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[YellowPebble]

I'm curious how everyone else deals with the problem of loose stone cluttering up fortresses when you dig into it. So far as I can see, there are six solutions, all of them with drawbacks:
* Ignore it. This looks untidy, and causes problems with stockpiles.
* Build the fortress only outside (very difficult) or in dirt (easier, but you have limited space and can't smooth walls or engrave them).
* Create huge outdoor stone stockpiles. This consumes a lot of your dwarf's time, and causes dwarfs to have to go outside a lot to collect stone for building and dump unneeded stone.
* Create huge indoor stone stockpiles. These will consume 50-90% of your total fortress space.
* Dump the stone. This consumes no space, but is fiddly when you want to use the stone again and feels like an exploit.
* Turn all the stone into blocks. This consumes 1/10th the space, but requires a lot of bins, takes a lot of time, and renders the stone unusable for furniture and crafts.

Any other ideas?

[Noble Digger]

I like using a central quantum dumping pile. I've done this for every fort I can remember, even though it does feel hacky it gets the job done and makes the stone accessible to my workshops (I normally dump all stone in an area close between the smelters and the masons\mechanics, including gems\ore). Stone stockpiles, aside from a small one to feed workshops with your favorite kind of stone, are usually a bad idea. Another nice upside to this method is that the dwarves are always standing in the middle of the industrial fortress when they finish a dumping job, so they look nearby for available work and this tends to make sure all the "non-dumping" jobs still get done during mass excavating.

[HAMMERMILL]

One thing I do, is that I never embark with trained miners, just 7 dorfs specialized in everything else and embark with 6 mining picks. Since newbie miners generates significantly less stone when they mine, the initial carving out of the fortress doesn't generate much stone.

Another solution I use, is that I train up about 6-8 seige crewmen and have them practice on catapults non-stop. That gets ride of alot of stone faster then you'd think it should, while it builds up a reletively useful skill and boosts their stats.

Also, alot of masons and stonecrafters to help clear up the rubble and generate wealth at the same time. There is no such thing as too much furniture, I put chairs and tables in any room I can fit them in.

[Hyndis]

I use custom reactions to allow prospecting useless stone for metal or gems.

This lets me shovel in those mountains of useless stone into my smelters, where its turned into a useful metal bar or rough gem.

Also, rock blocks. Lots of rock blocks. All construction must be done out of the same type of rock block. NO EXCEPTIONS. The type of block used is the stone type on the main level of my fort, and so this is the most plentiful type of rock.

[HebaruSan]

I would prefer non-cheaty stockpiles if you could specify where to get the stone, to clear other stockpiles. As it is, that approach produces full stone stockpiles from the wrong area of the fortress plus other stockpiles still full of stone. This feels like a missing feature to me, so I settle for the exploit-y dumping. It's less fiddly if the dump zone is one tile and you use the d-b-c menu periodically.

[Gus Smedstad]

I felt the way you did, but I came to realize that the amount of waste stone produced by a mature fortress is so huge that ordinary stockpiles are not a solution, even if you use every corridor as a rock stockpile.  When I gave up an accepted the dark side - using Garbage Dumps to put all the stone into a single tile - the improvement in my fortress was enormous.

You can salve hurt feelings slightly by treating all dumped rock as permanently destroyed, even before you use an atom smasher on it.  This means you need stone stockpiles for stone you do want to keep.

Continuous block creation barely makes a dent in the amount of waste stone, so I consider that a non-solution.

Another, less cheaty approach is to build a hybrid fortress.  Build an underground fortress as normal, but periodically use the waste stone to build above-ground structures.  You can you use it to Construct floors underground as well, which uses 1 stone per tile and gives a fairly nice appearance.  It's unclear to me at this time what the room value of constructions are - rough stone constructions seem to give higher room value than plain rough stone walls and floors, but it may be furnishings (chest, cabinets) that are actually increasing the room value.  Since room value is stated very vaguely, it's difficult to tell.

