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[lastofthelight]

Query, oh wise ones!

I'm a newbie, and I've been looking through several of the excellent Dwarf Fortress tutorials availiable, and look forward to using my knowledge of geology and physics to burn, freeze, drown, and crush invaders of whatever great fortress I construct.

However, before my lofty ambitions can be realized - I am facing a simple barrier:

I can't seem to get mine to work.

I can designate the >>> downward staircases, and have even Channeled lava into a nice moat to keep out these godawful monkeys which seem to swarm my wagon like Zerg, but whenever I try to mine, I see this little flashing green cross, and when I go to tell it what to dig like I would tell it to channel, or chop trees, or whatever - it just goes away and nothing happens; I see no change to the screen, and no sign of dwarves digging. I've tried this on temperate, tundra, and volcanic surroundings, so I think its some stupidity of mine, and not bad terrain.

Help me, oh wise ones!

[Sevrun]

when you open the designation screen make sure it's flagged for mining, sometimes it'll decide what you're trying to do is chop trees underground where no trees exist for some reason.  I get that issue rather often, just hit (d) again and it should let you start hollowing out the rock.  and remember that a downward stair must be met by an upward stairway beneath it.    That tripped me up for a bit

[Jetman123]

Yeah, you need to put _upward_ stairs underneath the down stairs, otherwise you only have half a staircase. Somewhat unintuitively, the other half is not created automatically.  

[lastofthelight]

Yes, I made sure to hit d lots. But I'm not at the point where I really /need/ stairs even, I don't think - I'm just trying to mine a simple, single square in the earth, and when I hit return the cross goes away and nothing happens!

[Sevrun]

Errm, I dunno what to tell ya then  :confused: I think I had a similar issue once that wasn't just it misdiagnosing the autodesignate...  but I dunno how I got it to work.  It may take a while but someone will have an answer for ya, sorry I wasn't more help

[lastofthelight]

Aha!

I was underestimating the 3-d nature of the game. You can't just tell it to dig on the surface and expect it to dig a layer below, you have to tell it to dig in the actual filled z-level that you want emptied!!!!

[lastofthelight]

Another question though, since I don't want to start a whole new thread - I deleted my wagon, and of course, all the idle dwarves idling around it moved elsewhere. How do I designate a new spot for them to idle in?

[GreyMario]

Press the key i to get the Zones menu. Then designate a zone like you would designate channels, or some such. Key over the zone and press m to designate it as a meeting zone.