DF Fortress Layout Final

Noble Bed rooms! I love noble bed rooms you get to fill them with all sorts crap. There is nothing really to say about this so much. Noble bed rooms work best when they are big and you just shove tons of crap in them.




This is how I layed out the bed rooms. Nothing really much to see. One importnat thing to note is that the center stairs are the ones that go through the rest of the fortress. Sound is a big problem, and is the cause of many negative thoughts for sleeping, and everyone sleeps. Even with one Z level between the workshops and the bedrooms it is still a problem. Annoyance! Oh The 2 leads down to the mining layers. This way I don't have all sorts of crazy amounts of traffic going through the bed rooms.




Man this is going to take some explaining. Okay first the width of the hallways. This is important because while dwarves can move through each other it screws with pathfinding and inevitably makes the game go slower. So it is much easyer to just have the dwarves go around each other. Hallways 4 wide greatly increases traffic flow through congested areas.

1)The butcher bin. Doors can be set so that pets can't get through them. So I build some cages, stick the animals inside the cages, then when I am ready I let the animals out of the cages. I let them run around, breed a bit maybe, or I just set them up for the slaughter. Either way the workshop directly below is the butchers workshop so it will be nice and convient for him. Also I really want to get a soap manufacturing cycle started so this will be a basic lynchpin of that operation. Fat comes from animals after all. The area below that is all dug out has obsidian in it. Obsidian is the only stone which can be made into weaponry, weaponry that is as powerful as steel, which is the second most powerful material in the game. NICE! I use them to outfit weapontraps.

2) The dining room. This is both near the kitchens, the brewery, and the food stockpile is right above it. This creates a nice smooth traffic flow through the eating process. It is also essential to have a really nice dining room. Seriously, it isn't hard, get that thing up to lengendary as fast as possible. Eating in the legendary dining room will give dwarves happy thoughts, and since every dwarf eats it is a quality way to ensure that every dwarf recieves happy thoughts on a regular basis. There are things called tantrum spirals where one dwarf flipping out causes other dwarves to flip out. It is much easyer to get negative thoughts than positive ones so get them when and where you can.

3) These are the stairs that connect direct to the trade depot. I dunno I like having a nice engraved entrance for my fortress. This area also has THE ANIMAL CAGE! The animal cage is important for three reasons. One it is a fantastic place to generate happy thoughts from. See pets are kinda good because they will generate happy thoughts within their owners. Animals in cages will generate happy thoughts in anyone who stops by the cage. You'll start seeing the thought, "Comforted by a wonderful animal in a cage" fairly often and you will love it. Two, it helps ease up on the whole path finding problem which does indeed kill your processor. Lastly the centeralized location means the animal can be scooped up and stuck in the cage before it adopts a dwarf and then becomes ineligable for cage dudy. That sucks. In other news displaying wealth is great, dwarves will stop and appreciate armor racks, states, doors, beds, and all sorts of other things. So having nice things in one area that everyone passes though is a good way to ensure good thought generation.

4) The Magma forges. When planning out magma forges I always try to make sure that I have more room than I need rather than less. This is mostly because expanding magma forges is an epic fucking pain in the ass and I hate doing it. The wiki does a good job explaining how to do this, and I really like this set up here. The centeral area is a large bar stockpile, the area to the right are the magma forges and the actual metal stockpile is located just above. Of everything this is prolly the most streamlined production chain in the entire fortress. It also has the added benefit of the haulers having wide open access to the actual workshops which is nice. It reduces the number of traffic jams.

5) Over here is the glass making section. This is the least streamlined part of the fortress, currently. This is due to a couple of things, one, the sand gathering point is way the fuck over on the other side of the fortress, and two just the nature of glass making. Oh well, I stuck it out over on the side, because it really is only going to be important for the aborrarareum and nothing else. It does its job moderatly well.

6)&7) I am not sure why I made two numbers for this. I doesn't need it. Huh. Anyway here are my main manufacturing wing. Ordinarly, there would be a couple of more crafts dwarf workshops here for me to make stone products out of but because of the retarded amount of iron on the map it isn't particularly necessary. Here are the mason, leather works, cloth works, mechanics, gem cutter, and everything else. The leather, gem, and cloth stock piles are all directly above the workshops, and there are stairs in the center leading up. The center is a large stone stockpile and over to the left there are stairs leading down. The reason for this is Dwarf pathfinding is more than a little retarded. When craft dwarf is looking to use a chunk of stone for werking on it will grab the nearest one. Good right? Well it when making this descision it will also take into account things like Z levels. So something 4 Z levels down would be counted as much closer than a stockpile that is 5 steps away. Of course exploritory mining isn't desighened to be easily walked through so a stone crafter will end up walking hundreds of steps out of the way for one piece of stone. That sucks. It is also what haulers are for. So I designated a nice large stone stockpile. It is quickly filled up by the inintal fortress and then the rest of it gets easily replaced as it is used by my army of haulers. So far it has worked wonderfully.

DF Layout Stockpiles 1 and 2

In a stroke of luck I got two layers of soil which is ideal for using in stockpiles. Stone walls leave behind, well stone, and that needs to be cleared in order for a stockpile to be set down. So the soil layers provide me with an ideal place for me to put down storage.