 - Gus

[Noble Digger]

I use custom reactions to allow prospecting useless stone for metal or gems.

This lets me shovel in those mountains of useless stone into my smelters, where its turned into a useful metal bar or rough gem.

Also, rock blocks. Lots of rock blocks. All construction must be done out of the same type of rock block. NO EXCEPTIONS. The type of block used is the stone type on the main level of my fort, and so this is the most plentiful type of rock.

I do all this same thing. Except instead of prospecting, at least in my last fort, you would use a ton (15) basic stones and 5 stacks of a plant to transmute something else such as wood. My previous fort was 100% basalt with a tiny bit of alunite, whereas my current fort is all Dolomite. Blocks if used on the surface, rough rock if used underground.

[StrawberryBunny]

You can also pave your fort with constructed floors. It's a little fiddly until you manage to clear out some initial space, but the 1:1 floor to loose rock ratio means you CAN clear up the floor space. You can build anything but other constructions on constructed floors, including stockpiles. Just give ten or so dorfs Masonry labour and it goes REAL fast.

[Bronze Dog]

I'll probably try other things, but for my next fortress, I'll probably do a bit of quantum dumping of cheap stone near a craft/mason/mechanic shop so that I can get stockpiles in order. I would then periodically reclaim the dumped stone so that it can be made into cheap crafts, furniture mechanisms, and such.

After the place reaches some maturity, I might order a lot of bins and blocks made through the manager and use those for construction jobs. I've got some miscellaneous big ideas, and being able to quickly haul 10 units at a time instead of one stone to the site would speed things up.

[Labhras]

I use custom reactions to allow prospecting useless stone for metal or gems.

This lets me shovel in those mountains of useless stone into my smelters, where its turned into a useful metal bar or rough gem.

I enjoy this idea very much, I can never seem to find gems when I want them and gem cutting/setting is actually a pretty big part of my exports, especially in the beginning of fortresses where values are somewhat low. Would you mind posting the data for the custom reactions so the rest of us can use this?

As for what I use, I try to use up the stone as I mine, but then I get bored and just ignore it.

[forsaken1111]

I just hide it.

Seriously, loose stone on the floor doesn't interfere with anything in the game except some stockpiles. If I am carving out a stock room I will clear that stone out by dumping but anywhere and everywhere else I just hide the stone and ignore it. My masons can still grab it for use in crafts, etc.

The only exception is ore, which I have different stockpiles near the forges for so I can easily forbid/claim different types for use.

[CognitiveDissonance]

Here's something for you - rocks consume FPS. Not much individually, but they do when you have 7000 of them lying around.

As such, I've gotten into a habit of setting up a Dwarven Atom Smasher indoors, and creating a hole above to dump. then, I dump all the rocks that are in the rooms I dig.

I then set up rock stockpiles around mason/mechanic workshops, so that way dwarves will gather rocks from other places and masons don't have to travel far.

Frees up FPS, and makes my fort look nicer!

[forsaken1111]

rocks consume FPS

It should be noted that this depends almost entirely on what kind of computer you are running DF on.

[Bronze Dog]

Now I'm starting to wonder. I've got a new laptop (Windows 7) that seems pretty darned good for right now, but it does make me wonder about stockpiles and such, since I will eventually get good enough to build bigger fortresses.

Does a bin full of stone blocks save on this mentioned FPS drain, if it occurs?

[Noble Digger]

You can also pave your fort with constructed floors. It's a little fiddly until you manage to clear out some initial space, but the 1:1 floor to loose rock ratio means you CAN clear up the floor space. You can build anything but other constructions on constructed floors, including stockpiles. Just give ten or so dorfs Masonry labour and it goes REAL fast.

I'm still scared by rumours from way back when that supposedly, constructions cause FPS death or otherwise affect pathing more than regular ground. Indeed, Gatereign died of excessive use of constructed walls\floors and liquid activity...