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[MrWiggles]

Well, I recently changed my fortress designed. I am doing a fast expendable work house fortress, to house the crew for the main fortress I take my design building.

Before, it always became such an ugly mess, and I came to the conclusion that I cant make an organic grown fortress look pretty. I can make a fortress designed for 200 dorfs and make that look good.

Although now with that design change, all my fortresses carry similar elements.

I always place the graveyard on the bottom level, and I always have a large two z level cistern, that supply water to my network of wells that supply water through fortress, on every level, and more common in housing area.  That sits on the bottom.

If I have magma, I make a smoothed magmaduct with bauxite grate stop gaps on the lowest z level I can safely mine into, and pump it to my magma work shop, powered by underground windmills. (I think of it as air pressure differential moving a collection of turbines in a the shaft.)

My rooms are always grouped together, with nobels getting their own floor, the king being the exception. They're near their thorn. The mayor has an apartment with office, dining room, and bedroom as one duplex.

The military is always in one large central barracks, with the captain of the guard (if I appoint), having a well to do office, rivaling the mayors. They have an independent route to the outside world.

[andrea]

I like building aboveground towers , big aboveground tower fortresses.
But it is evolving, the second fortress was different from the first and the third will probably be different too.
In my signature, I have a little castle I am building. What is odd is that despite me not being able to give rooms or a dining room until mid-late game, I never have tantrum problems. Until a large part of my military gets killed by goblins, but it usually ends well.

Later , I'll try something more decorated.

[Silfurdreki]

Examples of my fortresses are:

Silverwaters
Roomtyphoons

Oooh... Nice <<*fortresses*>> there. I love the designs even though the first one reminds me of an elven tree city somehow. What titleset did you use for Silverwaters? Also, I love the dragon in the other one. Nice work.

Thank you!
The tileset used for Silverwaters is Dorten's smooth walls.

Only artifacts may be made out of ore. If I want higher-value furniture, I use metal, even though that's inefficient.

Same here. I simply can't bring my self to exploit the high values of ores. Ore is for making metal, not furniture(though I still use native ore walls for high value rooms sometimes). Also, metal is like a treasure for me. In older fortresses I end up with vast hordes of metal bars, since I only use them for important projects and military. Lately I've begun to boost my trade with metal crafts(especially since with my mods I have 5-6 trading races), but since I always buy all metal bar the traders bring and often request them with trade agreements, it doesn't change the balance much. I remember to have had over 2000 metal bars in my last fortress and that one didn't even last that long.

Seems like there are a few general building styles. I guess we could even start dividing building styles into schools.

That sounds like me as well, When I want valuable furniture, metal is the way to go, and I also buy all metal bars I can get my hands on.

[darkrider2]

My forts always tend to have screw pump and water wheel systems moving all my water about. I usually try to put my meeting hall or statue garden suspended over a pit of magma (or water). I start with one main staircase and then by the end I have several large staircases, but only the starting one spans every used level. I also like to build verticle bars at my entrances.

[Bryan Derksen]

I usually try to penetrate the ground in the fewest possible places - usually just one ground penetration for the main entrance. Sometimes I use a vertical central stair, sometimes I use a 3-wide entrance hall with ramps so that the caravan can descend into my fort. I carefully conserve the "undergroundness" of tiles, I very rarely do any direct sculpting of surface features. Surface structures are almost exclusively military in nature, but can get quite big and elaborate - I like to pretend that there are real sieges and so plan for things such as siege towers and sappers and wall breaches.

Underground, my main thoroughfares are either three tiles wide or five tiles wide (three used to be my maximum but I've since discovered that a 200-dwarf fort will really need more than that). The main thoroughfares are always carved out by ramping so that they're two Z levels tall, and some of my other major rooms such as dining halls and throne rooms will also have ceilings an extra Z level high. I pretend that the 7 tile wide cave-in rule is in effect and I use pillars wherever it seems architecturally reasonable and realistic. I try to line up walls between Z levels so that they provide vertical load-bearing support. I use doors _everywhere_ - I've never had a serious fort flood, though that's also because I'm extremely careful and conservative whenever doing waterworks. My most recent fort has under-floor water channels with wells at every major intersection, the first time I've dared doing something like that (pressure is regulated by an automated repeater system and there's an emergency cutoff floodgate that will trigger automatically if water were to start coming out of the wells).