1) Here is the finnished good stockpile. This thing gets huge later on. Those X's are up/down stair cases. Above is trade depot and below is another layer of stockpiles, followed by a centeral meeting area. If you look above the 2, you will see some downward leading stairs. These lead directly to workshops which manufacture goods. This way the dwarves won't have very many steps to travel from workshop to finnished good stockpile. Depending on the stockpile it is somewhere between 25-40 steps which isn't bad at all.

2)This is a farm plot. The other benifit of soil layers are farm plots. A 5X5 farm plot, assuming you embarked with a competent grower, will produce enough plump helmets to keep all your dwarves drunk and fed. The amount of food grown is based on the actual skill of the farmer, so one square can produce something like 25 plump helmets which can be eaten and brewed into alcohol.

3) Funrinture stockpile! These things get massive. There are so many things that count as furniture and they tend to get produced enmasses. Ultimatly it is smart to break these things into a billion diffrent smaller stock piles. However, I don't feel like it. So they all just go in one place and if I feel like it later I'll seperate them, however, I don't see it as being to much of an issue.

4) Here is where the dwarves gather sand for my glass making empire. Making glass kinda sucks. You need bags, these bags get filled with sand, and then they use the filled bags to make glass. The problem is that my glassmakers inevitably work faster than the sand gatherers. More on this latter.






Not to much to explain here.

1) Food on top and drinks on the bottom
2)Metal stockpile, all that stuff will turn into iron which is pretty exiting! YAY!
3)Glass also consumes the bags in question so I need to be constantly making bags. The top one is for empty bags the bottom one is for full bags.
4)On top of the 4 is an animal stockpile which is the only way to store cages, to the right is variouse stockpiles wood, gems, ammo, weapons, leather, cloth things like that.

Dwarf Fortress Fortress Layout thesurface1

This is mostly for James' benefit but who knows this might attract the atension of some other dwarf fortress players out there. The general purpose of this is to give a demonstration of fortress layout as well as some other general tips for fortress building. Okay so here we go.



Ahh the surface. So the map I embarked to is compleatly flat. I didn't really mean for that to happen it's just how it worked out. I wanted a magma pipe and to much elevation variation kills your processor, but none at all? Oh well we make our own fun! I decided that keeping a trade depot on the surface and constructing a castle around it would be the best rout. So above is the start of it.

1) An archery range is planned to go here. The most dangerouse piece of opposition in a siege are the archers. Hence the point of the hallway of certain doom. I once had much more ambicious plans, which included elevators and ballistas. However, ballista ammo is annoying to make and I just know that there will be many accidental deaths. So the second best thing is I am going to put the archery range down on point1. This way any archers who are practicing can form a nice little ambush.

2) The corner. As stated earlier enemy archers are the most deadly piece of opposition you are going to face in an ambush/siege. Thus I came up with the ultimate defense! The corner! The green carrots are cage traps, which will take out the first wave of invaders. The white carrots are stone fall traps and are very helpful for defense. The idea is to plant the archers on the archery range and my melee dwarves right on the otherside of the corner. This way when the goblins/elves round the corrner my melee dwarves will be able to attack without suffering from massed archer fire. BRILLIANT!

3) This is a mistake. See I though locking the doors would keep invaders out. As I found out during my second siege some time later. They do not. I have a solution in the works but that will show up more in the evolution of the actual castle.

4) This is one of the military barracks where the military dwarves train and chill. It's important to keep these places close to the impending action, and you don't get much closer than this.

5) The Aborroarium! Okay so I got a little ambitious when channeling this thing out. To explain. If you build something with a glass roof it is still considered outside for crop purposes. So I've dug out a channel which is like a tunnel except there is no roof. Now if I build a glass roof I can grow out door crops safely from ambushes and the other varying dangers of the outside world. I also plan on making it an upscale gathering point for dwarves, as well as some other things. I dunno. I just think it is neat to have an undergound outside world.

[Dwarf Fortress] Where I play! Part 1

It is currently Late Spring in the second year what will soon to be the epic stories of HelmTell. Right now things are just starting to get interesting. Since you are new to the fortress let me give you a guided tour.

First we start off with the surface. I made the odd choice of putting the trade depot on the surface. This is mostly because the entire bloody map is flat, no matter though. I ordered a rough building to be constructed around the depot to ensure that it is inside and to protect it from invaders. I also stuck the barracks right next to the Depot so at least some part of my military will be there at all times.



Off from the hallway we see the start of the hallway of eternal doom. I hope to have it finished by spring of next year. The idea is to break up enemy archers by using the hallway and to be able to execute amazing flanking maneuvers. If all else fails I'll just fill the thing with traps and use my army as an awesome janitorial service :).



This fortress has an epic fuckton of iron in it, so I'll really be able to crank out some serious stuff a little later on.

Right now I am working on getting bed rooms situated, the butcher bin set up, and starting to set up glassmaking which is highly ineffective but oh so cool. The rest of the pictures are just there to give you an idea of the general fortress layout.

In the next post I will begin construction of the aboroalreum! There will be much excitment.