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[Noble Digger]

Hatch Cover + Chain + Blocks = Folding Stairs

Built as a floor-level structure, this building can be given the "extend stairs" order either from above or below, and this will create an "up stairway" that is both pathable and walkable, on the tile below the building. This is reversible. A dwarf must be able to reach the bottom or top in order to extend it.

[Retro]

Not to denigrate the idea, but wouldn't just building a hatch cover over a down staircase (with an upstaircase below) be simpler and serve the same purpose?

[Noble Digger]

I'll answer yes to your question if you can tell me how to remove the downward staircase and the material it was made from without having some other means of reaching the bottom of the pit.

[JamPet]

This is a suggestion to help answer how we can build downwards into open space without being able to access the area below us, yes?  As was recently agonized over a month or so ago when it was wondered how rope ladders would work?

As I recall the biggest problem with that was the issue of buildings which span multiple z-levels and also the issue of how pathing calculations would take such a structure into account.  From your description this building spans two, the one it is built on and the one below it.  If this structure needed to be extended several z levels, so that three of them were needed to be built, would not the middle one be unsupported for a time and cause a collapse?

[Noble Digger]

Nah, this would only work in the case of a 1-z-level span. Rope ladders and their associated troubles is a whole other can of worms. I can see how with the way DF does things, having it magically lick out a tongue consisting of a staircase and then recalculate pathing to take this staircase into account--temporarily--might not just be a 1-day job.

How do vertical axles work presently? I've never used one, opting instead to use the solid tile of a pump or a gear assembly to transmit power vertically.

[Volatar]

Well, while we will need to think about this sort of thing later, as a placeholder in the next version Toady enabled dwarves to build staircases downward.