My workshops and residential areas are vertically stacked, on opposite sides of major thoroughfares from each other for sound mitigation. The largest I'll generally dig a workshop room is eleven by eleven (with four pillars or staircases providing support), capable of holding up to nine workshops with gaps between for pedestrian access. I don't usually put a full nine workshops in them, though - some of the space instead goes to small stockpiles for raw materials. Another common workshop size is five by eleven - these are capable of holding two of the five-tile workshops or stores - or seven by eleven, which can hold up to six regular workshops (again usually only three workshops are built, with the other half of the room devoted to raw material storage).

Residential areas are done with the "living pod" layout described on the wiki (four rooms by four rooms with four staircases accessed by diagonal doors), using three-by-three room size. Every dwarf gets a room with a cabinet and coffer, if for no other reason than it gives them a place to store their crap instead of leaving it lying all over the place. If the fort is long-running I'll often wind up adding a table and chair to each as well. I prefer wooden doors if there are ample trees available, stone doors are reserved for doors that might need to be secured for defensive or fire-control purposes.

A catacombs will be built some distance away from the main fort, usually hidden behind an ordinary door tucked away in a generic mineshaft somewhere (the best way to thwart grave robbers is stealth, IMO). The tombs will consist of four-by-one rooms- enough space for a door, a coffer, a coffin, and a cabinet.

After I've accumulated enough pointless artifacts (amulets and junk like that) I'll sometimes build a treasure vault. This vault's access will be hidden in a random dwarf's tomb - a second level of security through obscurity - and will contain the fort's last-ditch seal-and-destruct levers. I've never lost a fort to invasion but I like to imagine that as the fort is falling to ruin one of the nobles will flee down into the depths and entomb himself there with the fortress' riches.

My fort's main non-artifact treasure trove will be gems and metal bars. I don't encrust things with gems, and I usually only allow legendary metalworkers to actually use metal for anything - I _hate_ the loss of metal that occurs when I forge something and then melt it down, it makes no sense. All goblin gear gets melted down. All metal is precious - nobles that mandate too many metal things will just have to go without (I'm willing to throw them a goblet every once in a while, especially if the metal they like is lead). I do build constructions out of metal, though, and also gem windows, since those can be deconstructed to their original components again without loss. My above-ground military facilities can wind up being solid steel gem-windowed cathedrals of military might, while my dwarves are still armored in patchwork no-quality imports bought off of caravans because I haven't scored an armorer with a strange mood yet.

I'm not consistent about it, but I also sometimes like to pretend that forges and furnaces need chimneys.

[Lasander]

My forts are pretty organic.  I dont plan ahead much until the fort is halfway done.
I find a small/medium hill and begin work on removing the ramps and carving an entrance, space for a trade depot, and a temporary living area while I design the rest of the fort.  I do not use a room unless it is completely smoothed and furnished and I try not to use a floor if I can unless it is done.  I do not use engravings as they are tacky.
The space inside the hill is pretty chaotic and follows the landscape.  Other than smoothing any stone in the immediate area, removing ramps, and building roads I try not to change the land too much.  Eventually I will build walls near my hill especially if the hill is near another hill which will have its ramps removed as well should I decide to use it.

I dont take advantage of Z-levels as much as I should.  At first my entire fort would be in 1~2 Z-levels and for the most part that is all I use but I now dig my workshops deeper in the ground to combat noise.

