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[Toast024]

Hello fellow Dwarf Fortress players. I have made this thread for the discussion of fort layouts.
 
I myself am becoming tired of my usual fort layout. I have a moat that surrounds only the entrance area. Behind the encrence you can find a hallway of traps. Beyond that is the trade deport. Then we begin our decent. The barracks are found two floors under the entrance floor. The barracks are separated into two rooms per army. Room one has the beds for the soldiers plus about five extra. The armor racks are also found in the bedroom. The second rooms has some tables, and some supplies.

Hospitals are found a few floors under that. The hospital layout is rather generic.

Under that are workshops, and the stockpiles.
Farms are usually under that.
Under that is the stone dump.

Several floors under that is the dining rooms and bed rooms.
The dining rooms and bed rooms are broken up into three sectors.
The hauler area, the minor people area, the worker's area, and the noble's area. Haulers get a bed, a black space, and if material is available, a chest. The workers get a bed, two blank spaces, and they always get a chest and they may also get a chest if material is available. Nobles get what ever they need to be happy, usually they also get a single bridge tile and a lever in their room. Dining rooms are also suited for position. a few food storerooms are near the dining areas.

An area based off of good old Roman forums can be found under that. The forum is at level with the Noble dining rooms.

Yea, my Fortress isn't that bad in my opinion, but it could be far better. What is your fortress like?

[Eagle_eye]

Mine typically has a long entrance tunnel, which after 20 or so squares leads to the main fort. I have a medium sized room devoted to workshops, and a large wood/finished goods stockpile in a room next to it. on the other side of the tunnel, usually accessible by tubes leading above or under the entrance hall, I have the living quarters and the dining room/food stockpile. Typically the first thing I do is a. get stonefall traps set up, and b. dig an area for a large farm. I'll put in a floodgate to flood the farm, and gradually phase out the stonefall traps for serrated blades, as soon as I get metal production going. On maps with exposed magma, I'll beeline for it, dig a furnace room, a resevoir under that, and drain off magma by building a tube that leads to the resevoir, and channeling into the obsidian ring around the magma to prevent any accidents. Once the forges are ready, I'll assign some migrants to smelt ores, while the miners are sent out in search of gold and iron ores. Then I'll build a small lake, fill it, and make the only entrance to the walled off courtyard be across that with a floor made of hatches that can be opened at any time, and by pressure plate. nobles don't get their own rooms until the last minute.

[Hyndis]

At the center of my forts is a large, fully engraved, multi-Z level great hall. This is also the meeting zone, and the great hall is gigantic. Moria sized.

Off of the great hall are various other rooms, such as workshops, smelters, bedrooms, or whatever else is needed.

The general layout of the fortress, viewed from the top, looks like a large empty square surrounded by smaller rooms.

[Shiv]

I generally do a large open room of about 3 z levels tall (one under, one in the middle, and one above).  I stick my trade depot in the middle of it or off to the side (dependent on if I remember to dig appropriately).  I then dig a shooting gallery around the sides, but those are worthless now a days.

I then do a U pipe design with my barracks being in the bottom.  One end goes from the area described above and the other leads into a large foyer where I put my main base (workshops, meeting area, kennels, etc).  I like to build across, not down.

Then I build a separate stairway going down which leads to the hospital (two z's under), the living quarters (5 z's under), and the furnace room (however many z's under it takes).  I'll have a couple of z's in the middle which are dedicated to finding specific minerals/flux/what have you.

[Mordy]

I try to optimize pathing and Z levels a bit when i 'dig down'.  I tend to build a central  shaft with a ring of stairs around it with hallways leading from it to whatever i have decided that level to be.

I then stack the levels descending in this fashion:

G:Walls around entrance,above ground gardens, moats,traps, etc.
-1: Farms, refuse piles, trade depot, defenses if no walls (built into cliff)
-2: Nothing, maybe a well room
-3: barracks, armory, trade goods stockpiles
-4: Production areas: workshops with optimized stock piles interspersed
-5: Meeting halls, cage/statue gardens, breweries, kitchens, food stockpiles. Some bedrooms
-6+: Bedrooms and some more meeting halls
-7+: Tombs
-7+: If needed, a multi Z water reservoir.   
-7+: bottom guard room if i decide to break into the underground plus exploratory mining tunnels.

