Hi, I am new here but have been playing Dwarf Fortress for about 10 years now. I got a question that I couldn't find the answer to, I am doing testing now, but I thought maybe somebody already knows the answer.
Do bridges and buildings (grates, floor hatches, etc) do falling damage? It seems they only sometimes do. I got a 11x5 area covered in floor grates, built directly above constructed down stairs, so that I can circumvent the restriction of building grates only adjacent to floors/walls. The problem is, goblins dropping onto those don't die - most survive without injury, same goes for dwarfs (as I found out when somebody deconstructed a floor directly below himself - which is a problem in itself). So the question is: Why? The goblins drop 23 z-levels. Is it that hitting a floor grate does not cause injury? Is it that there are stairs directly below?
Lengthy backstory below.
So the reason I am asking, is this: I was trying to design an semi-automatic goblinite refinery. The goal is this: Burn all clothes and bodyparts, but leave all metal, including silver and copper, for further use.
That means, I have to start a fire that sets everything burnable on fire, but does not melt the metals. Fine enough, my first Idea was to use a Magma Mist generator - the minecart variant, as the pump version would block the drop shaft. Turns out that mist generation is not reliable, with minecarts either not hitting the magma at all or dropping into it after a few rounds. So the next Idea was to use floor grates.
I already had my 11x5 shaft, so I dug ramps at the bottom, leading down from the outer edges (to make magma flow off of the tiles faster) to a single line of floor grates in the middle, designed to catch any items. The goblins drop from a single tile floor with dodge traps, so they only land one tile to either side of the middle line (which is solid ground). So far so good, invasion arrives, goblins walk over the trap path, and one by one splatter at the bottom of the pit. But a problem arises: All the items are lying besides the grates, not on top. So when I pour magma, it stays as 1/7 puddles on those tiles, melting all silver and copper. Another strange thing is that certain bodyparts are very hard to set on fire (a single 1/7 magma tile does nothing to them), so I have to pour more magma, which in turn sweeps some items through the grates into the magma evaporation chamber below - not such a big deal, but it annoys me.
So I try to cover the whole area in grates, above the aforementioned setup, which still remains in place. Since grates can only be constructed adjacent to something solid, I build constructed down stairs over the whole width of the pit, and cover them in iron floor grates. Now, the problem is not that the goblins don't die when they hit the floor grates - that would be fine, they would get magma showered anyways. The problem is that as long as about 20-30 of them are down there, the other goblins won't walk over the traps, instead endlessly idling outside the entrance. I have confirmed that by pouring magma on the life goblins, and when they are dead, the idling ones move forward a bit. Which makes the whole setup really tedious, and I have to pour more magma than the evaporation chamber below can handle.
All of this would of course not be necessary if dwarfs would not get stressed. That whole system seems broken anyways. Random dwarfs shoot up at about 1000 stress per day for no apparent reason - sure, they got no friends and no family, but I set them to idle (no hauling, no cleaning), and have dedicated idlers to keep them company, which works a little - they socialise and get a happy thought (never making friends, though), stress drops down about 1 per tick, and then they go to get something to drink, and on the way there, stress rises by as much as 1500 in extreme cases. So manually hauling the bodyparts to a magma dump is impossible - especially since I get invasions of 200 goblins, 200 beak dogs and 100 trolls - every - fucking - year.
The basic problem is this: I can not use weapon traps because they make too much gore, which means too many hauling jobs and stress. I can not use atom smashers, because I want to use the goblinite. I can not get magma mist to set anything on fire, some body parts seem immune. I can not use raising bridges to push the bodyparts onto the grates, because they fling stuff in all directions, where it would get atom smashed when I lower the bridge again. I can not use water to push the bodyparts because that would push them through the grates, and all that water would need to be drained, and then the armor and weapons would accumulate at the bottom of the drain, which either means inaccessible (got an aquifer to drain into) or outright lost (bottomless pit).
So unless I missed something (minecarts do not push stuff lying around, the they?) I have to drop the goblins directly onto floor grates or a bridge above the floor grates (both of which has to kill them), which then gets retracted, dropping the goblin down onto the grates, and then pour magma on top which in a single action will set everything burnable on fire - which means 7/7 stacks of falling magma, which is enough to ignite the hard to burn body parts. But since the grates and bridges seem to do no falling damage, this setup is impossible? Or did I miss anything?
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Topic: Falling Damage and Buildings (Read 1220 times)