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[Mickey Blue]

I prefer to have a small cliffside to dig into but other then that mostly flat ground with a few soil levels for storage/farming.  I tend to make my main hallways three wide (sometimes the main entryway is four or five, to be more grandiose) with minor ones two, I rarely make any one unless its one that is only going to be used very sparingly). 

I find it irritating when a part of my my room/hallways below my storage levels is soil (meaning I cannot smooth/engrave it), I also like others make sure to drag everything underground and put into stockpiles (I sometimes keep wood on the surface but behind walls).  I like to know that I can keep working even if I'm trapped by a siege.

I almost always like to have a waterfall though recently have stopped due to FPS issues.

-MB

[existent]

I wall everything above-ground off. I have a walled off refuse pile, even. And I make sure my wood stockpile is big enough to RARELY need re-stocking. If some nefarious griblies are going to conquer MY fortress, they're going to my coming in through the front door,  by George!

[caknuck]

Also, my hallways are always 3 tiles wide. Always. No matter where/how deep/population count/whatever. Three tiles.

Same, exactly the same.

I take this one step further. My forts are laid out on a grid, with 17x17 "blocks" and 3-tile wide "streets". This way if you shift-arrow in any direction twice, you'll be at the same relative spot on the block. Furthermore, each tunnel intersection has two up and two down staircases, like so:

Code: [Select]

>.<
...
>.<
Founders get 3x3 rooms in a one-block housing complex. The rooms surround a large dining room/meeting hall with an adjacent food/booze stockpile. The expedition leader (also my broker) gets an additional 3x3 office space. Legendary/otherwise meaningful dwarves get rooms in an identical complex, with the office and adjoining bedroom going to the bookkeeper. Less-useful migrants get rooms in higher-density complexes with 2x3 rooms and a smaller mess hall.

As soon as my miners strike the earth, I use the first rock quarried out to build my (temporary) stonecrafter's workshop and set him loose cranking out trumpets and harps. (It used to be mugs, but I always had leftovers after buying out the caravans.)

As soon as I get a good gem setter and blacksmith, I tell my liason to have the caravan bring assloads of gems, bars of rare metals and not much else. I try to get masterwork statues of each of the metals, and then proceed to glue glittery stuff all over them.

[breadbocks]

I can't gen a world with good biomes. If I do get one I (a)bort.

[ghosteh]

I like a flat embark zone but with a 1 z level height difference, but I dont like it when the lower part is
 a) bigger then the higher part
 b) to the north of the higher part because I like raising bridges

[Fistbeard]

I... can't stand having the outermost layer of my entrance not be rock. If it's soil, I'll build rock walls in front of it.
I also just have to even out the outer walls so they're all geometrical.
Besides that, most of my little quirks are just preferences for a certain type of item over another, even if there's no difference (besides value, which is negligible) in use or function. Like, if I want gems or rock blocks, I just have to get Fire Opals/Agates, and I have a huge thing for pitchblende. I'm not even really a fan of purple.

[Lokii]

Whenever I can, I build a zoo of exotic animals. I've done this even sooner than building a dining room before, although that particular fort didn't end well at all.

[Chattox]

Also, if, in the embark text, where it says "ere the *** get hungry", if that creature is one that is native to the biome I'm on, I consider that good luck. So, something like a black bear in a conifer forest or something.

I'm pretty sure it always picks an animal from the region's biome for that text.

Not true, I've embarked on a taiga forest and been warned of giant desert scorpions.

[Starver]

Currently, 5x5 rooms (except where needing them larger, when they're often 11x11, i.e. four 5x5s with the walls knocked through), though that's a been different, and will doubtless change again.  But if I really want a 5x5 and I could only get a 24-square room, without breaking through to the outside, I'll break through into the outside and rebuild walls (of blocks of the same material, not even ones just of the same colour!) and floors and ceilings above to make them so.  In fact, in a recent fort I even extended the room and corridor pattern out over the hillside, like some weird Los Angeles hill-side building (sans stilts, because I didn't need them).

On the subject of same rock colour, probably my most invariant trait is that if I'm digging out something that I'll not go back into (like a cistern, or magma channel) I'll completely smooth it off before 'commissioning' it.  And if that cuts through gemstones or ores (and even just touching upon a regular rock type where it's not a major component), I'll mine them out.  Could be just one tile into the wall, if I can later on get the more distant items by digging in alongside, but where there's doubt I'll pursue the cluster/vein as far as I can.  Then (having arranged for blocks of the appropriately local native material to be made), I'll wall the side up.  Though these days I tend to leave voids behind the walls, rather than fill them in.  And even if it's only one tile in, it does leave little 'warts' of visible rock beyond the built walls, where there are none behind the smoothed ones.

