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[Sofaspud]

I've been playing with a repeatable, eye-pleasing, and reasonably efficient design for my dwarves' eating and sleeping space.  What I came up with works well for me,  so I thought I'd share.  Each z-level has the same design, and I smooth/engrave surfaces as the population grows.  A couple of legendary miners can dig out a new section in about five minutes, and each level houses 20 dwarves easily (it's dead easy to add more, too).  Oh, and because I don't know if Toady plans on restoring the old cave-in code, the pillar in the middle prevents the roof from squishing the dwarves.

code:

█████████████████████████&#960 ; 8;████ 
█████..████████████████..████&  #9608; 
█████..████████████████..████&  #9608; 
█████D██..............██D█████
█████....................█████
█..D.....██D██..██D██.....D..█
█..█.....█...█..█...█.....█..█
████...████.██DD██.████...████
███....D..███....███..D....███
███..███..██S....S██..███..███
███..█.████X......X████.█..███
███..D..██X.CCCCCC.X██..D..███
███..█.██S.CTTTTTTC.S██.█..███
███..███...CTFFFFTC...███..███
███....D...CTF██FTC...D....███
███....D...CTF██FTC...D....███
███..███...CTFFFFTC...███..███
███..█.██S.CTTTTTTC.S██.█..███
███..D..██X.CCCCCC.X██..D..███
███..█.████X......X████.█..███
███..███..██S....S██..███..███
███....D..███....███..D....███
████...████.██DD██.████...████
█..█.....█...█..█...█.....█..█
█..D.....██D██..██D██.....D..█
████......................████
████D██................██D████
████..██████████████████..███&  #9608; 
████..██████████████████..███&  #9608; 
█████████████████████████&#960 ; 8;████ 
D=Door
C=Chair
T=Table
F=Food Stockpile
S=Statue
X=Up/Down Stairs

I set one of these up without the apartments around it at the top level and designate that the meeting hall, then move to the next level down and create the first layer of apartments.  When I'm about to pass 20 dwarves I move down again and do another right under the first.  The block-shaped rooms on the corners can double as offices and have plenty of room to be enlarged once nobility starts arriving.

Since dwarves don't seem to mind walking over chairs and tables, I put the food stockpile in the middle (with orders to take from my main pile elsewhere, duh).  All my dwarves simply adore their dining room(s).

Suggestions or criticisms?  I like the idea of apartment levels, kinda; I'm next going to try building this above ground with blocks, heh.

I'm not going to pretend this is original (I imagine most everyone's got one like it), but if anyone's got suggestions I'd love to hear 'em.

(Edit: I dunno what's causing the glitches in the code block and I've tried fixing it three times, but just pretend those are all wall sections.  Funky.)

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Sofaspud ]

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Sofaspud ]

[Slappy Moose]

That's a very nice design. The only critique I have is that the rooms are small, there are way more tables and chairs than rooms, and the rooms are pretty cramped.

However, I say that the food stockpile surrounded by a dining room is a cool idea. In my next fort, I will probably use a similar design, that has larger/more rooms.

Good job.

[palin88]

I wanted to adapt Raynard's Fractal design into a 3d fort so I made a map in Excel  to help plan everything before digging.

40x40 tiles, holds 56 dwarves with 3 tile rooms. One block of four rooms could be rezoned into two rooms with 11 tiles each or rezoned into one room with 29 tiles (for nobles, say.)

I went with the same "rule of 7" to avoid future disasters if collapse code changes.

 

Central area is a dining room, and yes, there aren't enough tables and chairs for everyone. I figure if it's declared general use then I probably won't have to worry about all 54 dwarves living on that floor eating at the same time.

Also note, all rooms are within 5 tiles of a stairwell. My fortress is designed around that grid of stairwells which grant access to workshops and storage levels beneath my administrative and residential levels.

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: palin88 ]

[Sofaspud]

Slappy Moose, the number of tables match the number of rooms precisely; I built that into the design.  There are a few more chairs than needed, true, but I wanted the corners to look neat rather than having one side of the table area have more chairs than another.

It's easy to miss the way the rooms are laid out, but there are 5 rooms per quadrant, making for 20 total; 20 tables total as well.    Yours are all short runs, though, which probably makes it a non-problem.

