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[Immacolata]

I love this game, but my trial-and-error-nature has its limits to designing good industriy and stockpile layouts. I get confused by my own stockpiling and end up with, well, confusion.

I wonder if someone has some good solid advice on setting up. I never got around to milling and weaving and leather stuff, because the whole animal thing confuses the dickens out of me.

But I got around to designing somewhat sane workshop areas for crafting metal and crafting wood and stone, also a sort of decent food section with farms + seeds and breweries + plants with a butcher that didnt really butcher anything but he was there

One of my problems is probably that I cant put some kind of easily identifiable tag on my stockpiles. They are just identical looking checkerboard grids with barrels and crates to me.

[gopa4]

Seperate storage units or areas. I have a room for food, ammo, armor...ect. Just remeber what order you placed them down in.

[Namfuak]

Seperate storage units or areas. I have a room for food, ammo, armor...ect. Just remeber what order you placed them down in.

You can also just make stockpiles accept everything.  I once made a fortress where every single shop possible was in one room, and at the end was a huge area dug out that had stockpiles that accepted everything (well, about half was all stone and the other half everything but stone, but you get the gist of it).

On the other hand, I've also made a fort where each stockpile was next to its industry (since it was all separate, due to being built across a river).  If you do that, it shouldn't be too hard to separate.

[Traece]

Whenever I do a regular embark without intending for any insane limitations, I generally try to build a few bins first ("n" in the carpenter's workshop) as well as some barrels.

Bins are essentially boxes that can store large amounts of items such as finished goods. This severely decreases most stockpiles with the exception of food, furniture, and wood. My suggestion is to build a small stockpile room for binned goods, and then large stockpile rooms for food, wood, and furniture.

Keep in mind that you can also designate CUSTOM stockpiles by using c and t(?) in the stockpile menu. This allows you to decide everything that can be placed within that custom stockpile. This is good if you want to place a stockpile of a magma-safe stone (or just stone in general) by your mason workshop. Your sheeple dwarves will place whatever you specify on that stockpile and make it so that your mason doesn't have to go all the way to the nearest source of stone (or your nearest quantum stockpile AKA Dump).

Now with that being said... Urist McDumbMason will completely ignore the custom stockpile because he/she (and all other dwarves) is/was an idiot and should be killed sacrificed sent on vacation to a sauna for being ignorant such a hardworking skilled crafter.

[Drakeero]

I learn to use q-s to tinker with the settings of different stockpiles to customize them after I've made them to help trim down what they're supposed to have in them.

Here are some changes I've learned to make to speed things up.

Food is separated between actual food and drink.  Seeds are forbidden and have their own little corner near the farms.

Bars/Blocks are seperated between metals and stones.  Depending on the projects I may seperate them further.  Fuel gets its own stockpiles as well.

Wood is just a free-for-all.  Bring it, drop it, use it.

Furniture has been giving me a huge problem so I've learned to create private stockpiles for barrels, mechanisms, and possibly seige-engine related gear when I get around to it.  In the future I may also split off other mechanical related furniture as well.

I haven't really tried many other industries yet since I've been mainly building now, but I believe that you may find other personal patterns to use with customized stockpiles to help increase the organization and flow of your fortress and your sanity when trying to find stuff.

[Chocolatemilkgod]

My main place where i use custom stockpiles is in the creation of steel. I have loads of different ones. One stockpile for the raw coal/lignite, raw iron, processed iron, pig iron, processed coal, and then one for steel. Don't think i missed anything...It allows for much better organization :3

[Immacolata]

Drakeero, your advice is priceless. Thanks.

To other readers: Can you come up with some similiar advice for Crafting jewelry and trinkets (Manufactured goods), clothing industry and animal husbandry?

Can you SAVE a stockpile as a template?

Would make sense to have a Fuel stockpile template option, Drinks, Seeds, Metals, Stones.

Problem is to remember which is what of your custom stockpiles

[Chocolatemilkgod]

For jewellery I usually just have a cut and uncut pile, but USE LOADS OF BINS. You can increase your stockpile storage space by about 1000% (Each bin can store 10 things). Crafting...I usually don't bother, unless I'm extracting raw candy. Clothing industry?...Don't bother with much either XD. But you would have a raw area and a finished area most likely. If by husbandry you mean milking and such I'd usually just build cages/chains (depending if you want them to breed or not) right next to the milking center.

I don't think you can have a template.