I put my farms and barracks in the hill with my workshops down below and my offices and housing where ever they will fit. I am trying to be more efficient and build some sort of housing complex and design a fort around a central staircase.  I still use a central staircase but my forts are so sprawling that they arent as efficient as they should be. I also just have a massive room for all of my storage needs located on or near the craft level.  I used to micromanage my storage areas with rooms separated by quality so I have a nice visual on my quality goods without having to examine all of them individually but I have been getting lazy.  I want to start doing that again and have raw materials stored above their respective workshops.  Sometimes if I plan ahead I will have an office complex.  Statues go where ever they fit.

Every craftdwarf, champion, and appointed positions get a 3x3 room that is well furnished while the rest live in a barracks.  I have a large dining room with small ones scattered about(with stockpiles) so my dwaves dont have to walk far to eat.

Also, all coffins go into smoothed veins with statues and doors wherever they fit.  If it is an underground then my artifacts that I am not currently using gets stored there as well.

I use traffic zones to protect the trees and I try to keep my important dwarves from going outside at all if possible.   Most useless skilled dwarves get drafted and the rest become haulers and only peasants are considered for appointed positions if available otherwise they are haulers.  I dont care about non-appointed nobles too much.

[Tokkius]

I build my forts very precise, with a specific thematic goal in mind. If it's a military fortress, I'll build lots of looming towers and moats and traps. If it's an economic fortress, I'll build it more freestyle, with focus on residential and commercial flair. One problem I have, though, is perfectionism. If there's even ONE LITTLE DETAIL not to my liking, I'll savescum to before I made the mistake or even abandon. That whole "staircases everywhere with lots of mining tunnels" thing bugs me to no end, and is part of the reason I prefer to do my own forts, rather than pass saves around.

[EnDSchultz]

Huzzah for my first post! I've been playing DF on and off for about six months now after my friend introduced me to it and just now decided to register on the forums after much lurking.

Anyway, my fortresses...they really have no style to them. Usually grid-based, 1-3 tile wide hallways, with workshops or bedrooms squeezed in the space between the grid. In my most recent fortress, cramped hole in the ground that it is, I threw any semblance of pattern to the wind after about the first z-level down and just started placing large workrooms and stockpiles next to each other as I started needing them.

I don't know why, but I'm very hesitant to expand much. Architecture and style be damned, I'm going to dig out every last bit of unused space within the confines of my (square) fort before digging outwards more. I've been looking at some of the other forts (Room Typhoons at the moment) and quite a few of them have a goodly amount of empty, un-excavated space here and there for whatever reason. Haha, not me, though I'd like to become more stylistically interesting. Alas, I end up digging out every last bit of dirt and filling it with crap to the point my fort is a blinding block of random rooms, shops, and stockpiles.

[Astramancer]

My forts are more or less designed to be dwarf-proof.  I try to lay things out so that I don't have to forbid going outside during a siege (messes up my above-ground farms) or other things like that.

My workshops all have doors and a space for a cage trap inside the door.  The door is for locking to cut access to a workshop for when a cat leaves a rotting corpse in there, and the trap space is just in case of failed moods - I usually don't bother to install the trap unless there's a moody dwarf working.  The workshops go above or below a rather large open space designated with as many stockpiles as I need, with pairs of workshops stacked above/below each other with up/down stair access.  My fueled workshops go below, because that's where the magma will go (well, it'll go one zlevel below that, anyway).
My workshops:

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My refuse piles are all inside (so I don't lose bones to lazy haulers), I make use of the fact that miasma doesn't travel diagonally but dwarves do.  No dwarf ever has to step into miasma to drop refuse in my dump, no matter how many things are rotting.

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The refuse stockpiles go in the outer edge

I also like to use shafts cut all the way to the bottom level with access on all zlevels - I designate them as dump zones, and put an atom smasher at the bottom, with levers on all zlevels next to the access to the trash chute.  If a chasm, bottomless pit, or underground river terminus is convenient, I'll use that instead of an atom smasher.

Housing tends to be uninspired - vast stacked blocks of 3x3 rooms with 2-wide hallways.

