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[CinnibarMan]

I am a simple captain, standing aboard the prow of her phallic shaped vessel, cutting through the frigid ice on the edge of the Sadistic Frontier.  The monsters loom up before me, and it is my modest task to calmly snap a picture and expose these monstrosities to the world.

Would it be improper for me to sig myself?

I'm not sure. But I'm going to beat you to it.

[ahonek]

I usually do something similar to this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Vertical housing is where it's at if you're trying to save space. Obviously this works just as well with larger rooms; I usually do 2x3, but this time I decided to go for 2x2 and make up for the lost space with higher quality goods. Probably going to toss a cabinet, floor hatch and a 10x steel serrated disk weapon trap in each room just to make everyone ecstatic. I also can never really decide what to do with the central floor; this time I made it my dining room, but in the past I've put my noble housing in there or even just used it as a giant stockpile. If you're really crazy about reducing travel distance you can go with even fewer rooms per floor and more floors; it'll start really eating into fortress space, though. 5 floors dedicated to housing is enough for me.

Holy pathfinding, batman.

[Carnes]

I do 2x3 rooms (bed, cabinet, coffer, and later smoothed) in long hallways.  Nobles usually get a 7x7 area but reduced to 6x7 here (ran out of space).  There are also more rooms directly below this z-level.  The biggest the halls will get is 4-wide from area to area and housing area usually gets a 2-wide. 

I love some of the "exotic" designs posted on here.  Someday i'll have to try them out.

[Granite26]

I've started experimenting with personal burrows for my elites.  The first floor is a craft(raw materials) stockpile and a workshop.  Stairs to the second floor which has a personal dining room (with food/drink stockpile) and a bedroom.

After experimentation, I've expanded all the burrows down the hall to a two story stone stockpile.

Lock all the dwarfs into the burrow and voila...

For the pleebs, I use a central stacked hallway.  Grand staircase(3x3) to grand hallway(3x) to side hallway(2x) to 3x3 room.   Side hallways have 4-5 rooms, grand hallways have 3-4 side hallways.  Basically what carnes has, but with the hallway in the middle, and the whole thing stacked.

[Grax]

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I usually use this plain design, especially when playing nanofortresses.
120 rooms per level + big central meeting hall and dining room and greater rooms for greater dwarves.

23 steps maximum from center stairs to farthest room if i calculate it right.

[JacenHanLovesLegos]

I let them sleep on the floor. My starting seven get personal 3x3 palaces, as well as notable dwarfs. Nobles get a 3x3 to 4x4 room with the bare essentials. All bedrooms are smoothed, engraved if their not peasant houses.

[Urist Imiknorris]

I prefer to use the 32-bedroom Greek Cross design from the wiki:



Very low travel distances, seven levels houses more dwarves than I will ever have, and it's easy to dig out. You can construct a level of this in four stages (stairs, floors, horizontal walls, vertical walls), making it fairly easy to build aboveground.

[Nidokoenig]

10x10 rooms, with a workshop in one corner, four layers of workshop stockpile beyond that, and beds, tables, chairs, prepared food and booze on the outer three layers, for the workshopper and his haulers. Next fort, I might add their coffins in there, so they can admire them every so often.

[Levi]

Mine are so boring compared to you guys.  I usually just do a big line of 2x2 or 1x3 bedrooms on each side of a long hallway.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I use vdig to take out a large vein of stone, dig chambers along the edges.  Nice irregular, natural looking cavern to smooth and engrave where there are gems or mineral veins.

[Jorshamo]

For my last several forts I've been using this layout that I found on the wiki.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Houses 80 dwarves, easy to expand, and simple enough to designate.

[Dradym]

id show you mine, but its not very....pretty, just a ton of different sized rooms carved into a hill from below-i would carve windows if i could.  i figure its very dwarfy though, hills that make sounds from below of drinking, industry, but no visual entrance.  oh yeah, the visual part of my fort is across the map, so its very peaceful there, no blood, guts, and corpses to keep you up with night terrors.

[Khift]

I usually do something similar to this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Vertical housing is where it's at if you're trying to save space. Obviously this works just as well with larger rooms; I usually do 2x3, but this time I decided to go for 2x2 and make up for the lost space with higher quality goods. Probably going to toss a cabinet, floor hatch and a 10x steel serrated disk weapon trap in each room just to make everyone ecstatic. I also can never really decide what to do with the central floor; this time I made it my dining room, but in the past I've put my noble housing in there or even just used it as a giant stockpile. If you're really crazy about reducing travel distance you can go with even fewer rooms per floor and more floors; it'll start really eating into fortress space, though. 5 floors dedicated to housing is enough for me.

Holy pathfinding, batman.

It's better on pathfinding than most designs; remember, one tile up / down is the same amount of travel as one tile side to side.

[EmperorJon]

My most recent fort has... well, it's hard to explain...

An area big enough for 4x4, 5x5 rooms... if you get what I mean. The 4 in the corners hold stuff, the 2 inbetween on each side have stairs to the actual bedroom, with the entrance room being filled with tables and stuff, so each dwarf has 2 5x5 rooms stacked. Then the middle 4 5x5 areas are dug into one massive hole that goes down to the bottom of the fort. Windows from the rooms look out onto the massive chasms.

The roads are 5 wide, with 3x3 stairs at every intersection. Alternate z levels are road, open, etc... so each road corridor is 2 high with the top floor of the 'houses' looking out onto them.

It's not finished, and I'm going to make a new fort now I've got some idea of how it works, and perfect the design. I'll do some paint pixels of what I mean if it makes it clearer.


EDIT:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[slink]

Here's my current layout.  It is so far repeated on four levels, giving me a total of 48 bedrooms.  It is easily convertible to family or nobility dwellings.  Many of the rooms have magnetite walls and/or gems embedded in the walls, making some of the bedrooms "Quarters" without even engraving them or giving them more than just a normal bed.  The levels are connected by 5-tile-wide ramps, making it very fast and easy for the Dwarves to go from their rooms to the various stockpiles and workshops.  Stockpiles and workshops are on the opposite side of the central square, and in the central squares themselves, on the higher levels.  The entrance is five levels up from here.  There are no bedrooms on that level.  The pastures, beehives, and outdoor farming are on that level and also on the level above it.  The central ramps continue down 11 more levels, allowing for 132 more bedrooms give or take some possible cavern instrusions.  From the bottom level of the man ramps there is a corridor going over to an area near a lava tube which is 34 levels down from there.  A smaller set of ramps, only three tiles wide, goes down to the level of the top of the lava tube.  The next project is building the pump stack to bring the lava up to the level of the main ramps.

It's not especially space-efficient or artistic, but the fortress-like outline makes me happy and the pathfinding seems to work for them.   

Spoiler (click to show/hide)