Bay 12 Games Forum

Maybe I'm just neurotic about aesthetics/efficiency, but I've been having alot of trouble coming up with a decent layout for a fortress. In the past I've generally just used a + shaped arrangement of 11x11 rooms, connected by 3x3 halls/stairwells. i repeat the design on a number of levels. some of the 11's get used as stockpiles, some get 4 workshops stuck in the corners, some get divided up into bedrooms. overall like this:

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edit: here's an older fort, but similar to what i'm talking about. in this instance I used the corners of the + for bedrooms, so it's just a giant square, and it's based around 9x9s instead of 11's, but you get the general idea.

this works efficiently, but I've been getting very bored of it. I also don't like how wide open it is. workshops don't really 'seem' like workshops when they're just sitting in a big open room. seems more like a gigantic hangar bay with whatever just layed out.

I'm trying to come up with something 'better' that's still aesthetically appealing, but i'm kind of lost for ideas. I want to do things like have an actual entrance hall, give workshops their own rooms, somehow set up 'logical' stockpiles (rather than just having a massive cleared out floorspace with whatever dumped on it).  also little things like having the space to put small stockpiles of valuable materials close to workshops, so moody dwarves will actually use them (this layout virtually always ends up with iron trumpets encircled with bands of chert menacing with spikes of raw green glass etc, unless i manually forbid / use other tricks/exploits/whatever)

All in all I want my fortress to 'feel more real', without becoming a sprawling mess.

so how do you set up your fortress's layout? do you tend to stick to 1 z level or multiple? do you get a certain design and repeat it over several levels, or vary what's on each level? ASCII diagrams / mspaint doodles welcome

if you dig a shaft, build a farm at the bottom, then cover the top with floors, will the farm be usable for surface plants (strawberries etc)? i know an underground tile that gets exposed to light is permanently marked as lit

i intend to use glass floors for the sake of 'not cheating' (i'd use grates but since they wont support eachother... yeah), can't recall if this works or not

does anyone know if it's possible to use booze in cooking if it's not the only ingredient? I know if you try to just make a wine roast you end up with wine splattered around the kitchen and no roast, but if with with burrows/micromanagement/stockpiles you force a dwarf to only have say 2 pieces of meat, some cheese, and some wine available, could I get him to make a roast that included the wine?

I'm used to the old version where I could turn out food in my early fort that was worth a bunch of dwarfbucks. In the new version I need an alternative.

I seem to remember reading that there's a certain craft that's good for making to trade, I just can't remember what or why. possibly mugs? one of my first immigrants was a high master stonecrafter, so I can start cranking some stone goods out, I just don't know what I should make.

I'm not talking about just putting a job on repeat

in the new version is it possible yet to tell your dwarves "make barrels whenever there is wood" or "milk the cows whenever they can be milked"?

I'm trying to run my food supply entirely on cheese and its working out pretty well, but god damn is it annoying constantly having to tell the milker to do his job

just a little streamlining idea. unless there's some practical application of making windmills fall apart, there doesn't seem to be a reason to make gear assemblies stop supporting connected mechanisms when the power transfer is disconnected.

it actually doesn't make much sense the way it is, because it means abstractly that the entire weight of whatever the assembly is connected to is resting on the gears themselves, rather than the 'housing' or whatever of the assembly. In fact a windmill couldn't even operate if the only thing holding it up was the axle going down, the blades would just end up turning the whole windmill back and forth -on- the axle rather than turning the axle itself. the base would have to be connected to the ground via the housing of the gear assembly, in which case disconnecting the gears themselves shouldn't matter.

are there any graphics packs with tiles even bigger than 16x16? i just got a ginormous monitor and playing with a huge grid is fun, but i'd also like to try out big detailed sprites

I was just wondering, does a dwarf need the associated hauling to grab ingredients for an item he's making? for example you tell a carpenter to make a table. does he need wood hauling on to go get the log?

just curious and cant test it at the moment