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[NEANDERTHAL]

What's the best way to get dwarves to drop items down a multi-z-level "laundry chute" with minimum hassle? It would be useful for consolidating mined ore/wood/surface food.

[thefinn]

Yes I'd like to know this too. Good for farms.

[PatrikLundell]

It depends on what you're after.

A one way downwards design would probably be a minecart dumping into the chute (taking from feeder stockpiles). The chute would have a retracting bridge onto which the stuff falls. A lever retracts the bridge to form a pile beneath (which you can paint as a stockpile). As long as you make sure nobody is accessing the stockpile when the bridge is open (e.g. by locking a door) the bridge should protect your dorfs when they access the stockpile. You'll probably get some cancellation spam when the door is locked, though.

A more complex two way design has a pushed minecart fall down a chute onto a ramp carved with tracks, roll to a track stop to dump the contents, and onto another to pick up stuff to be sent up. A spiral impulse ramp driven track then sends the cart up when pushed. The upwards track ought to be blocked with statues or doors, or you'll get dead cats and visitors attracting citizens to the danger area. Also, it's a bit tricky to arrange the drop such that the minecart doesn't land onto the track and returns back up immediately. The footprint of this design is a 3*3 area, although you need walls outside for much of it for an effective size of 5*5, and you need a bit more for entry and exit.

[Fleeting Frames]

If the items aren't stupendously heavy, you could also drop them into constructed fortification and use water flow to move them out over downstairs/stockpile (with pump triggered by the dwarf walking to place thing inside the dumper above).

You can do 2x2 spirals, as long as you have 2 ramps every so often (easiest to designate is after every 2, but I think every 4 or 5 (not sure) should be possible) to give it extra speed. You'd still need a hole to fall through, though.

[Gigaz]

It is almost always the most convenient option to use guided minecarts on a carved track.

[Leonidas]

When I dig a dropshaft, it goes through the center of the fort. Then I use it as a multilevel QSP. Put a dump zone and stockpile at the top of the shaft, then periodically designate the collected items to dump. (Be careful not to dump wheelbarrows.)

This design carries risks. Combat near the shaft can send a dwarf tumbling down to his doom. And objects falling through the center of your fort at high speed can be hazardous. You can alleviate these dangers by restricting access around the shaft with walls and doors.

If you want to get fancy, you can build lever-controlled hatches or grates along the dropshaft, and use them to control which z-level collects which items. You could also use a second QSP or stockpile to pick up a batch of dropped items and deposit them a few tiles away.

And once you're finished with the dropshaft, you can put grates over it and use it as a fortress-wide waterfall.

[anewaname]

My dropshafts tend to be a two-tile dig, a channel adjacent to an updown staircase, like
_X
(after the dig, the staircase is sealed off at top and bottom to keep it from being pathable for FPS reasons). At the top and bottom, access to the dropshaft is gained from the side opposite the staircase, like
 WWWWW
++s_XW     ++=raising bridge, s=trackstop, _=dropshaft, X=updownstairs
 WWWWW.

Wood consolidation is done with a short dropshaft and is a dwarf mob activity, where I close the dropshaft's bottom and open the top, then 40 dwarfs will spend a season hauling wood to a minecart that dumps them into the shaft, then I close the top and open the bottom. For me, it is about having the dwarfs stay in the area to do multiple jobs instead of walking a long distance between jobs, and about reducing surface risk by using a quick mob.

Magma disposal of sentient corpses uses a minecart dump into a long dropshaft of the same design but there are no raising bridges. It drops into a magma puddle that is not connected to the magma sea, for FPS.

In previous forts I used a long dropshaft for meltable siege items, flux, shallow metals, but have been using wheelbarrows with feeder stockpiles and multi-item-bin-filling instead in this fort.