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[Anathema]

Build vertical. It is quicker to go up/down a flight of stairs than a 20-tile hallway.

What if your dwarf trips and falls, say, down 50 flights of stairs?

You know I've heard that's possible, but I've never seen it happen. And I always build my forts around up/down stairs going down 50+ z-levels, I've even had dwarves fighting off invaders on the stairwells, never seen a falling injury on them.

The only time I get falling injuries is when open space is involved, i.e. when I get taken by a mood and replace my stairwell with a fancy spiral ramp that circles an open shaft. Which, by the way, makes for hilariously Fun combat. Picture your civilians happily hauling things around your ramp, entirely unaware that a siege is being fought off 10 or 20 levels higher.. until a goblin goes splat at the bottom, miraculously survives, and attempts to chase your haulers one or two steps at a time, in between giving in to the pain of his 7 broken bones.

[mellonbread]

I put all my workshops and stockpiles in the soil layers so I don't have to haul out stone to make room for anything.  I also enjoy walling off small areas of the cavern to serve as public parks, complete with tables, chairs, and exotic creatures pastured there.  In my current park the children enjoy frolicking barefoot on the cave moss, playing amongst the giant desert scorpions the elves so graciously "donated".

[simonthedwarf]

A good fortress design doesn't compromise. The general problem is getting what industry and workshops going without having made a a workable fort already.



I would say that the most awesome fort ever would fit the cliches about medieval forts.

[  ]                   [     ]
___________________
I                             I
I                             I
I                             I
I                             I
I__________________ I
[  ]                 [      ]

Where [] are towers, and the square on the inside will contain the enveloping courtyard to the main fortress.

You will of course have to have a full moat, a drawbridge, a red-carpeted approach and a hall with a big ass double thrones and pillars and dragon heads on the wall.

Its entirely possible to make a run-of-the-mill Camelot in DF.
In fact I think it would be awesome.

Just dont compromise.

[Tharwen]

A really simple one just involves building a vertical stack of square rooms with a staircase in the centre.

No corridors, just rooms connected in the middle. It's also practically the most efficient fortress possible for pathing.

[Pan]

I always felt that an epic fortress of dwarves shouldn't look like an apartment, and that's the exact way I feel about the main area of traffic being a flight of stairs. I prefer ramps and large hallways. You know, so it can actually feel like a dwarven fortress.

[franti]

My above-ground deep-pit tripple bridge trap, which I consider my signature, is a whole nother page, but I use rows of "shift" rooms (hold down shift key and go left/right) connected to 3-wide hallways, with multiple levels.
The first level is storage. Every shift-room has a staircase leading down to a workroom for it's material type. The work rooms aren't conected to eachtother to prevent failed-moods from going too bad for other dwarves. Why? I had a massive fort killed by a failed mood that was almost comically stupid in hindsight:
A woodcrafter arrived and was given a pick to help excavate a giant cluster of Chalcopyrite (custom copper ore). Decades later, he's an Uber-Legendary Miner with a Steel Pick and Bronze Chain armour so the Trogs don't bug him while he's mining out the caverns. He claimed a craftsdwarf shop, and demanded wood. I embarked on a glacier, and had leveled all the caverns for charcoal for my steel industry. I spent months begging a tree to grow, somewhere. One did. I cut it down, and he wanted more. Not too long later, he snapped. I knew it was going to happen, so I moved a squad of Marksdwarves to the other side of the storage room above when he comes up. I would've locked the door if I had know what was about to happen, but I was feeling lazy.
You ever see V For Vendetta? Remember that scene in the subway where they all shoot him and it has no noticable impact, and he goes Matrix on their asses? That happend to my military of 10 Professional Soldiers, 30 Militia Dwarves and 20 War Naked Mole Dogs.

[Oaktree]

My current fortress (in year 3).  The embark is fairly flat and right next to a small river.

