Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist McWangchuck]

I build my access stairs indoors and leave them there with a bridge above to seal it off.  In case I want to add a floor later. Not particularly useful for a chicken coop I guess, I tend to have just the one access building above ground.

[WCG]

I find that when dwarves remove constructions, they tend to want to stand to the north or west of what they're deconstructing.

Maybe. But in my chicken coop example, where I tried this twice (two different stairs giving two different access points to the roof), they both stood on the roof to the south of the stairs they were deconstructing. Admittedly, one of them might have come up the other stairs, which would have been to the south.

The edge of the roof was to the east, so they couldn't have stood there, but there was plenty of room to the north and west. Of course, I was expecting - hoping? - that they'd stand on the lower stairs to remove the upper portion. 

[WCG]

Hmm,... one problem I've discovered with using ramps is that my dwarves won't often stand on the ramp to build the last section of a wall. They'll use the ramp to get to the top of the lower wall and use that to build another wall on top of the previous one, but when they get to that last section, where they actually have to stand on the ramp to build it, they won't do it.

At least, they won't do it very often. Sometimes, that will work just fine. Other times, they simply won't build that last section of wall. There are workarounds, of course, but when it comes to building walls, rather than roofs, I've gone back to using stairs again. After all, once that last section of wall is in place, they don't have anywhere else to stand when it comes to deconstructing the stairs.

But this is weird, don't you think? 

[Tacomagic]

I typically build a scaffolding at least 1 tile away from the wall, and then cross the gap with floor sections.

And your dwarves are actually smart enough to stand on the scaffolding, not on the roof, when they remove the floor section?

When building walls and other construction, I can do that old workaround of suspending construction on the tiles I don't want them to stand on. But I can't do that in deconstruction - not, at least, when I don't want them standing on a constructed roof (i.e. floor tiles used as a roof).

So far, I haven't seen any good solution for that, except for using a ramp. That ramp is a great idea (my thanks, once more), which can be used even in tall construction with a little thought (build a wall section just below where you need the ramp), since there isn't a top section to that. Thus, a dwarf will deconstruct a ramp without leaving himself stranded above it.

There are a couple of tricks here.  The first is just get lucky enough that they'll path up the scaffold and just take the floor tile from the scaffold instead of walking over it and taking it down.  Most of the time, I find that if you keep doing it, eventually somebody gets it right, but it can be a little frustrating... and sometimes the dorfs just won't co-operate.  Seems to work a little better if they have actual floor to stand on, so moving the scaffold an extra space away makes it much more reliable.

The better trick is to set the scaffold an extra space away, place a floor, and build a bridge that extends across the remaining gap.  When it's time to deconstruction the scaffolding, the bridge will go down with it.  This takes more time than just plopping down a floor since you have to involve an architect, but it's a 100% solution.

[Bumber]

Perhaps with the new climbing system dwarves might just be able to get down on their own?

[smjjames]

Perhaps with the new climbing system dwarves might just be able to get down on their own?

^This. I thought that maybe they'd be able to climb down on their own, unless the roof is like, 20 z levels up and climbing down would be suicide.