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[MantisMan]

I have a link in my sig of a post I made in a similar thread. I took screenshots, too.

The bedroom level design is one I particularly like. It serves 36 dwarves and leaves things open ended for exploratory mining.

[TheEqualsE]

This was my Alathdum, my latest work in progress.

...
What do you guys think?

You build on a large scale.  I usually see that from experienced players.  I'm trying to build bigger myself, and I'm slowly doing it.  I haven't quite reached this size yet.  I like the way you set up the workshops it reminds me of Captain Duck on steroids. I see your front entrance has some thought given to safety, trade and pathing.  I particularly like the workshops because the path between the workshop and its raw material is almost always going to be a diagonal, and near by.  Extremely efficient.

[Leonidas]

Many of these designs strike me as wildly horizontal. I aim for nearly all of my fortress to be within six steps of stairs or ramps. In a pinch, I'll stretch that to ten. I aim for my dwarves to move up and down as easily as possible.

[zdrgn]

I always build macros to designate 3x3 rooms in a grid
(i don't worry about doors and hallways these get designated later, its easy to cut them out of the grid)
I end the macro one level down, in the top left corner(where it started) so I can build a multi z-level grid with just a few repeat keypresses.

Basically start designate (d) and do shift+arrow 3-4 times to get a 40x40 grid which i divide into 3x3 rooms with x cuts vertically and horizontally every 4 spaces

I either build hallways so that i have 9x 3x3 rooms or 16

for dormitories the 3x3's work great, also for workshop floors.
Then some levels i do large rooms of 12x12 or so which equals 9 3x3's as a storage room with a central staircase up to the workshops.

4x4 x 3x3 rooms is fun for dormitories.  its 16 rooms, but to use them all I lose 4 as connectors, and end up with 12 bedrooms making a shape like:
*-o-* * |||
  |   | |||
* * *-o-|||
|     | |||
o-* * * |||
|   |   |||
* *-o-* |||
    |   |||
--------XXX
--------XXX
--------XXX

the O's are 3x3's that connect to the outside hallways, and have a staircase in the middle to allow interlevel travel to storage rooms and workshops.

(a 2nd macro conforming to the original grid allows me to place the stairwells.)

[Mastermind]

This was my Alathdum, my latest work in progress.

...
What do you guys think?

You build on a large scale.  I usually see that from experienced players.  I'm trying to build bigger myself, and I'm slowly doing it.  I haven't quite reached this size yet.  I like the way you set up the workshops it reminds me of Captain Duck on steroids. I see your front entrance has some thought given to safety, trade and pathing.  I particularly like the workshops because the path between the workshop and its raw material is almost always going to be a diagonal, and near by.  Extremely efficient.

Thanks. I always say go big or go home. Part of this is also because I like some eye-candy. You should also note (as a tip for your own designs) that the stockpiles you see actually consist of 5-6 smaller stockpiles per item group. These are sorted on product quality, so that the highest quality items (cut gems for example) are always used first by the dwarves. Looking forward to seeing your designs aswell.

[DaSwayza]

Typically I like to build on a theme. Sometimes I will go with an outdoor city walled in by a double layer wall, with large buildings on the corners for various purposes. I like building lavish libraries and high tower temples, or for my next project I'm trying to generate a vicious world with extreme temperatures and multiple good and evil biomes, then I will build a huge bastion tower, containing the remnants of study and civilization locked away behind an army constantly vigilant. I'll post screenshots when Armokvision is updated!

[strainer]

Im always in a mad rush to build facilities and get training like its starcraft or something. Not yet continued to the megaproject stage...

[Lz_erk]

19th Sandstone, year 125 [first year of the settlement's founding]. Quick and dirty luxury/defense embark with numerous potential threats for the endgame.

https://imgur.com/a/lthGyZu

[Russell.s]

I've posted this fort before, but Eaglemansions is probably one of my better designed forts. I've since created a newer fort that's bigger and better in a lot of ways, but I have fond memories of Eaglemansions.

https://imgur.com/gallery/RSGkN

[Dov]

I have nothing to show as my last save of DF is quite old and somewhere on a drive I have forgotten about but I'm the same kind of player as Werdna. I like building pointless and needlessly complicated projects for the sake of building pointless and needlessly complicated projects.

