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[jakr]

I am a beginner.  In many video tutorials, I see very intricate room designs.  Why not make one giant room that contains farming, brewing, cooking, carpentry, furnace, forge, etc and the stockpiles for each.  I am talking about like 60x60 room.  This is easier for me, especially soil is being dug so there are no stones to dump.  What are your thoughts?

[bucket]

It's a very undwarflike idea.

[Telgin]

This will work perfectly fine in game, but there are a few caveats:

First off, most people like for their forts to look nice.  Separate rooms helps that.

Secondly, it's easier for most people to remember exactly what is what and where it is if they're in sectioned off rooms of the fort.

Lastly, this affects the value of some rooms and that can be important.  Especially for things like your dining hall.  Allow me to explain: rooms that you designate from a piece of furniture have a value associated with the "room" that they're in.  This room is just the area that you designate from that piece of furniture.

Say you're building a dining hall.  When you set a table to be a dining room and specify the area around the table, that area is the dining hall.  The bigger it is, the more valuable it is.  Smoothing stone and engraving it makes it more valuable, and having more furniture in the area makes it more valuable.  Having a valuable dining hall is a powerful way to keep dwarves happy.  The same principles apply to the dwarves' bedrooms, and a few other things like offices.

The reason you wouldn't want to have such rooms randomly scattered throughout a 60x60 area is two-fold: you'll probably forget where they start and stop, and when you have rooms overlapping their value goes down (by how much, I have no idea).  When you put a designated room in a physical room with walls, you can easily keep this from happening.

Overall though, it's certainly possible to run a fort with a couple of huge communal areas with everything scattered around in it.  It's just less efficient.

[zilpin]

You're thinking in 2 dimensions.
The best reason to create rooms is so they can be arranged vertically, so that source materials have shorter trips to get to destination workshops.
It takes a dwarf just as long to cross a 5 tile room as to climb 5 z-levels of stairs.

My own design is typically simple, with 5x5 workshop rooms, stair in front of the door, 5 z-levels of 5x5 rooms, with the workshop and entrance in the middle.
Some industries get a little more involved (e.g. wood burner -> ashery -> glass furnace).

Also, having rooms lets you manage pathing better.  Having high-traffic corridors and work areas with only one entrance/exit can help FPS.

[i2amroy]

One last thing that people don't note for workshops is that by placing them in various rooms this allows you to lock down any specific room at will. This is very helpful if you have a moody dwarf who goes insane, as you can simply lock the doors until they starve to death instead of risking your dwarves' lives at the hands of a very angry berserk mason/speardwarf.

Also I totally agree with the vertical designation style. I tend to have a level of workshops with two levels of stockpiles, (one below and one above) and stairways on the outer edges of each workshop. When a dwarf needs materials they simply take two steps over to the stairs, and then a few steps back to whatever they wanted on the stockpile. This then results in a massive amount of increase in productivity.

[Sphalerite]

I have to admit, most of my fortresses end up with crafting areas that are just one huge room.  Bedrooms and dining rooms and anything else that needs to get designated as a room are made as neatly intricate little rooms, but the main crafting rooms are just big open areas.

[Garath]

any crafts unlikely to attract crazy dwarfs are i one big room: kitchen, tanner, butcher, loom, farmers workshop etc. The others are in areas i can lock down in case of berserk. Even the bigger areas with multiple functions are not too big, it makes it so hard to find the exact one you were looking for

[King Mir]

If you have a large open area where dwarves are often passing through it is particularly beneficial to create high traffic areas. High traffic areas (d-o) are paths that your dwarves will prefer to take, over normal traffic tiles. These are useful to keep FPS down when there are multiple paths between two points, like in an open room. In such cases the pathing algorithm can potentially flip flop between trying alternatives, thereby taking more time. The high traffic areas prevent this, by making those tiles preferred.

So you should set up high traffic corridors through the middle of large rooms.

[khearn]

There are also some places you want to have walls and doors around for miasma control. Any refuse stockpiles should be enclosed. Butcher's shops and kitchens can also end up producing miasma if you fill up the stockpiles their output would go into (or your haulers are too busy). Food in a stockpile won't rot, but food in a workshop will, producing obnoxious clouds of miasma. Having walls and doors around those shops will keep the miasma from spreading.

[SannaSK]

gasp. i did not think of having more than one stairwell in my fort. especially the part about storerooms /below/ their associated workshop room. this is brilliant!

[Mohreb el Yasim]

It's a very undwarflike idea.

i think i can beat it my "initial" bedroom and dining room looks like this (initial is quated 'cause sometimes my dwarfs needs to endure them for like 10 years):


z+1
+++++
+++++
+
++
++
++
++
++
z-0
bbbbb
bbbbb
O►
tc
tc
tc
tc
tc


with: +:floor ; ►:ramp ; O:wall ; t:table ; c:chair ; b:bed and limegreen: is for positioning tha same axis
and to be even worse all of it is made from wood

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

I am a beginner.  In many video tutorials, I see very intricate room designs.  Why not make one giant room that contains farming, brewing, cooking, carpentry, furnace, forge, etc and the stockpiles for each.  I am talking about like 60x60 room.  This is easier for me, especially soil is being dug so there are no stones to dump.  What are your thoughts?

I think that, since you are a beginner, you should absolutely put everything in one big room made of dirt if you feel like it.

There are benefits and drawbacks to this approach, but the best way to find out which approach suits you best is to try a few.

[i2amroy]

Agreed! The best way to find out whether the drawbacks/benefits of any particular design is to try out the various designs and see what you like. I mean sure we can all give you our two bits, but it is still you who is going to have to make the final decision on the matter after all.