Surface - Walled off connected areas - pastures and butcher/tanner along with refuse pile.  These are roofed. 

Surface +1 - Barracks for guard, statue garden, fortifications

Soil (-2)  - Initial area dug into.  Underground farm plot(s), Animal handling, cage storage, Trade Depot, Goblin disposal.  The first soil layer is all sand and not built in much due to interference with ditches dug on the surface.

[The Trade Depot connects to east and west tunnels running fairly far out and then hitting the surface- these are still under construction].  These will be the main surface connections besides a narrow postern gate in the main keep.

Stone Layers from here on down.  And the basic fortress design is 11x11 square rooms with two doors in each wall.  Surrounded by a two-wide corridor and stairs (2 up, 2 down) in the center and each corner.  Roughly a 50x50 footprint.

x     x
 [] []
   x
 [] []
x     x

Level 1 - Storage (trade goods, raw materials from the surface like wood)

Level 2 - Workshops  (each 11x11 can hold 9 3x3 workshops with some extra space left over)

Level 3 - Kitchens and Food Storage (kitchen, still, fishery)

Level 4 - Meeting Hall (dining), Hospital, (turns out this was a marble layer)

Level 5 - Residence Blocks (I use "windmill" design cell blocks - four on the level each centered on a corner stair)
             Space remaining off the central stair is used for housing nobles and officials (mayor's office for instance)

Level 6 - Residence Blocks (see Level 5) - not currently dug out beyond the stairs

Level 7 -  Facilities -  Connection to mining galleries, catacombs, water cistern, also a DWR installation to power a few things.

Below this is shafts downwards to the Magma Sea, a Cotton Candy spire, and weaving amidst the caverns.  This fortress hit magma at Level 103, so the actual fortress depth is fairly shallow compared to my last one.  Two large rooms at the bottom handle smelting and forging as well as ore and bar stockpiles.  Plus pottery and glass since the fortress has yellow sand and kaolinite in abundance.

[Lectorog]

My fortresses look terrible. I channel down, make a 3x3 hall and a 5x5 room for a depot, and then dig using stairs and 2-wide halls. I make a 5x10 or so temporary store. Then farms and farming workshops (especially the still) across from that. Workshops proper come next, down the hall - 4x4 space designated for each shop, usually in 1 or 2 rows. Wood storage is across from that - 5x10 base, but I leave plenty of room to dig out more. Next I dig out food storage somewhere; wherever it fits, really. Maybe I'll make a meeting hall after that, if I dig in stone. Rooms come after several months; dug out 3x1 niches along the same 2-wide hall.

Like I said, my fortress design is terrible. Looks bad and is inefficient. Very simple, though.

[Mushroo]

What if your dwarf trips and falls, say, down 50 flights of stairs?

Good question. I stagger the stairwells by a square every few z-levels.

[Lexx]

So, I've been playing this game for many years now. Generally when I build a fort, its very labour-centric. I use large rectangular rooms with a single 'type' of workshop and a stockpile of raw materials.

So my question is, what simple fort designs does everyone use generally? When I say simple I mean.. basic. So no SDTs or megaprojects or something. Just to see if a design inspires me. I had a friend who used to use circular rooms and they did look nice.

My forts hallways are all 3x3 with 1 wide side corridors running parallel with them. This general principle lets mass traffic move and minimize distances between destinations in the fort. With a grand entrance hallway 5x wide lined with free standing pillars of natural stone leading up to what is usually the only entrance to the fort. If magma or water isn't hard to get  it usually becomes a magma/drowning chamber.

My dining halls tend to be large and high capacity. But with prepared food/booze stockpiles near them or on same level to save travelling distances. With entire z levels given over to housing and nobles estates. Usually the fort branches off the back of one or two staircases for ease of travel.

[franti]

All the pumps/grates for drowning rooms isn't worth it. I use a pit trap that cripples them, but not kills them, then I pit one or two of my War Naked Mole Dogs into the hole (from a lower hight) and let them duke it out.