About your workshops being below your residences, though: every time I've done that, none of my dwarves sleep well.  It seems that even with a layer (or two, three, ten) of solid rock between them and, say, the masons shop, they'll still complain about noise.  Z-levels don't seem to matter for distance calculations.  Have you found a way around that problem?

What I do with my design is use one of the available 2-wide corridors (N,S,E,W) to move a 'safe' distance away and build my workshops, etc. there, instead of above or below the apartments.

[palin88]

quote:Originally posted by Sofaspud:
<STRONG>

palin88, I really like the layout, but I've never been a fan of 1-tile-wide corridors.  I'm not sure that's as much a problem with the diagonal movement now, but still.  Something about watching a dwarf icon squeeze down the hall like a fat man down a movie theater aisle just grates on my nerves.    Yours are all short runs, though, which probably makes it a non-problem.
</STRONG>

Aye, and I'm praying that the even distribution of hallways will mean each hallway will only be pathed by no more than four dwarves simultaneously in the worst case scenario. All of my other floors use 3-wide corridors.

quote:Originally posted by Sofaspud:
<STRONG>

About your workshops being below your residences, though: every time I've done that, none of my dwarves sleep well.  It seems that even with a layer (or two, three, ten) of solid rock between them and, say, the masons shop, they'll still complain about noise.  Z-levels don't seem to matter for distance calculations.  Have you found a way around that problem?
</STRONG>

That's troubling. This is just a prototype, I haven't actually tried building this fortress yet, although I've mapped five layers out using the stairway grid pattern (residential, administrative, food production, workshops, storage.) If z-distance isn't taken into account when calculating noise then I'm just screwed in terms of unhappy noise thoughts. I was planning this out with workshops five z-layers below my residence layer in the hopes that it would eliminate noise problems.

If I change the layout to spread workshops away from the residential floors on the horizontal axis then it defeats the whole point of using the stairway grid for fast access across floors. My dream with this total vertical layout is that any arbitrary object in the fortress is no more than 25 tiles away from any other object (floor diameter / 2 + vertical depth.)

I'm wondering then, is sleeping uneasily a minor unhappy thought or a major one? My dwarves are generally ecstatic all the time because I cook them extravagant meals that they eat in legendary dining halls.

[Sofaspud]

quote:Originally posted by palin88:
<STRONG>

I'm wondering then, is sleeping uneasily a minor unhappy thought or a major one? My dwarves are generally ecstatic all the time because I cook them extravagant meals that they eat in legendary dining halls.</STRONG>

I'm not sure.  I think it must be minor, because I've had fortresses where dwarves were next to noise all the time (I didn't know mining was, um, loud) and they never tantrumed, and BOY did they sleep a lot.

My approach to DF is more "what would dwarves do" rather than "how efficient can I be", though.  From an efficiency standpoint, yours wins hands down, I think.  My current fort the dwarves have to travel something like 30-40 tiles to work in the workshops; something like 60-80 for the farms, I think, because I sited them in a clay loam area but good, Armok-fearing dwarves would never even THINK of *living* in anything other than stout rock.  

[Eagle of Fire]

Need to create new bedroom desing wiki page... Rising...  

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Eagle of Fire ]

[tallyho]

Sound travels vertically just as far as it travels horizontally. Workshops need to be at least 5 Z-levels below a residential area if you want to avoid disrupting your dwarves' sleep. Any digging going on within eight z-levels below the apartments will do the same. It won't travel as far diagonally as it will up and down, though.

[Merlon]

Palin88, if you're limited in vertical buildspace you could always slice your current blueprint horizontaly instead, for instance turning the northern half into workshopspace while keeping the southern as livinquarters and other no-noise activities. If your dividing 3 tile hallway also has walls that should make it wide enough to prevent noise from spreading across the divide.

quote:Originally posted by palin88:
I'm wondering then, is sleeping uneasily a minor unhappy thought or a major one? My dwarves are generally ecstatic all the time because I cook them extravagant meals that they eat in legendary dining halls.

There doesn't seem to be much information on the specifics of thoughts in this version, but here are the values for noise in the old one (v0.23.130.23a):
slept uneasily due to noise lately            -2
slept very uneasily due to noise lately            -5
was woken by noise while sleeping lately         -10

While thoose aren't huge numbers, they could very well be just what it takes to make your unhappy dwarf tantrum if (s)he's allready borderline. For comparison to other thoughts try this link at the wiki archive, though some of the information is likely dated.