One thing that I do that I don't really see mentioned is I make separate rooms for the different quality/materials of weapons and armor.  Long before I get my metal industry up and running, I have those rooms dug and designated.  Basically, I set the stockpiles to only accept certain metals and qualities.  This way if I want to equip my soldiers with poor-quality silver weapons for training, I just forbid all my weapons from the stocks menu and unforbid the 'training' room which contains my poor quality silver weapons.   I can also use the mass designate tool to send all my bad quality gear back to the smelters - since all the bad-quality stuff is in it's own room.  It gives me a lot of control over what my military dwarves use, without the problems that seems to plague many of the other forumgoers.

On that note, I try to avoid doing anything that requires me to remember that I forced a dwarf somewhere for me to do something with once they get there.  Since dwarves tend to take forever to actually get there, my attention will have wandered off and the dwarf will likely die of thirst (or get really, really thirsty and hungry) before I remember about him and do what I was going to do originally.  That's why I designed the auto-sorting rooms for my military gear, so that I didn't have to remember that I stationed them there so that would be the closest weapon, or whatever.

Strangely enough, I never really got comfortable using the manager.  I overproduce raw materials, so that I can just keep the workshop on repeat and not have to worry about it.  It's either repeat, or have several identical workshops next to each other so I can queue up 30 or 40 beds (or whatever) at once, just in 3 or 4 workshops.  Consequently I have many, very large stockpile rooms.  I've managed to completely fill up a 20x20 room with beds, barrels, and bins, and the only manual thing I had to do in that process once it was set up was keep designating those trees to be cut.  I didn't notice I had that many of those until I noticed that the carpenters workshop was at max clutter.

I don't like to have any idlers, so if I see that I always have 2-3 idlers or more, I'll just start up another process on repeat, like sewing images or decorating with glass or something.  I always have a few engravers smoothing and engraving everything (depending on terrain, I'll even do it outside).

Once the fort gets mature enough, I'll start sorting furniture by quality and uninstalling poorly made stuff and replacing them with better quality.  The bad stuff gets dumped in the garbage chute and atom-smashed into oblivion.  It takes a long time to completely replace all the tables and chairs in a large dining hall.

As part of this incremental upgrade process, I also remake all of my workshops with blocks, and later bars of precious metals.

My mega-projects aren't about giant towers, but making everything that my dwarves interact with be masterful with masterful decorations, if possible - this means doors, traps (including both the mechanisms and weapons/cages), bedroom sets, dining hall ... everything.

[shadowform]

I like to mix things up from fort to fort, usually in the attempts of creating a specific 'feel' at each one.
My previous fortress consisted of a series of towers, each supporting identical and with room for 40-50 dwarves to work, sleep, eat, and play, with a noble occupying the top floor.  Only one had access to the outside (it contained both the depot and the barracks), with the others connected through a network of underground tunnels.

The one I'm in right now has a fairly tight setup centered around a 3x3 stairwell in the center, with an erratic and unplanned series of surface constructions consisting of archery towers, an archery range, and an open-air barracks.

The next fort I'm planning is going to be a straight out castle; spiral staircase in the back leading to the throne room several stories up, with all of the necessary workshops and living quarters located in the four towers that form the corners of the castle and the walls that connect them.The design is 52x52 with a bit of overhang to make it easier to tell where the 'front' is.

After this...  I dunno.  Maybe I'll find a site with a river, do some digging and create a city under a lake.  That, or a city with some truly massive waterworks...

[Jake]

I tend to start off with a five-by-five space for the trade depot, dug into the side of a hill at some convenient point; if I can find a natural valley I can roof in as an entrance tunnel, I'll do so. My wood, fuel and economic stone stockpiles usually go out by the front door.
From there I'll dig space for two huge stockpiles on either side of the trade depot, one for food and booze and another for cloth and leather, cut gems and finished goods for sale to caravans. On the side I choose as my food stockpile I'll dig a barracks and dining hall plus food-prep workshops (kitchen, still, farmer's workshop and fishery) and eventually the bedrooms. On the other side will go my workshops. Charcoal ovens and smelters stay outside, a habit I picked up when I still thought they were a fire risk.

