Print

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

[Particleman]

I'm working on my first real megaproject and it involves a 50 z-level high sky and LOTS of building. It also involves two large, solid stone pillars that I'm constructing from blocks.

So far the way I've been constructing them (after the ground level) is building som access stairs one tile away adding new stories as neccesary, and bridging the gaps between the stairs and pillars with temporary floors. Then I build the pillars one X/Y-axis row at a time. Naturally, this is trather tedious as I have to keep going back to to pillars and ordering new rows of walls built every few minutes, and I can't really start on a new layer until the one below it is finished.

Does anyone with experience building large, solid constructions like this have any advice?

[Elvin]

You might want to look into using the macros, either in DF or an exterior program, to allow you to designate whole walls/floors/whatever you want at the push of a button. I've never personally used it, but this is the situation they were designed for.

[Avin]

There is a utility called quick fort that may be able to help you with this, but if you're like me you can't be bothered to do silly things like read or learn.

When building large projects with out using any utilities I've found that building the temporary stairways first helps the most. once the stairways are in place you can use them to anchor a 10x10 area of walls or floors for construction and then remove or suspend any tiles that you don't want built before they start construction on them. Just make sure that the structure is properly supported when you start removing the stairways.

[Dearnen]

I was working on a similar project in my last fort.  I ended up abandoning, though, because in my noobness I failed to realize that my water tunnels would clog up with plant life and I had no way to drain and clean them.  My plan was to pour a 50 z-level tower of obsidian and then carve it out.  I was inspired by Orthanc in the Lord of the Rings.  I painstakingly constructed magma and water pump stacks from the magma sea and 3rd cavern and after many trials and tribulations was able to get the first foundation layer (directly on bedrock about 6 levels below ground level) poured and mostly solidified.  But, struggles with power, ice, and plant growth forced me to shut the project down after over 12 years of game time.

I don't know if this would be easier than constructing a tower block by block, though.  In addition to constructing nearly 100 z-level pump stacks that avoided 3 caverns, I was going to need to build the stone casting form, and requisite scaffolding, for the tower itself.  While materials would have been saved by continually shifting the form upward as the tower rose, it was still going to require a lot of repetitive work.

I hope to attempt such a tower again someday, but I'm taking a break from mega projects for now.