From what I remember most important rooms and main hallways in my fort were two or three stories high with balcony, windows and doors leading to other rooms at different levels, columns, floor paterns of different colours and decorated with statues, artifacts and war trophies aplenty. I used to build temples and taverns even tho the game wasn't supporting such things at the time, elaborate necropolis complete with deadly traps to protect the rest of the deads from the attention of the livings (with the understanding that if it ever had to serve it would probably be the other way around), royal palace, mansions, slums, indoor gardens, outdoor gardens at z-10 with glass ceilling and retractable drawbridge (I know, you don't need one if you have the other, but that's how I roll), market place, public bath (that had to be closed and quarantined because the water quickly became red, and green, and yellow, and filled with filth, blood and syndromes from at least two different megabeasts) and once I decided to build ballistas, which is pointless in and of itself, but rather than just get rid of all the extra bits I had to craft in order to get the required amount of masterwork ballista parts I used them to build two row of 15 or so ballistas each, facing each other in a large hall that was dubbed the "Royal Arsenal" and served no purpose other than to look utterly badass. I even made sure that the arsenal was linked to the road used by the merchants so the ballistas could technically be hauled out of the fort if needed even tho you obviously can't or need to haul a ballista in that game.

So yeah, lots of pointless stuff.

The only thing I ever built that could be regarded as practical was the way I organised production and residential area. Depending on how much of a given item I needed I would either decide to organise its production in what I called a "shop" or a "guild". The shop typically had the work space on the main floor, storage below and housing for the shop owner above that, a few extra bit too if I deemed the job prestigious enougth to deserve it. The guild meanwhile was similar to what production area looks like in most forts I've seen and used for the main industries but the living quarters of the guild members were directly attached to the production area. With a lavish mansion for the guild leader, nice houses for the head of each branches of the guild, more modest quarters for the guild members and dormitories for the guys tasked with hauling everything in and out of the guild. The result was a very decentralised fortress and allowed for the liberal use of burrow orders which stopped my important dwarves from being killed outside on a quest for more socks, saved a few FPS by making pathfinding much easier for the majority of the dwarves, made production very efficient and easy to manage and most importantly gave me excuses to build more pointless stuff like guild halls or a town hall with a meeting room for every guild leader, the mayor and even a representative from the nobility.

Now that I've decided to go back to DF you can imagine that I'm overjoyed to learn that I'll be able to have several nobles and a priesthood and build working temples and taverns, libraries, a foreign quarter, museums, shrines, universities and much more.

[Russell.s]

@Russell.s, I'm admiring your work there with Eaglemansions.

Been to busy to play for a few months now, but seeing your fortress, plus the new release where Dwarves can become stressed again, is making me want to get though the rest of the mountain of work that I've got on, so I can get back to designing a new fortress inside of a week!

Thanks David, I'm glad my fort could inspire you . May your work end soon so you can strike the earth!

[Slogo]

One thing I've always advocated, and really like but a lot of people don't do are stacked bedrooms. That is bedrooms where you use a single up/down stair to access 2 different bedrooms (one above, one below).

An example from an old fort can be seen here: http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-32142-bedroom

So essentially on Z+1 and Z-1 you have a dense pack of bedrooms only accessible by stairs, and on Z-0 you have some additional bedrooms and the pathways needed to get to each bedroom. The result is a lot denser bedroom area and less space spent on hallways. The building in the link houses over 80 dwarves in that tiny area.

Another example here: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-12461-tuftedstockades where the middle level is used for workshop space and a main hallway.

[Schmaven]

My current one is only about 33% complete (it's big) but one corner is almost done, and is enough to give an idea.  Screenshots don't do it justice because it covers a lot of z-levels and the fort is larger than a screen.  I've been meaning to put the fort on DFMA, here it is:

Graniteramparts

On the year 139 map, the lower "3D" fort starts at level 144 and goes down 7 levels.

That is a really impressive fort design.  Also, that method for hosting the multi-level fort views is really cool.  I've never seen that before.

[Werdna]

Thanks.  DFMA is fantastic, there's a decade's worth of forts on that site and I encourage all of you to use it, as it has unfortunately fallen into disuse.  It's my favorite way to enjoy and learn from other folks' work, and there's some really inspiring forts in there!  It's also a handy way to refer to your fort (a snapshot anyway) remotely outside of the game via browser.

[Schmaven]

So I want to use this to upload fortress designs, but despite reading through the mkv25.net upload instructions, and the DFMapCompressor readme file, I don't know how to use it successfully.  I can select which Z-Levels I want to export, but pressing <e> doesn't seem to do anything.  I don't think I can skip this step though.

Export Screen:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If anyone is able to help me make this work, that would be totally awesome.

Until then, here's an earlier screen shot of what's left of the entrance to my fort after a dragon showed up to play:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I like to have an above ground courtyard with wood storage, wood shops, wood crafting, and military training grounds.  This is the first aspect of my forts I try to get in good shape after embarking.  I also made a bunker the Marksdwarves can be locked into during sieges.  But so far they stand around and get shot at by invaders without shooting back much, so there's some kinks to work out there.