Editing Bedroom design

As to size, all a dwarf needs to sleep is a 1-tile bed, anywhere. However, to be [[Thought|happy]], a dwarf wants their own room with a bed, and a chest and a cabinet to put stuff in.  Dwarves consider it a bonus if the room is enclosed by 4 walls (or 3 and a door) for privacy. If you want to add some other item(s) that a dwarf [[preference|prefers]] to add to their happiness, that would require that much more space - usually no more than a tile or two.  However, some [[noble]]s can get very [[Room#Quality|particular]], and their rooms need to be bigger to meet all their requirements.  

Players frequently want designs which maximize positive thought and minimize the path distance between a dwarf's food, drink, job and home. For these purposes, nothing holds a candle to the ease, simplicity, and efficiency of [[#The_multiply-overlapping_single_bedroom|overlapping bedrooms]] in a single large, carved-out area. In the current version, the main benefits of individualized rooms are for roleplaying purposes. Historically, room design was further complicated when the [[dwarven economy]] kicked in, and a wide range of "[[Zones#Quality_and_value|room qualities]]" were needed, and poor dwarves were kicked out of over-priced quarters (the dwarven economy is currently disabled). To this end, a number of solutions, some surprisingly elegant, have been produced.  

=== 1×1 bed only, no walls ===

By far the most minimal design is to take a bed, place it anywhere you want, then set it as a 1×1 room. This bed 'room' can be assigned to a dwarf early on, and will at least serve the bare minimum purpose of avoiding unhappy thoughts from the lack of a room. It will not, of course, leave the dwarves with any space to store any possessions at all. However, it requires the absolute minimum work to set up; all you need is existing empty space, preferably with no noise nearby, and a bed to place in it.

Alternatively if you are building compact merely to save space or improve framerate, a 1×1 bedroom on a smoothed, engraved floor can have quite a high room value.

Note that since beds do not block movement and simply having people moving nearby (or even directly ''over'' them) does not produce noise or disrupt sleeping dwarves in any way, you can place these 1×1 rooms in a solid block with no space between them; this makes it easy to smooth and engrave the floor for all of them at once.  With a competent engraver and quality beds, this is often enough to raise the room value to the point where even this minimalist setup will produce happy thoughts; compared to a high-quality bed, the amount that un-engraved walls would add to a room's value is minimal anyway.

The simplest form of dwarven housing.  Stick a bunch of beds in a room, zone them in a [[dormitory]], and voilà, instant flophouse.  On maps with no [[tree]]s, this is pretty much your only option for sleeping quarters before breaching a cavern or importing large amounts of wood.  (Dwarves will sleep on the floor of the dormitory if no beds are available, which at least keeps them from sleeping in the wilderness.)

Compared to the solid block of 1×1 bedrooms above, the advantages to a communal dormitory are the ease with which it can be set up, the lower number of beds required (several dwarves can time-share one), and the fact that it allows dwarves to sleep on the floor in a dedicated area if all beds are occupied. These make them ideal if not enough wood is available to make beds for everyone or as a fallback in case you fall behind on building rooms.

 

However, even a 1×1 owned room generates happy thoughts (as opposed to the minor negative one from a dormitory) and takes the exact same space. Therefore, if unhappy thoughts are a concern and you have enough beds, you should designate them as rooms instead.

[[Image:3x3 example.png|180px|right]]

If it is 2×2, 3×3 or more, square designs are probably the first choice of many players. Easy to plan, easy to put in place, this kind of design is one of the best when the player values their playing time instead of the overall layout of their fortress. While square designs are easy to reproduce en masse, most are not optimized either for beauty or space efficiency, two aspects that other designs excel at.

In this image, the access stairwell (blue fields in the center), spread out in all directions to a public dormitory and dining room for poorer dwarves on the left/right and to 3×3 private rooms on the top/bottom.  The design allows for two small stockpiles of food (gray fields) to minimize the walk to a dining hall.