And for remembering...Well I usually just look at them so much I just remember off by heart XD.

And this is my idea for a super efficient fortress:
It kinda looks like a mess since I have little space to play with before the caverns (-.-) But I think the idea is sound. On the left is all my wood industries (carpenter, Siege works, bowyer, wood furnace) and on the right is my stone industry (masons, engineers, and craftsdwarves). At the bottom is my still disorganized jewel industry -.- But the idea will eventually to use loads of bins and have half of it as cut and the other half as uncut. All the wood is close to my woodworkers, and they have the right stockpile next to that (IE furniture for carpenter, and a similar idea for the other side with their right stockpile close (You may have spotted the raw candy ). Finally I have their bedrooms right next to where they work (a bit of a micromanaging headache...but a good idea)...Oh and I have a well to the top :3 .

Feel free to make fun of my bad ideas XD.

[SkyRender]

 It's pretty easy to segregate out related industries if you use a Greek cross layout with large-ish stockpiles in the corner of each floor.  About the only things I keep uber-segregated are metals (because the forges are way lower than the rest of the fort) and food (mostly because it's a waste of barrels early on to store meals in those; also, it just makes good sense to keep the kitchens and dining areas cloistered about the same stockpile.

 As ever, here's what I'm talking about.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Chocolatemilkgod]

Could you provide the exact dimensions on the stockpile? I take it the whole thing is 35X35...And the hallways are 3 tiles wide? I'm just asking cause I'm starting a new fortress and this looks pretty good

[SkyRender]

The stockpiles are one Shift+Left and Shift+Up in size (which I believe is 11x11 or 12x12).  Actually, the layout is very Shift+direction-friendly: the halls on the lower floors are all possible to designate with a 3xShift+direction movement, and the rooms can be designated as 3x3 and then the connection across the hall to the next room can be made by hitting Shift+direction from the furthest-away-middle tile of room 1 to the furthest-away-middle tile of room 2.  I've laid out entire floors in under 3 minutes with the help of that fact.

[Immacolata]

Thanks for the diagram. What is a z-level exploitative design if I may ask? Never heard of that before.

[Quietust]

What is a z-level exploitative design if I may ask? Never heard of that before.

A design that takes advantage of multiple Z-levels. In other words, rather than having your stockpiles next to your workshops, you put your stockpiles above or below your workshops and provide nearby stairs for quick access.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

For the clothing industry silk is by far the easiest, as you will need only a loom and a clothier's shop next to each other, with a cloth stockpile somewhere nearby. This is a very simple set up; your weaver will run to the nearest spider web, instantly turn it into thread, and bring the thread back to the loom to weave into cloth. The cloth you make will almost always be worth more than cloth you buy from traders, as the cloth you can buy doesn't have any quality modifiers. Just place a cloth stockpile close to your clothier's shop, and you're set.

If you use rope reeds or pig tails, or if you want to dye your cloth, things get a bit more complicated. For plant threads, you need a farm to grow them, a plant stockpile for the result, a farmer's workshop to extract the threads and a stockpile for the threads so your weavers can have ready access to the raw materials. For dyes you need a quern instead of a farmer's workshop and a plentiful supply of bags to hold the dye, and then a dyer's workshop to dye the cloth or thread(It doesn't matter if you dye the thread before it's woven into cloth or after). Once again, dying your own cloth will be much more valuable than buying dyed threads from traders, due to the quality modifiers.

Leatherworking is somewhere between silk and plant fiber cloth in terms of difficulty. You need a butcher's shop and a nearby tannery, which I generally have adjacent and have one dwarf do both jobs. You need a refuse stockpile nearby that is set to only accept corpses, as butchers will only butcher nearby things. You also need a source of animals, either from hunting or ranching or just butchering what your military kills. Once the leather is tanned just place it in a stockpile close to your leatherworks. Unlike cloth, leather doesn't have quality modifiers, so it can be extremely worthwhile to purchase some or even all of your leather from traders. 

[NewSheoth]

Also, notes. Shift-n brings up the note menu. There you can place a note over each stockpile labeling them, in case you forget which is which.
I generally use them for levers, though. Especially useful with complicated gate systems. Or when pulling the wrong lever results in !!Fun!!.
I usually make a giant stockpile hall right under/over the workshops to minimize the distance between them, connected by an excessively big stairway to cut down on congestions. I also put the trade depot in that hall, makes for quicker junk crafts and single items delivery. But that's general thoughts.