Rooms

Learn how to design and build bedrooms for your dwarves in Dwarf Fortress. Avoid noise disturbances and optimize layouts for happy, productive dwarves.

Up to this point, your dwarves have probably been sleeping on dirt or rock in your fortress. While this is fine for a short time, your dwarves will gradually become less happy if they are forced to sleep without a bed. Under normal circumstances beds can only be made from wood, so be sure to designate some more trees to be cut down if you're short on logs.

Designing living quarters is largely a matter of personal preference and aesthetic sense. While a few useful designs are discussed here, there are many other options. In general, try to keep the bedrooms close to the stairs, and make your access hallways at least two tiles wide to reduce congestion.

Because noise generated from certain jobs (especially mining and woodcutting) can bother sleeping dwarves, doing these jobs within 8 tiles of a sleeping dwarf should be avoided. There are two ways of accomplishing this:

• Placing bedrooms at the end of a hallway at least 8 tiles long will avoid most noise (as long as you are careful to avoid noisy jobs directly above or below the bedrooms).
• Extending your fortress down several z-levels will also work (9 levels from the surface is a safe choice), although extending a 3x3 staircase takes more work than extending a single hallway.

Both options work equally well, as long as you are careful to avoid disturbing sleeping dwarves. Ultimately it depends on how you want your fortress to look.

Due to the limited resources of a new fortress, setting up a communal sleeping area in a dormitory is often the best short-term solution. However, you can also set up individual bedrooms for dwarves.