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[GreatWyrmGold]

How wide and how long is a tile? Similarly, how high is a z-level?

This is a spot for guesses as well as calculations and "facts," but please note guesses as such in case there are some definitive facts somewhere.

[Girlinhat]

"Big Enough"

A puppy and a Titan take up 1 square, a wagon uses 3x3.  Based on this assumption, tiles must average ~20 feet wide and ~200 tall.  The speed at which creatures move is not very high, if you consider that it might take an entire day to drag one item to a stockpile.  Dwarves use stilts, aided by their bears, when building or constructing stairs that are above them.

[NecroRebel]

A tile is big enough that a thousand dragons can be in one tile, so long as 999 of them are lying down. A tile is small enough that in order for 2 housecats to pass each other in a single-tile tunnel, one must crawl on its belly. Clearly, a tile is between six inches and a mile wide, and between 2 feet and a thousand feet tall.

In addition, I seem to remember that someone calculated that, by weight, a single block is roughly the size of two ordinary real-world masonry bricks stacked atop one another. You can make a whole wall out of one block, or pave 3 full tiles of road, with a single block. Clearly, a tile is blocked off entirely by a, let's say, ~3x6x4 inch wall, and 3 tiles in a row are approximately 6x4 inches, so one tile is probably around 2 inches on a side.

Alternatively, you can just realize that tile size is completely inconsistent, given what dwarves do with them, and you should Really Just Relax about the whole "size" thing. It's relative to what's in it.

[Girlinhat]

It's entirely quantum.  The size of the tile depends on what's currently inside it.  For nerds out there, it's like the sayan armor in DBZ (the original pre-cell stuff, the good stuff).  It grows to exactly accommodate whatever is within it, much like how an armor bin can contain 10 leather gloves or 10 breastplates exactly.

[Shade-o]

I'd guesstimate a rectangular prism of about 1.5 x 1.5 x 3m, or 5 x 5 x 10 feet which would be enough to comfortably hold most creatures and items.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'd guesstimate a rectangular prism of about 1.5 x 1.5 x 3m, or 5 x 5 x 10 feet which would be enough to comfortably hold most creatures and items.

This is what I'm looking for: A guesstimate that helps me visualize my fortress in real-world terms.

[Minnakht]

Going by the elven measure: Tall enough to house one tree, high enough to have the tree be grown tall enough to yield one log when cut. Small enough to not provide enough space for walking through to avoid trampling a sapling. Small enough to fit only one shrub.

[NW_Kohaku]

3m³.  Tiles are treated as cubes, and all sides are treated as equidistant from one another.  This is part of the basis of the Volume and Mass thread about the size of tiles, volumes of objects, densities of materials, and masses of these objects derived from the last two.

This also means that the smallest rooms of just one bed are 10' x 10' wide, which probably explains why dwarves are happy with them, even if it's the smallest possible unit you can give.

[Deviled]

I always figured a z-level was a story high.

[Girlinhat]

10 feet is about a story tall, but then again giants are supposed to be 15+, whales can be enormous, and titans are supposed to be, well, titans who are some 50 foot tall.

At the end, it's all imagery and representation, nothing is so exact, but if you want to compare it into real-world terms, then 10x10x10 sounds fair.

[Zrk2]

Ok, water fills up to 7, suggesting 7 feet tall. This is backed up by the fact that dwarves start drowning around 4-5 deep. Since dwarves are tradtionally 4-5 feet tall, we can conclude that they must be 7 feet tall. I would say 2-3 feet wide, because a single dorf fills one, but two can push past each other if one 'lies down' meaning pushes up against the side.

[NW_Kohaku]

Just for clarity, 10' [i[is[/i] the standard story height, with 8' of normal space, and 2' for a floor/ceiling and its support, over here in 'Merica.  3 meters is just slightly longer than that, but it's negligible enough that you can say "3 meters means about 10 feet".

edit:

Ok, water fills up to 7, suggesting 7 feet tall. This is backed up by the fact that dwarves start drowning around 4-5 deep. Since dwarves are tradtionally 4-5 feet tall, we can conclude that they must be 7 feet tall. I would say 2-3 feet wide, because a single dorf fills one, but two can push past each other if one 'lies down' meaning pushes up against the side.

This is a common thing brought up.  7 is used because there are eight values (0 is included), and that is what can be fit into 4 bits of data, for compression of map data to the smallest bit size possible.  It has absolutely nothing to do with exact distance, and remember, a dragon and a kitten treats 5 unit deep water in exactly the same way - as a blocked path.  Their size has no relevence to that.

Also, even in 2 to 3 feet of space, kittens have the same problem getting past one another, it's just a matter of the game deciding that only one unit can "dominate" a space, and everyone else must be set in some sort of state to allow that other unit to move through.

[Zrk2]

Which still means nothing because the world is tiled, making the 'size' of a tile irrelevant. This whole well this animal and that animal stuff is just semantics. The tiles are roughly the space a single person would need to stand comfortably. Other animals just corrupt that because they are different. There is no objective 'size', and so no point arguing over it.

[Deviled]

A tile is x*y*z. Can we leave it at the base formula.

[NW_Kohaku]

Which is why there is the Volume and Mass Thread, which works to consolidate everything into a more easily understood and concrete framework, which allows for kittens drowning in water depths that are ankle-deep for dragons.  Perhaps you should click the link and read a little?