platypotamus said:
Anywhere that you have a bunch of stone, build a craftshop nearby, and give it a bunch of orders to produce stone crafts. The craftsdwarf will grab the closest stone to do it. I usually have a sort of nomadic stone-craftsshop that slowly but surely cleans out my fortress.
You will probably never be able to craft the stone as fast as it gets produced from the mining though, especially as your miners skill-up and become more likely to leave useful stone behind.
One of the cool things about DF is that there is often more than one way to skin a cat. When it comes to getting rid of stone I use multiple.
1. Dump area on magma. Toss it in the magma, it melts and disappears forever. I don't play too many maps without magma, so I'm very used to using it for many things, including a garbage disposal. I modded the raws for iron/steel specifically so I could dump used ammo in there and get rid of it too.
2. Bottomless pit/chasm. These make good dump sites too, toss something in there and it is removed forever.
3. Dwarven atom-smasher. This is a drawbridge built on top of a solid floor. You can't build a stockpile on that particular area but you can dump it through a hole one z-level above with the bridge raised. Once you're done dumping the garbage, lower the bridge. Bang! everything underneath is destroyed. This was a relatively cheap method to deal with megabeasts too, but I think they changed that particular code so it doesn't work nowadays.
4. Turn some portion of excess stone into block. You'll need block for things like wells, screwpumps, and some workshops. Block also makes for a higher grade of roads and bridges when used as the source stone. Block can also be stored in bins, so you can put a lot of it in stockpiles and then move it by bins when you need too---providing you have dwarfs strong enough to move a bin filled with stone block.
5. Use a bunch of dump areas, throughout your fort as needed. Sorta like how stones cleared from farming fields became the walls around those fields in the old days. You'll have a convenient source of stone wherever you need to build something and it won't take that many tiles of your dungeon to store it. Good thing about this is that it makes for the least amount of hauling work for your dwarfs. Make sure to only have the dump area you want to use enabled at any particular time, there are some quirks to the pathing logic that will make a dwarf haul something to places you wouldn't expect. Also nasty if you dump a bunch of soon-to-be-rotten-and-miasma-producing-corpses on a stone dump. I use this method a couple times at the start of the fortress to concentrate stone where my mason/mechanists workshops will be and I use it later on when clearing very large underground areas in preparation for large-scale tower cap farming.
There are a couple downsides to stonecrafting excess stone. Each stone will be turned into up to three items, effectively tripling the entities. Stonecrafts, even at masterwork quality aren't worth very much money, you'll have to sell a bunch of them to cover your caravan costs if you really buy a lot of stuff(like I do). Sure, you can sell by the bin but I like keeping my bins, particularly if I used precious wood to make them. This means lots of extra keystrokes in the trading interface. Stonecrafts have a horrible value to weight ratio. You might have enough to buy anything you want but you'll find some caravans don't have enough weight tolerance to cart off the stone crafts it would be required to cover your bill.
On top of that I don't think the stonecrafting skill is of value for anything else. You'll end up with a legendary stonecrafter who can't produce anything of real value. Perhaps stonecrafting counts for obsidian sword production? Obsidian swords are equivalent to steel swords and a good option for a fortress without steel. Be warned that stone swords require wooden hilts.
What you an see in this picture is 4 retractable bridges, cage traps, weapon traps, fortifications, dogs, etc. My guards are off in a different part of the fort killing something from the depths.