There are also built-in areas for impressive things like [[Main:statues|statues]] and [[Main:cages|cages]] (for zoos) to keep dwarves admiring your handiwork.  The 3×3 rooms are easy to get up to decent or higher to keep your most useful dwarves happy as clams.  They're also convenient for impromptu noble housing, since you can just knock out a wall between two rooms and convert one into a dining room for a whiny noble.  You could even expand the corner rooms a bit more on both the X and Y axes to make four 3×3 rooms to give the noble a dining room, tomb, and office all in one area.  This is especially useful for the mayor, who gets replaced every so often.  When a new Mayor is elected, one can reassign all the trappings to the new mayor in one go.  If you want an even more decentralized and calm traffic pattern, put tables and chairs in all the private rooms; dwarves will prefer to eat in their quarters.  The walls between the doors leading to the dormitory and Dining Room allow for 2 entrances and 2 exits to each predictably higher-traffic room while leaving a pillar of rock for an engraving.  The main corridor also allows you to branch off into 4 restraints per floor in a private 1×2 prison.  Since it's flanked by an animal cage and a statue (or alternatively, 2 statues. This may be better because Statues block movement and it's effectively the same as surrounding the prisoner with walls). Additionally, in an area you want smoothed and engraved to begin with, it gives prisoners a leg upon their happiness immediately and -- once again -- prevents traffic jams from convicts being brought food and water in larger prisons.

Another option for maximizing traffic throughput is to put a 1×3 line of upward stairwells on one end of the blue field, and a 1×3 line of downward stairwells on the other.  This simulates a 3-wide vertical corridor without the safety risks of up/down stairwells.

[[Image:Housing_by_Marble_Dice.png|thumb|244px|This is the 61×61 housing plan]]

| style="padding-right:26px;" | 29×29 tiles

| style="padding-right:26px;" | 45×45 tiles

| style="padding-right:26px;" | 61×61 tiles

| style="padding-right:26px;" | 77×77 tiles

A variation on the dormitory can produce large numbers of cheap, high quality bedrooms, very easily.  Start with a large room, perhaps 20×20 tiles, and put many beds in it.  From each of those beds, create a bedroom that covers the entire room.  Each of the rooms overlaps the other rooms, and therefore suffers a quality modifier, but the room is large enough that its size can dominate the quality calculation. The quality hit for overlapping rooms is only applied once; your room either overlaps or it does not. With any reasonable amount of beds, it is easier and cheaper to furnish the one room with high quality items (at a penalty) than it is to carve out and furnish dozens of rooms separately. In addition, side by side beds in an open room is by far the most efficient use of space and walking distance. A room this size with a couple hundred beds in it, and some combination of smoothing, engraving, or multiple pieces of cheap furniture, can be of any quality level that is desired, from modest to royal.

The following diagram shows a 3×1 layout surrounding a 3×3 stairwell. The design can be repeated outwards as far as necessary.

Dwarves will navigate from the stairwell diagonally through rooms, while bedroom sizes can be applied at 3×3 (without the area leaking to adjoining rooms) allowing for some level of furnishing.

[[Image:Dwarf-bedroom-simple.jpg|thumb|250px|This is a 35×35 housing plan]]

The main point of this design is that it squeezes six bedrooms in a space of 9×8 squares (including walls) by using two-way doors. It's meant to be built across several Z-levels, making it take up a minimal amount of practical space. It can be easily mirrored, although that requires a wider corridor (or the use of four bedrooms instead of six on the other side).

One apartment "unit" gives you 6 rooms using only 2 doors and it fits within a 13×7 space (including walls).  Access to the apartments in the unit is through the 1-3 up/down stairwells in the center.  This design can be expanded by repeating the same pattern one level down and/or by tiling together multiple units together on the same level.

This design is compact and allows for a large number of rooms. Each room has 3 tiles plus a door. To add to the complex build an apartment level one level above or below the lobby - the stairs allow direct access. The design can be stretched to make the rooms 3×2 or 3×3, or to allow more rooms per floor, depending on your preference. Though not as visually impressive as the fractal patterns it is very efficient in that it can allow for large numbers of dwarves to easily access the main hallway.  The pods are very quick to deploy as the interior (mined out) width of the pods exactly equals one {{k|Shift}}+move of the cursor.  Highlight a full square with a horizontal shift+move then a vertical.  Then ''un''mark the 3 internal walls in both horizontal and vertical directions (each also 1 shift+move distance long), and finally mark in the four staircases. Sixteen bedrooms with extremely efficient pathing laid out in as many seconds.

:2) The entire design has been expanded (to 15×15, vs 13×13 above), but rooms have not been expanded to fill all available space - not yet.  That will be done if/as need arises, and many of the 3-tile rooms can become 5- or 7-tile¹, or two joined together to become 12-tile suites².

The Shaft design can fit 20 2×2 rooms, or 30 1×1 rooms.

This results in 30 bedrooms in a 21×15 rectangular space (counting all walls, including external ones). Can be repeated multiple z-levels, accessed from a lobby hallway.

By playing with the basic building block of the above design, and a 25×25 space, you can get this elegant square and symmetrical design: