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[GrimmC]

So I finally hit the magma sea 117 levels down. I'd like to set up some magma furnaces and such here. I'd also like to build a minecart path to lead all the way up to floor -10, to carry the finished products up and the ore down. There's a large cavern system which fills up most of the middle map levels, so the shaft would have to be limited to around a 5x5 shaft at the largest.

Could someone tell me how to go about doing this? I don't know much about minecarts, and given the scope of this project, I can't afford to mess up too much either. Diagrams would be especially helpful

Thank you!

P.S. I'm planning to have it run powered, so advice on how to keep dwarves the heck off the path would be good too.

[Sutremaine]

Not going to get into the schematics, but once you have the powered track set up it'd be more efficient to use it once for magma than to use it continuously with ore and finished products.

[AutomataKittay]

From what I've seen, you'd need a double helix of ramps, one running up and one running down, unless you intend to have one way be guided to get around the rollers.

I'd just have it guided all the way up and down, unless there're still issues with carts going uphill.

[kingubu]

I like building a 2x2 stair with 2 spiral ramps wrapped around it.  You can fit 4 spirals around it, if you want to get crazy.  The tracks are automagically designated low traffic, so they should take the stairs and stay on the stairs when they bump into someone.  You can designate the stairs high traffic, if you are paranoid.

I tried this once with 2 ramps wrapped around a 1x1 stair.  So many road kills.

I have the stairs exit one level below the tracks and go under them.  Set to guide up and push/ride down on the route.  Or guide down if you're paranoid again.

When you carve the track be sure to designate beyond the ramp so it know where it's going on the upper level.  To put another way, designate carve track on the down ramp and the up ramp.  Only the up ramp gets carved, since down ramps are really just open space, but it knows to carve a track that goes through the up ramp, instead of stopping in the middle.

As usual, I would experiment with a practice mine cart route, cause you're going to screw something up.  And remember you can smooth stone to remove tracks then recarve them.
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[GrimmC]

Thanks very much to kingubu. So this would result in two separate mine tracks, correct? Would it possible to somehow make the carts switch over, so that one track could be powered up, and the other ridden down? Another question: Is it necessary for stairs to be present at all? Once the track is completed, couldn't they be blocked up, allowing the cart to run on an "internal" track/tunnel, as it were?

I'm surprised there's no way to turn magma into a power source. I had sort of been running on the assumption that I could use it to power the track somehow. Water and magma would clearly create steam, no? Which then could be used to power a steam reactor...Maybe in a future release someday.

Is it feasible to create an aqueduct down to the magma forge level, and use that to power the rollers? I have two rivers (maybe brooks, since they are pretty small) which I could divert for the purpose. Are there any guides for creating aqueducts into the deep levels of one's fortress? How many water wheels would be required to support 100 levels of rollers? (Or however many rollers prove necessary.)

Finally, could we turn this discussion into the basis of a "Minecart shaft" page on the wiki? I think that would prove useful to future players...

Thanks again!

[AutomataKittay]

You could shrink down what kingubu have by one tiles on a side and have a gear shaft going through the middle instead of stairs, water or wind powering it elsewhere.

Making aqueducts all the way down there might be difficult without drainage, unless http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Water_wheel#Perpetual_motion

You can stack gears up by channeling tiles out and putting gears in there, gears will power anything above, under, to the four sides directly against it. Though you'd have to either place the bottomost or a gear against an axel or another  gear somewhere on the way first.

[melphel]

Is it feasible to create an aqueduct down to the magma forge level, and use that to power the rollers? I have two rivers (maybe brooks, since they are pretty small) which I could divert for the purpose. Are there any guides for creating aqueducts into the deep levels of one's fortress? How many water wheels would be required to support 100 levels of rollers? (Or however many rollers prove necessary.)

Just build the wheels on the river at the surface and send the power down via vertical axles and gears.  An aqueduct like that sounds like a brilliant way to flood your fort, or at the very least, kill your framerate.

Waterwheels generate 100 power and consume 10 of that, so that's a net gain of 90 power.  Depending on how your machinery is configured and what you are using, your power demands may vary.  I found that minimally, to power a minecart upwards through a helix(which was full of magma when I did this, you may find your minecarts lighter and easier to move), it required one roller every 3 z-levels.  That means two vertical axles in between on unpowered levels (1 power each for those), and a gear assembly + single-tile roller on the third level (5 for the gear and 2 for the roller).  That amounts to 9 power every 3 z-levels.  So for 100 levels, roughly 300 power using this set up, plus a little more for whatever you have moving power across the map to the shaft.

If you have flowing water, that's only four waterwheels (though you have nearly infinite power with a river anyway) or a handful of windmills if you don't.  You could power this with perpetual motion water reactors...but I find those to be framerate killers (and a bit cheaty).  A roller every three levels will get a minecart up to the surface fairly consistently, if you have more than one cart on the track, they may hit each other and get stuck.  You could opt for more rollers, but this will cost more power.


However, it doesn't really sound like you need a powered set-up in the first place.  You could just have a single-helix that allows traffic both ways, and let your dwarves guide the carts up and down.  If you really don't want a two-way track, you could always drop the carts down an open shaft to get them to the bottom, just have some sort of airlock at the bottom to make sure the cart doesn't land on anyone.  Without the double-helix design, your spiral can be as small as a 2x2 horizontal footprint.

OR, if that isn't dwarfy enough, do what I did and use the powered minecart spiral to transport the magma itself up to the surface so you can build your forges there.