[Jurph]

A really simple one just involves building a vertical stack of square rooms with a staircase in the centre.

No corridors, just rooms connected in the middle. It's also practically the most efficient fortress possible for pathing.

A vertical stack of circular rooms, taking advantage of traffic designations, is slightly better for pathing and can turn into a really streamlined logistics factory.  If you use a circle of diameter 15, then a stack of 15 circular layers has a maximum internal path distance of 30 tiles.  I place my workshops one tile back from the stairs, with common workshop inputs surrounding each workshop and each floor's most common output going to a temporary stockpile on that floor before being cascade-hauled to larger stockpiles.

If you group the workshops and stockpiles together sensibly you can end up with a very dense capsule fortress.  My first few floors look like this:

• Surface pasture, refuse and corpses that could create miasma
• Plant stockpile (millable plants and quarry bushes, pull from #1 below, allow barrels), mill, farmer's workshop, high-value food ingredients, kitchen, meat-fat-and-milk stockpile -- output prepared meals, don't allow barrels
• Butcher, Leatherworker, Tanner, Craftsdwarf, bone-and-skull stockpile, leather stockpile -- output finished goods (bone)
• Plant stockpile #1, farm, still, seeds, barrels -- output Booze
• Wood stockpile, furnace, carpenter workshop -- output bins/barrels
• Storage only; holds bins and barrels for any production site that needs them
• Rope reed / pig tail (pull from #1 above), farmer's workshop, loom, dyer, powder dye stockpile -- output bags
• Gems stockpile, jeweler's workshop, masterwork furniture storage -- output figurines and gem crafts
• Ore stockpile, charcoal and bituminous coal stockpiles, smelter and wood-fired forge -- output metal armor and weapons
• Stone stockpile, mason, mechanic, and craftsdwarf shops -- output mechanisms
• Prepared meals (no barrels), Booze, high-quality tables & chairs
• Dining Hall
• Plumbing/reservoir
• Trade Depot, high-value goods
• Low-quality stone furniture, atom smasher
• Dormitory
• Barracks & danger room

[chuckthegr8]

I use up to 4 central stairwells. Each stairwell is 3X3 with a 5X5 room around it. They are connected by 3 tile wide hallways. I usually give each stairwell a couple of statues, booze, food or tables for localized eating. I build 7X7 rooms off the corners of the stairwells with up/down staircases in the center. The staircases are for the stockpiles and each room gets 4 workshops. That gives me 4 rooms per 4 stairwells with 4 workshops per room, a total of 96 workshops on one level for my max planning stage.

Then I have a level with a giant central Dining room and with the 7X7 rooms as each a noble room. For normal workers I build a small flower pattern based on the stairwells.

For the planning itself, I start by grouping similiar stuff together and slowly segregate them as populationg rows. So a block might have Mason/s, Crafts'dorfX2 for Pots and Crafts, and Mechanics. Later I would get a full block of 4 Masons, a block of Craftsdorfs and a block of Mechanics.

So far I only need about 2 stairwells for about 80 dwarfs, but I am thinking of expanding to the 3rd one.

[bloodtoes]

I have an automatic fort plan that I've been following for a while now and am trying to move away from to do things more creative.

Basically I dig a hole in the ground and on the first level is 2 temporary stockpiles: food/beer in 1, everything else in the other. Just to get all my junk out of the rain. I build a carpentry, mason and mechanics on the surface, and on the level below dig out a dormitory, farms and hospital. Once that's done the miners go find a nearby layer of stone and clear out a 21x21 around the hole for the mason's to work with.. eventually the workshops are moved inside, a trade depot is built, the hole in the ground is surrounded by walls and things grow (usually in quite an ugly and obviously-unplanned way) from there.

I like to have a central pillar to my staircases so instead of

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[Lexx]

Sorry wrong thread.