Basic but efficient.  Boring too.  To keep it less boring i establish this sort of fort and then move onto a project.   

[Kogan Loloklam]

I start my fortress with a long hallway entering into the mountain, 3 z-levels high and carved with fortifications (allowing marksdwarves access). This hallway ends in a pit with a siege engine behind a fortification pointing down the hall. The end of this hall forks in to directions. The first direction is my trade depot. It dead ends and also has some fortifications looking into it. The other side is the path into my fortress. It is blocked by floodgates, and on the other side it splits into three directions. The first is my warehouses. The second is my Throne Room, the third is the path to deeper in the fortress.

Deeper in, a corridor splits off that leads to my military works, one goes to my workshops, and one goes to my residential zone. The residential zone has a grand dining hall buffering it from the workshop zone. Past my residental zone I have my "Keep", or the point for all my civilians to run in case the interior fortifications are breached. This turns into my inner fortifications against the underground. After this my fort splits in two. One way has my jail cells, with mini-forts stretching downwards through the blocks. The other way leads to my Outer under-defenses. This defense plan is still being properly developed. After the outer defenses I make the odd "Border Fort" for a place to miners working down there to run to, but they are pretty rare and mostly decorative. Then there is just the mines and underground.

[Nikov]

I really don't understand you people who build fortresses like a sandwich. Bread, balony, swiss cheese, bacon, lettuce, mustard, ham, roast beef, horseradish, pickles, bread... all stacked on top of itself. I'm not happy unless my fortress involves enormous greathalls with multiple Z-levels worth of engraved pillars holding up a vaulted ceiling  with apartments lining the walls, overlooking the coming and going below through gem windows.

[tastypaste]

I normally do a zig-zag moat or walled entrance to maximize the distance invaders must travel to reach me. Bridges are used as short cuts across the moats during peace time. I checker board the entire zig-zag path with stonefall traps and later, as I collect weapons from invaders, I put those into weapons traps. This way the defenses get progressively more deadly as the years go by.

I have the typical long entrance hall with Depot and barracks in the hall so invaders have to walk through the military to get inside.

Next layer down is offices and private noble dining halls.

Below that is workshops. All workshops that moody dwarfs can take over are constructed as drowning chambers to execute berserkers. Next level below that is a small evaporation chamber for draining water out of the workshop drowning chambers. Workshops that moody dwarfs do not seize are just in a single large room. Stockpiles are below the evaporation chamber in my current fort. Usually I try to keep the stockpiles directly above or below the workshops to minimize walking distance.

Then I have my concentric circle dining hall/jail/hospital. The outer ring is jail cells and the hospital. I keep them close to the dining hall so idling dwarfs will be more likely to feed prisoners and the wounded (in theory). The well is on one side of the dining hall, zoo with quantum cage on another, and a statue garden on the third side.

Currently I have a sort of high rise apartment complex that extends upward, above the entrance into the top of a mountain as my bedroom levels. This is a rarity for me because I usually embark on flat lands. But I'm enjoying the extra z-levels to play with. There are 5 bedroom levels, 3 for common dwarfs, one for nobles and one dormitory. It's designed to be compact and centered around a shaft so dwarfs don't have to walk far to reach a bed.

The shaft for exploring the caverns is not connected to my main fort. I learned my lesson when I used my central shaft to dig straight down into the caverns and had no way of sealing it off. Now I keep them separate and secure. If I lose control of the caverns, I can still seal them off and stay safe inside the main fort. Even if something gets loose, I can still wall off the fort.

[stubby]

I like to do a lot of above-ground agriculture, so I usually dig an entrance, run it through the usual trap-, fortification-, and drawbridge-lined hallway, and then tunnel back to the surface inside a wall-enclosed courtyard.  I try to always build across a river (despite the occasional alligator fun) so that I can have emergency drawbridge exits to both banks, which is handy when there's a siege on one side of the river but not the other.

