40d:Bedroom design

The smallest bedroom design possible is a bed built into a notch in a corridor. Arguably smaller than this is the barracks, if you want to count bedrooms-divided-by-dwarves. In fact, you do not even need to specify rooms out of beds, as dwarves will sleep in any bed that has been built (dwarves will not sleep in beds which have been produced in a workshop but not built). However this arrangement leaves many things to be desired, and players of Dwarf Fortress seem to be uniformly obsessed^[Verify] with creating bedroom designs which are unique, functional and pleasing to the builder.

Dwarves gain happy thoughts from rooms they own and the furniture in them. Although the room-designation tool appears to not include doors, dwarves will receive unique happy thoughts for "their own quality door," as well as any other well-crafted doors which they pass through. Players frequently want designs which maximize positive thought and minimize the path distance between a dwarf's food, drink, job and home -- a process further complicated when the dwarven economy kicks in. To this end, a number of solutions, some elegant, have been produced.

There are many ways to design the layout of bedrooms. Designs might consider simplicity and ease of designating, efficiency, and aesthetics. The ability to modify the design to enlarge, improve, or add rooms can be important as well. Proximity of the rooms to noise should also be considered.

Many of the designs shown here were taken from this forum post.

Plain square design

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 value his playing time instead of the overall layout of his 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.

Line design

Line designs have the advantage of being very space efficient and very adaptative. From 1×1 to 1×4 and longer, it can fit almost anywhere, can be upgraded later on as long as you have the space behind your first original line and do not need excessive corridor space for the bedroom access. Simply dig a few lines out of an access tunnel already in use in your fortress and voila, you have new living quarters. This kind of minimalistic design is perfect for when the economy kicks in, as it can be adapted in a flash for any kind of low wage citizen.

THLawrence's Living Pods

Apartment Complex: Template:Qd Template:Qd

Lobby: Template:Qd Template:Qd

This design is compact and allows for a large number of rooms. Each room has 3 tiles and a door. To add the apartment complex build it one level above or below the lobby. The design can be stretched to make the rooms 3x2 or 3x3, or to allow more rooms per floor, depending on your preference. Though not as 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.

GnomeChomsky's Tessellated Apartments

Template:Qd Template:Qd Template:Qd

Access can be from above and/or below by the stairs, or a hallway can be run into the dining room level by removing the bedroom at one of the cardinal points. This design can be repeated as far as desired in the X, Y, and Z directions.

High density single floor housing

This is the 61x61 housing plan

This fractal-inspired design combines space efficiency with wider access hallways to alleviate traffic. Stairs are placed in the middle, and the design can expand indefinitely. To decrease the size, remove the outermost perimeter hallway, and all connected bedrooms. To increase the size, use the picture as a guide and follow the same radial pattern.

Size	Capacity	Max walk distance from center
29x29 tiles	48 dwarves	23 steps
45x45 tiles	120 dwarves	39 steps
61x61 tiles	224 dwarves	55 steps
77x77 tiles	360 dwarves	71 steps

Shaft design

Shaft bedroom design with a few possible variations.

The Shaft design allows various options for entry direction and central "shaft" use. The central shaft may be altered to create bedrooms, dining rooms and offices for minor nobles, "deluxe" bedrooms, hospital beds, or simply more bedrooms. The design can easily accomodate several different room sizes while maintaining efficiency. However, the design utilizes Z-levels for efficiency, and you must build several levels of Shaft designs to accomodate a fully grown fortress.

The Shaft design can fit 20 2x2 rooms, or 30 1x1 rooms.

Fractal designs

Betting on design beauty and on geometrical symmetry first, fractal designs can also be at the same time very space and walk efficient. They however require a lot of time and space both to plan and execute and are most likely out of reach of all but the most serious players. Most players however agree to say that they are the most incredible of all the designs around, if not the for the sheer challenge of successfully executing something as complex, then for the extra touch it give to the whole fortress as a whole once it is done.

Vaniver's Greek Cross design

Minimizing walking distances requires good use of vertical space. This plan is simple, scalable, and only takes up a few floors- 6 if you have 32 per floor, 4 if you have 48. The maximum walking distance should be less than 20 (I'm not sure how much movement stairs take).

Decentralized Living

In larger fortresses, one of the bigger problems is traffic. Dwarves have a tendency to all get hungry, thirsty, and tired in waves, and a crowd of 50 of them storming your centralized food stockpiles, one big dining room, and dormitory tunnels can cause a lot of lost time while the hordes shuffle by eachother. A good solution to this is decentralized archetecture, incorporating most of the essentials of every day life into numerous smaller areas. This isn't to suggest that you shouldn't have a legendary dining hall set as a meeting area, capable of holding half your fortress at once. You definitely should! But decentralizing from that dining hall relieves a lot of congestion in the halls surrounding the main dining hall, and makes it easier for dwarves just to pass through.

In this image, the access stairwell (blue fields in the center), spread out in all directions to a public barracks and dining room for poorer dwarves on the left and right to 3x3 private rooms to the top and bottom. The design allows for two small stockpiles of food (gray fields) to minimize the walk to a dining hall.

There's also built-in areas for impressive things like statues and cages (for zoos) to keep dwarves admiring your handiwork. The 3x3 rooms are easy to get up to Decent or higher to keep your most useful dwarves happy as clams. They're also conveinent 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 3x3 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 Barrack 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 1x2 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 is effectively the same as surrounding the prisoner with walls) and 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 1x3 line of upward stairwells on one end of the blue field, and a 1x3 line of downward stairwells on the other. This simulates a 3-wide vertical corridor without the safety risks of up/down stairwells.

You may also, at your discretion, knock out the statues and cages near the stairwell to make the entire plan a little more compact (though you lose the easy prisons in this case). This plan can stretch on the x axis as much as you like, but note that the 1 wide corridors leading to individual rooms can get crowded if more than 10 dwarves are living along each one. Even with the given layout, though, one floor supports 26 private rooms and as many as 14 public beds. This works out quite nicely since one floor is enough to handle most immigrant waves, while existing floors' public beds can handle a decent amount of overflow. The public barrack rooms can also be converted into prisons very easily (just put chains next to every bed) if you decide not to go with the main design.