Stesokur Entry 10: The Cookhouse

As part of my efforts to keep everything above-ground, I have emptied the basement of Stesokur of the few things it was still used for - kitchens and food stockpiles. Where did all this go, you may ask? The dining room? The empty floor above the dining room?

Don't be silly. I need all this empty space for my second dining room.

Well, as it turns out, there are some problems with building everything up. Mostly, it's a very very slow process. Even with over half of my fortress' population dedicated to hauling stone or masonry, it still takes a long time to finish a single floor - and I've got workshops and bedrooms to worry about before worrying about a pantry. Plus, I'll be honest; the single tower is starting to get a little... boring. So I installed an adjacent building:

I thought about how unsanitary it was to have the cooking facilities right there on the grass... then I realized that it's still way better than the ankle-high pool of goblin blood outside.

There's my still, farmer's workshop, kitchen, butchery, and a tanner's workshop. The tanner isn't, strictly speaking, thematically appropriate for a kitchen, but I figure it should be near the butcher anyway. Tanner's make leather from animal skin, and it's the butcher who removes the skin. See the upper right corner of the room there, the way it protrudes a little? That's my ventilation system! So when miasma rises from the dead bodies in the butchery, it won't bother anyone but the butcher. I'm a little proud of that.

Sharp-eyed viewers might have realized that there's no entrance there. At least, not on that floor. That's because I wanted access to come from the second floor:

Look! See the vent? All walled off from the rest of the fort, leading out into the open air? I don't know why I'm so proud of it, but I keep forcing my girlfriend to come look at it.

The second floor of Stesokur is the dining room, so it makes sense to have the pantry be right next door. I built a sky bridge linking them (covered, of course, to keep out that disgusting goblin rain). So my food storage is right above the kitchen area; you actually have to go through the main entrance of Stesokur, walk up the stairs to the dining room, and go down to the stairs in the back of the pantry to get to the kitchens. I think the placement there is actually pretty efficient.

There are two floors above the pantry that are currently unused; that way, when my fortress expands, I'll be able to add another level of food-related workshops, and another level dedicated to food stockpiles. I've added a roof, of course; I can't be having the goblin blood drip down on all my food, now can I?

That makes this building - which I have called the Cookhouse - four stories tall, each story approximately five hundred square feet, made of solid stone. The building I threw together for my larders and kitchens is larger than most houses. Of course, that's as it should be. This is Dwarf Fortress.