[I am Leo]

My fortress often fills with unused rooms from forgotten projects, which then become small, generic stockpiles.

[ElChad]

I tend to never stop food production. Using the Job Manager and 4 season farming to be constantly making, processing, baging and cooking Quarry Bush leaves, refusing to make any crafts or any other common money making item in favor of selling my surplus of food for more, you guessed it, food.

I also refuse to give common dwarves rooms of their own, vying for a giant dormitory.

Quirk Three, 50 percent Military, 25 percent Growers, 25 other..

I think my dwarves are militant hippie farmers.

[vlademir1]

I nickname all dwarves with their arrival group (original 7 as '1', first migrant wave as '2', et al).
I save and backup constantly, aside from the automatic seasonals every migrant wave, every caravan, every major Fun event all get scummable saves, organized in a backup folders by fortress and year, that I almost never use.
I build based on wings, each wing allocated to a particular group of labors (military, comestibles and clothing, stone, wood & bone, metal glass & gems, hospital), each having it's own attached living quarters, dining hall, prepared meal and booze storage.  Burrows made this so much easier .
Main hallways are always five wide with branch hallways three wide and branches from those one wide.

[ledgekindred]

Like a couple of others so far, I like wide-lane hallways.  I make my main streets 3 wide, with local streets 2 wide.  I avoid ever having 1-tile-wide hallways.  I'll bulldoze over a room if I have to.  They are also laid out more or less grid-pattern, but I will also follow mineral veins so that's not always the case.

My biggest quirk is that every workshop gets its own 3x3 room with a door on it.  Every. Single. One.  It's partly so I can lock dwarves in if they go berzerk, partly so I can keep workshops easily identifiable and mostly flat out OCD.   They're almost always next to each other along the side of main street with storage across the street.  Sort of the workshop district if you'd like.  With my latest couple fortresses, I've been trying to make great big open areas with workshops and storage all mixed together to test if it helps speed up pathfinding and to try to break through my OCD but I still wind up putting everything as grid squares.

I also build a "restaurant."  Four 3x3 rooms in a square, joined by single-tile doorways, with doors on one side opening to a hallway, doors on another side opening into food storage.  The rooms are a still, kitchen, butcher shop and fishery.  Then there's usually a dining room across the corridor.   Easy access for the chefs to grab and drop off food, doors to keep out miasma in case someone leaves a rotting carcass in one of the rooms, and a short trip for dwarves to run and grab a snack.  Pretty much every single fortress has one of these.

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[existent]

doors to keep out miasma in case someone leaves a rotting carcass in one of the rooms

You might be playing Dwarf Fortress if....

[Doomshifter]

Central staircases. I always seem to have a 3x3 up/down staircase running the center of my fortress. Some of the advantages are:
- Dwarves seem to traverse staircases almost instantaneously, so my craftsmen can get from the workshop level to the warehouse level in a matter of seconds
- Helps to prospect for mineral veins
- Makes it easy to figure out where everything is (For example, separate levels for separate purposes.)

Disadvantages:
- Invaders can move up and down as fast as dwarves.
- So can angry dwarves.
- So can demons.
- Water and magma. 'Nuff said.
- Staircase traffic.
- Accidentally finding an aquifer in ONE of those nine tiles on one level, and having to move the ENTIRE staircase over, thus creating a small hallway'o'clog.

Some other things I do:
ALWAYS have levels (somewhat) like this -
ENTRANCE with depot
STORAGE + FARMS
BEDS
MORE BEDS
WORKSHOPS
and then whatever the fuck else I want further down

-Get bored and make something stupid, forget about it halfway, end up with some random-ass cavern or half-furnished room.
-- such things include an arena which was re-found two years later, (It seemed people liked looking at the goblin corpses, small pool of magma and the one dwarf who liked to stand in the middle near the rotten goblins.) a temple to a god which somehow ended up submerged in magma (this one was on a succession game, there was a lovely moon motif and a platinum dining room! Not to mention, a previous player's tomb was submerged too.), an underground military network which connected to some fortified towers around the map, a kitten-masher (complete with thriving population of kittens), the queen's half-collapsed bedroom.