I tend to build in as close to a grid pattern as the local terrain permits, and any odd-shaped sections of mountain I can't use for anything else become statue gardens or storerooms for stuff I don't really need but don't want to throw away. However, unlike many other contributors to this thread, I don't build to a template and actually find a more organic layout more aesthetically pleasing; make as many visits to I have to central Milton Keynes and you'll understand.

[Lav]

I always plan my forts ahead from top to bottom. So when I embark, I quickly do the prospect mining for major features (chasm/pit/pipe/pool/lake/river), then I quit the game, take some paper and start planning.

I like everything optimized so deciding the optimal allocation of bedrooms, workshops, magma and waterducts, fishing areas, woodcutting areas etc takes quite a lot of time - sometimes even several days.

Then obviously I get tired and never get to implementing those grand plans. So I scratch the world and generate another and start over.

But at least this keeps me occupied until the new version is released. :-)

[catoblepas]

I carve 17 tile wide entrances to my fortresses, with a pillar after every five tiles, allowing wagons to enter my lair. Any finished construction has to be made entirely out of blocks or smoothed stone. This is irritating when I make underground aqueducts for wells, as I have to wait until winter to dig out the tile to connect it to the river so my engravers can get to work. when not otherwise occupied polishing every square inch of my forts, my engravers are put to work polishing the landscape outside of my fort. Also, I never farm. Instead, I fish, hunt, gather, and trade for my supplies of booze and food. Because of this, my biggest challenge in forts is often running out of booze in the middle of winter. On the plus side, my forts always have plenty of legendary engravers, fishers, herbalists, and bonecarvers. My forts usually collapse due to thirst or from waves of invaders because I am a masochistic modder.

[Urist Imiknorris]

5-tile wide entrance hall into a wagon-accessible spiral stairway down to the bottom z-level of my map. Bottom level is dedicated to a giant mosaic of floor tiles in a combination of my civ's and local group's symbols, with my Trade Depot in the middle. All flooring for this mosaic is made of the highest-value metal/ores of each color that I can get my hands on. It's usually about 80 x 80. Occasionaly I try to make it 96x96, to cover a full four embark tiles, but it rarely works for some reason.

Also, most of my fortresses are above ground, with walkways leading between buildings, and inverted archer towers.

I don't actually get the full thing set up often, as I usually get sieged by Orcs first winter, but I try.

[Dendou]

I'm still pretty new so my designs are simple.  I try to pick a flat, or nearly flat, map with at least 2 layers of soil. 

Major details:  My central staircase is 5x5 with alternating up/down stairs on the edge, verticle bars around the ceter, and a waterfall in the center.
I dig into the earth with a 3x1 ramp down to -2Z.  I usually don't build anything above ground other than sometimes making an artificial hill around the entrance (to hide it)

at -2Z: I have a slightly more than 3x100 length hallway 2 Z levels high.  This hallway has the two edges carved into channels and covered with retractable bridges (all connected to a single lever).  At the inner side of the hallway I have a battery of ballistae and behind the entry ramp I have a 5x5 channel dug out to protect another battery of ballistae.  (cross-fire of heavy artillery ) On the left and right side of the hallway I have a resevoir of magma and water respectively and then two more levers to flood the hall with the liquid of my choice (or fill it with obdidian if I go crazy).  At the end of that I have my trade depot, finished goods stockpile/s, and farm/s.

at -1Z:  I have fortifications, ammo stockpiles, and basic ammenities for my marksdwarves to fire down at the hallway.  (though I've never had enough marksdwarves to make this practical.)

at -3Z (or the first stone Z layer): I have a massive empty area used for storage.

at-4Z:  I have my workshops, each workshop in a seperate room.

at -5Z:  I have 4 rooms for each dwarf, bed table chair and coffin, each 7x7 and engraved by legendary engravers.  I use a 3x3x3x4 fractal design.  (this is enought to please any noble other than king/queen)

I repeat the three previous layers necissary to accomadate extra dwarves.