[Sofaspud]

quote:Originally posted by Eagle of Fire:
[QB]Need to create new bedroom desing wiki page... Rising...    

quote:
I would not care about the tables though. I don't know if it was your intention, but I'd never care enough to actually assign a specific table for every dwarf in my fortress.

Now that I think about it, I'd probably never build more than one dining room in my fortress either. Which mean that the other levels could lead to even more rooms all over the central area...  

Oh, I don't bother assigning each and every table.  That would be... well, time-consuming, at the very least.  I just made sure that tables = rooms on each level in the starting design, because I usually have way too much stone anyway and it makes for a good way to get rid of some of it.  

What I've got going on in the current one is two levels as shown, then a third level underneath that has a slightly larger dining room (taking up the wall space that the 3 inner rooms per quadrant do in the starting design) and nobles bedrooms along the outer wall.  They're bigger than the others but they don't violate the general outline; I just expand sideways (so they become 2x5, 2x6, etc).  That should make it easy to replicate aboveground, if needed.  The bottom layer is nobility's quarters.  I don't *have* nobles yet in this fort, but when they get here their rooms will be ready.  

[palin88]

quote:Originally posted by tallyho:
<STRONG>Sound travels vertically just as far as it travels horizontally. Workshops need to be at least 5 Z-levels below a residential area if you want to avoid disrupting your dwarves' sleep. Any digging going on within eight z-levels below the apartments will do the same. It won't travel as far diagonally as it will up and down, though.</STRONG>

I hope that's true, I was working under that assumption when I designed this fort.

From my other thread about vertical design patterns:

quote:
z+1 - Sleeping quarters, dining room
z+0 - Entrance, traps, barracks, weapon/ammo/armor stocks, statue garden, throne room, offices
z-1 - Food production/processing (farm, farm workshop, mill, kitchen, still, butcher) animal storage
z-2 - Food storage, finished goods storage, furniture storage
z-3 - Workshops (non-metal and stone)
z-4 - raw materials storage
z-5 - Forges, smelters, mason (hopefully with magma)
z-6 - Raw ore storage
z-7 - Prison
z-8 - Stripmine

Workshops are separated from the residential area by four vertical tiles. Mining is seperated by nine. Given the cone shaped dispersal pattern of noise, distance of four is probably workable, especially since not all shops will be active at the same time. If I really wanted to avoid the problem I could swap the workshop layer with the raw materials layer to get exactly five vertical layers between it and the residential layer.

[Eagle of Fire]

If possible, it would be nice to have picture(s) of this living quarter desing so I can add them directly to the wiki.

Best result I've seen so far is someone taking a region picture of his whole fortress (with default character set) with the project completed and a second time with the whole project smoothered.

It is way easier to edit and zoom on region pictures to find the optimal picture to show on the wiki than to work with either a strange character (or image) set people are not familiar with or to have a fullscreen image which is often too small to have all the details.

The reason why I'm asking is that it might take some time for me to fancy building something like this in a new fortress. I'd probably do it eventually, but the sooner someone who already done it or is about to do it post a picture, the sooner we'll be able to add it to the Wiki.

[Kagus]

I'm not exactly a master architect, but I'd like my design to fall under the scrutiny of the elders.

I'll get a picture up when I get the chance, for now I'll just try and describe it.

I make a two-tile wide corridor, and put 2x2 rooms along both sides with one square in between.  I know it's not exactly brilliant, but it's easy to dig, and it's easy to add on to in case of more Dwarves.  If you want to make a change, just dig out the tile next to the doorway and you've got the two-tile corridor again, or dig out multiple rooms and you've got a nice little luxury suite.

And it even has its own little charm, like a little hotel floor or apartment block or something.  For Z-level access, I use a double stair on the side of a corridor, just because I like double stairs.

[Eagle of Fire]

Mine usually look like a carbon copy of this fortress, which is my latest to date.

Ugly, yes. Efficient? You bet!

[Amir Alawi]

quote:Originally posted by tallyho:
<STRONG>Sound travels vertically just as far as it travels horizontally. Workshops need to be at least 5 Z-levels below a residential area if you want to avoid disrupting your dwarves' sleep. Any digging going on within eight z-levels below the apartments will do the same. It won't travel as far diagonally as it will up and down, though.</STRONG>

Why are you so concerned about noise?  Happy dwarves are unproductive.