma) so I decided to start over in a mountain.

About what kind of rooms make your dwarves happy, I give each one a smoothed out bedroom with a cabinet and coffer and I've never seen one tantrum yet, though this could be my lack of experience talking. 

[Jim Groovester]

My fortress designs usually involve a large workshop cloister connected by a long hallway to a large bedroom cloister, both spanning several z-levels. That way, all workshop resources are very close together, so my dwarves don't spend a lot of time hauling, and whenever they get hungry or tired, they walk down the same path. The Trade Depot is at the center of the workshop cloister, just to reduce the hauling time for the thousands of items I give to the caravans whenever they arrive.

It may be very efficient, but it's pretty boring, so I'm starting to move away from it and do more thematic fortress designs, just to keep things interesting.

[Martin]

Yeah, that cube layout is the most optimal that I've been able to come up with (I'm trying a new design now, we'll see...). One of my goals is to see how large a military/civilian ratio I can sustain over an extended period of time. I *think* I can easily support 9:1 with that setup - 180 military dwarves and 20 civilians, including tending to wounded (I always have a well inside the cube somewhere convenient). That includes the civilians making food, booze, farming, butchering, and producing ammo and the like. No construction or trade items, because when you have an army of 180, you really don't need trade.

As for keeping dwarves happy - 2x3 smoothed rooms with bed, cabinet, and coffer work fine. I level up a mason before outfitting rooms so everyone gets exceptional furniture but a masterwork door. If you look at choke points in your fortress and plunk down masterwork doors, statues, and masterwork engravings where they'll see them regularly, they'll be ecstatic all the time. I surround my trade depot with masterwork engravings so anyone hauling trade goods there gets happy, that kind of thing. Same with where they eat and get booze.

Also, if you use prepared meals as trade items, sell the low quality ones. They're worth less, but the benefits of eating masterwork food is worth it, so save those.

[Foa]

Mine's fully modular, though it made the Magma Camps the most used facility in the fort, I have enough obsidian, and dense obsidian blocks/etc to make my fort made out of constructions.

Here is a snippet of the entrance prototype BP; Part of the Lock.

[Faces of Mu]

Can you post your map to the archive, Carusun? 

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/

[Carusun]

Can you post your map to the archive, Carusun? 

Will do once I've got it mined out

I also wanna mention that I'm using Tweak to edit the rocks immediately around my fortress, but that's just to make it look pretty to me; I hate it when I have a wall that changes colour halfway through