I started a new fort with the 39f version and so far it's been going great... except just now, when I had my first Goblin Ambush.
The first thing I do during a Goblin Ambush is set it so that my dwarves can't go outside, and as soon as the goblins get close to my gate I close the drawbridge. (if I close it any sooner the goblins just stand around and don't approach)
This time something very different happened. My dwarves started suspending and cancelling jobs all over my fortress, citing the 'forbidden area'. Normally they would cancel jobs outside of the fort, like building outdoor walls or roads, or chopping down wood or fishing. But this time it was including jobs all over the inside of my fort!
The fort I'm using right now has a different design than I normally use. It's square-shaped with five levels arranged around a core staircase. Each level has a cross-shaped five-square wide hallway, with four areas forming a square. The core staircase has a single pillar in the middle surrounded by eight staircases, which are surrounded by a single square of 'floor', then the cross-halls are bordered by a line of grates up to the 'top' of the fort, to let light in. My last couple forts had problems with cave adaptation so I thought I'd try this.
The grate/light thing was my first suspect, but there are a few other ways to get around my fort that didn't involve going through this staircase, and a few of the jobs warnings didn't make any sense at all. The top level of the staircase core has all twenty grates installed, already, and everywhere beneath them is marked as "Inside, Light, Above Ground"
My fort also features a front gate that is mostly made out of constructions. When I built it, I channeled away part of a hill to make a bold cliff face. I left 1 z-level of natural rock that was 13x11, and cut a 5 square wide hallway into the heart of my fort. I channeled away part of it, so that my archers on the walls could shoot both at targets outside the fort and at targets that make it over my drawbridge before I raise it. I had just finished adding a constructed roof to this gatehouse when the goblins attacked. I haven't finished adding fortifications, just a big floor floating over the gatehouse. Like with the core staircase, this is all marked as Inside, Light, Above Ground. When I set my orders to 'dwarves stay inside', my marksdwarves refused to go onto the U-shaped portion covered by the constructed floor, untill I set it to 'soldiers can go outside'.
So, it seems like 'above ground' means 'outside' but that doesn't explain everything that's going on. The middle three levels of my five-level fort are connected by a 'storage room' that is connected to my Trade Depot on the middle floor. The second floor from the top is connected to my farms, which are entirely underground with no constructions above them, and a straight route from most of my fort without going through any of the constructed areas, yet I got a lot of 'Cancelled Farming Job' messages.
In any case the whole thing is awfully chaotic. The one that stuck out most to me was a door construction job on the middle floor, at the mayor's house. The door was left on the staircase and the job was cancelled because of 'forbidden area', but then when I unsuspended the job, another dwarf went onto the stair case, grabbed the door, and cheerfully placed it, crossing the grates several times.
So, what in the world is going on? Is this a bug, or was I mistakenly thinking that constructed spaces count as inside, and my dwarves were too dumb to pathfind around the main stairs?
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Topic: [39f] Inside/Outside Chaos (Read 1016 times)