The surface level gets the refuse pile and the tanning shop, so I don't have to worry about miasma; a crafts shop for refuse-pile bones, a fishery next to the interior fishing zones, and then a half-dozen farm plots.  (I love surface crops so much more than the dwarven ones, since there's none of that seasonal rotation nonsense.)  If I've got a river, then the waterwheels go in right next to the farms for easy mill access.  Lastly I build a pen next to the tanning shop, rope my breeding cattle in there, and pet-forbid the doors so that I don't end up with calves running all over my meeting hall.  I build a floor over the top of the shops to protect them from rain, and on top of that a barracks with fortifications overlooking the main entrance outside the walls.  (I like to keep soldiers outdoors and sun-acclimated as much as possible.)

Z-1 is all the stuff that supports the agriculture on the surface level - underground farms, butcher, kitchen, mill, farmer's shop, leather shop, and all the plumbing for machinery and indoor waterfalls on the lower levels.

Z-2 gets the trade depot and all the trade-good-dedicated shops and storage areas.

Depending on how many levels of dirt there are between the surface and the first layer of engravable rock, I cram in industrial burrows however they fit - a furniture/machine burrow, a metal- and glass-working burrow, and a clothesmaking burrow.

The first rock layer gets the grand engraved dining hall, directly underneath the food storage.  Underneath it are the grand engraved hospital and grand engraved jails.  Underneath them is a water reservoir because they all get wells right away and waterfalls later once I've got the pumps going.  The shaft down to the mines runs through the hospital, since that's where most of my recoverable injuries seem to happen.  From there it's one more long trap corridor before it opens up for free mining.

Apartments get a reserved area off to one side; everything above and below them is off-limits for everything but residential expansion, to avoid awakening noises.

[Peasant]

I have a huge cave where i dig squares.

[jnecros]

I love keeping resources stocked above work areas, so farms have a 10 by 1 set of up/down stairs that lead to a massive seed/leaves storage right above. Dinning hall has the same, but has food, workshops have above and below storage from finished and raw materials. I do keep stacked apartments as well, ten 3x3 rooms linked with a double-wide hallway with double up/down steps on each end, which links with the dinning area, and these are stacked ten high to house 100 dwarves. I do the same with high-end living, but they are 20x6 rooms

My current fort has an entrance that is 2 wide with a bridge at the fort-end and floor bars and flood gates at the other, the whole corridor can be flooded and drained with 2 switches. Working on placing magma to han solo the corridor atm.

[hjd_uk]

So far my only consistent features are making sure my trade depot is inside ( meaning a 3wide road to it) and that its behind a drawbridge.
Most of my corridors are 2-wide.
My bedrooms are normally 2x2 except for nobles and 'heroes'.
A lot of my rooms are also shift-arrow units in size too .

[albatross]

I prefer a small 3x3 or 5x5 meager looking house on the topside with a locked floor hatch in the middle of the room (under an imaginary carpet) that leads to a massive network of underground dwarven caverns...
Then I place Urist McRetiredWoodcutter with his dog to live in that house to keep an eye out for thieves or other surface threats.
Essentially all my fortresses start out by digging 5-10 levels straight into the soil.

[Daetrin]

I dig straight down below the third cavern level, and make a central double-sHift by double-shift box with ramps as my central area.  I use my initial exploration shaft as my merchant entrance (no wagon, so) and trap it until I have the leisure to build a dedicated trading and defense scheme. I always have issues figuring out how to drain off magma properly, though...

I have a central hole with an atom-smasher at the bottom so I can dump from every level, and the size means I can fit the hole, surrounded by up/down stairs, behind walls as well as the outer ramps, and fill the inner area with magma or water sufficient that I can arbitrarily place whatever buildings on the floor above. I usually have a straight stockpile level, a workshop level, wells and fishng above water and farms below, and stockpiles off my forge level as well. With my current fort I want to run this all the way to the surface. 

[mission0]

Lately I've been doing a haphazard type of layout, basically I dig as I go type of thing which ends in some interesting results.