40d:Stockpile design

Workshop layout for efficient hauling

Placement of workshops based around the flow of materials from workshop to workshop can make hauling faster and more efficient. For example, farms near your kitchen and brewery near your dining room which supplies seeds back to the farm.

Farm-centric

Farms feed a wide array of workshops. Farms directly feed the kitchen, still, millstone (or quern) and farmer's workshop. The mill and farmer's workshop feed the loom and dyer which feed the clothier. Farms are in turn supplied seeds from the still, mill, farmer's workshop and dining rooms completing the cycle of life.

As such, it's a good idea to design all these workshops and their stockpiles around each other. Farms can only be built in certain places, so that dictates the location and layout.

Workshop/Profession stockpiles

It's often efficient to design your stockpiles around workshops to ensure they have the materials they need close at hand.

Stockpile placement

One strategy is to place the feeder stockpile immediately around the workshop. This works ok with a single workshop, but it doesn't expand well.

 SSSSS   S feeder stockpile
 SWWWS   W workshop
 SWWWS
 SWWWS
 SSSSS

A better strategy is to put the workshop's stockpile above or below it. This keeps the stockpiles close to the workshops, lets the workshops expand and you can expand the stockpiles above and below as necessary. It works particularly well with multiple similar workshops working off the same stockpile.

          adjacent z-level
 WWW WWW      SSSSSSS
 WWW<WWW      SSS>SSS
 WWW WWW      SSSSSSS

Bone Carver

Create a refuse stockpile with only bone, shell and skulls. Make sure none of your real refuse stockpiles take them.

Butcher & Tanning

Because tanners are supplied directly from a butcher it's best to put them right next to each other. Designate a refuse stockpile taking corpses for the butcher and Fresh raw skin for the tanner. Alternatively, it may be wise to ensure that fresh raw skins are not accepted by any stockpiles so that they may be taken directly from the butcher's shop to be tanned.

Place a refuse stockpile nearby, behind an airlock to keep out the miasma, to take the chunks and other useless by-products.

Kitchen

A food stockpile accepting meat/fish, raw edible plants*, cheese, leaves, cookable milled plants (everything but the dyes), fat, cookable extracts (Dwarven syrup and all the milks). If you cook booze, include that. If you want to reserve some edible plants for brewing, leave them out. Allow the maximum barrels. Remember to turn off prepared food.

(* plump helmet, muck root, bloated tuber, prickle berry, wild strawberry, rat weed, fisher berry and sun berry)

Brewing

A food stockpile accepting brewable plants*. Some of these have other uses, (like pig tail for weaving) so you might want to disallow them if you plan on using them for something else. Remember to turn off prepared food.

(* plump helmet, pig tail, cave wheat, sweet pod, muck root, bloated tuber, prickle berry, wild strawberry, longland grass, rat weed, fisher berry, rope reed, sliver barb, sun berry, whip vine)

Also include a barrel stockpile near your still to ensure a steady supply of empty barrels.

Sparring

A weapon stockpile near your barracks containing only low quality versions of weapons you want your soldiers to train with. This will lessen the chance of your soliders picking up an ☼Obsidian Sword☼ lopping off their sparring partner's arm. Enable all weapons you intend to train with. Turn off traps, the Unusable flag, all metal except silver (and maybe copper) and high core qualities (total quality does not matter). This should leave you with low damage bone, wood and silver weapons. If you don't have any, assign an untrained dwarf to make copper weapons.

Similarly, you can allocate a wood and bone ammo stockpile near your archery target.

The downside of a dedicated sparring stockpile is your dwarves will be armed with crap weapons when you send them out to battle. To avoid this you need a weapons locker...

Weapons Locker

A weapons stockpile containing only your best weapons and ammo. Enable metals, but remove the low damage metals (silver, copper, bronze & bismuth bronze and iron in that order). Remove low core qualities. Be sure to turn off Unusable. What is "low" and "high" quality is relative to the overall quality of your fortress' weapons.

Be sure to leave your dwarves with something to fight with! If the best you have is low quality copper weapons, enable that. If you have a mix of low quality materials with high quality craftsmanship, and vice-versa, consult the weapon damage calculation formulas to figure out which combo comes out best for you.

Place this stockpile in a room with a door near your barracks. When the time comes to activate your military, switch them to unarmed so they'll drop their training weapons, station them in the weapon stockpile, wait until they get inside, forbid the door and then change them to use their trained weapons. They'll have no choice but to pick up what's in the weapons locker with them.