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[Thursday Postal]

A new building unit: The Home, made of smaller rooms, for housing dwarven families.

While many players design elaborate bedroom layouts, the rooms themselves are often tiny and currently whole families sleep in one bed. I feel that as a fortress grows it becomes more like a town and the dwarves should have more space. While single dwarves may be content with simple, single rooms, a family should require more space and I believe they should prefer to have multiple rooms, maybe a small layout of three rooms carved into the stone or built by wood and stone in a larger empty space more like human buildings.

The home would give more flavor to the currently simple bedroom mechanics and possibly support future features related to individuals and their families. Dwarf families should expect or need a certain size of a room at the very least, with more than one bed if they have children. Family members and pets could spend time at home, and may prefer to eat or drink in here if they have a chance. The home could also serve as a place to perform the various things dwarves do in their spare time now or in the future. Each home could be allotted a default amount of furniture, say, two beds, two bins, etc, so that instead of requiring the player to individually place the furniture, dwarves would take the initiative and grab (perhaps settings for quality levels) the furniture if available. If possible, the dwarves could place it as they 'please,' along with other owned objects, giving each home an individual look.

A problem with this would be carving each individual home with its individual rooms, and currently bedrooms for a full population fortress is a daunting task. The use of templates combined with automatic furniture designation could alleviate this problem. Another problem would be space, but I feel that making 'bedrooms' more interesting would add to the game.  Do homes in this sense fit in with dwarven culture? Should a dwarf expect a small home, or are dwarves communal enough that all they need is a bed to sleep in? It may be a pointless suggestion if that unlike humans, dwarves do not strongly desire private space.

What ways could homes be implemented using current mechanics? It may be problematic to change how rooms are set up and designated, and I do not know if it is easy to give dwarves the ability to place furniture on their own in rooms. Are there other things homes would be better for?

[Murphy]

You could make an "apartment" building. It would require N beds, N chairs and N tables to build, and provide space (bedroom&dining&office) for N dwarves. When a dwarf claims such a room, or it is assigned to him, his family would occupy the remaining space (if there's any). If there's free room left after that, their friends might eventually move in too (if the dwarf's personality allows that). You could also assign an apartment to house several single dwarves, and they might get happy/unhappy thoughts over that.

[Astramancer]

Well, you can somewhat do that with existing mechanics.

Well, not the 'dwarves purchase and install their own furniture' bit.

You can set doors as 'internal' - this means that they are transparent to the designate room floodfill.  If you install a table and chair inside a bedroom, the dwarf will eat there, on occasion (depending on personality, I suppose).  If they have cabinets and chests in their room, they will store their extra junk in it.  (note that, for the most part, dwarves only own anything beyond the clothes on their back post-economy)

I suppose that if you install multiple beds in the bedroom, they would probably pick a bed to sleep in at random, unless you designated another bedroom from that bed and assigned it to a different dwarf.

I always give my dwarves a bad, a cabinet, a chest, a table and a chair.  I often find the remains of meals in the bedrooms (bones or seeds).  I only do just one room, but there's really nothing stopping it from being multiple discrete chambers, if you want.  As long as it doesn't extend past the maximum size of the room designation floodfill.