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[Weiler (Rottenburg)]

My first real game of Dwarf Fortress has stuck on a very basic point.

After a relatively successful couple of months, time has come to build stairs. I have built one down stair on surface level, then two up-down stairs and finally an up stair at the bottom. That's how it should work, right?

Apparently wrong, since none of the miners go down to dig out some rooms.

Images attached.


My up stairs at the bottom.


Some up-down stairs.


And some more.


Down stairs back up on the surface.

[mightymushroom]

Just a guess because I'm not 100% familiar with the tileset, but...

It looks like maybe you didn't designate the revealed stone immediately next to the stairs? There's a designated hallway pointed toward the stairs but the wall tile(s) there are exactly the same as on the other sides that presumably do not intend to mine. In that case, there's no valid mining path to get to the rest of the rooms.

[Weiler (Rottenburg)]

Ah, that's most certainly an issue here. Really makes me stupid not to realize it because I already oversaw it before, while digging up surface level rooms. I was on a verge of asking for help on the forums, but figured it out in the meantime. Not now.

I really have to get used to how this game works.

[Thisfox]

Except in very specific situations, you do not want single direction stairs. You want up-down stairs for ALL those stairs. Up stairs can only be traversed in the up direction. Down stairs, same but down direction. Up-down stairs can be traversed in both directions. It helps to think of them as escalators.

[Ziusudra]

That's not true (unless I'm misunderstanding you). Creatures can go up from an up/down to a down, and down from an up/down to an up. In other words they can go up TO a down, and down FROM a down  - they just can't go up FROM a down. If you don't ever want to have anything above the top of the stack, a down at the top is fine, and will not prevent them getting to the top. And similar is true at the bottom, they can go down to the up stair.

[Mobbstar]

Weiler has used stairs correctly.

Sure, there is usually no harm in using Up/Down Stairs all the time, but it *looks* less pretty and it actually breaches the floor, into the layer below, which can be ugly or even dangerous if used above a cavern.

Also, the Up Stairs you've dug can actually be turned into Up/Down Stairs by placing another digging designation!

[FantasticDorf]

Weiler has used stairs correctly.

Sure, there is usually no harm in using Up/Down Stairs all the time, but it *looks* less pretty and it actually breaches the floor, into the layer below, which can be ugly or even dangerous if used above a cavern.

Also, the Up Stairs you've dug can actually be turned into Up/Down Stairs by placing another digging designation!

Stairs prevent landbound movement, but they do not stop swimming, water flow pressure pushing objects (both of these are still adequate for "maintenance-pipes" for water projects), or flying movement.

If you dug a stair directly into the cavern layer, you should probably seal it up with a downstair construction if adequate put straight into the hole to mark the land movement down, and then slightly move the staircase "base" 1 z level above away so that dwarves avoid direct contact with that cavern roof layer and finally cap it off with a forbidden hatch for security.

This is mainly in concern to blocking your own dwarves falling down the stairwell in a accident, then also falling through the roof of the caverns since when dwarves trip on stairs they fly, and impeding the progress of flying creatures or ones that can climb, more worryingly hyper-agile trolls gorilla-bar'ring over the ceiling or GCS with their effortless stance-climbing can crawl into your fort this way. If a alterative open route is open that is much easier it'll draw away attention.

As time goes by you may want to consider just closing the hole up completely if the wildlife is too rowdy with constructions or artifact strength hatches, else it can be a kind of informal dump-hole or flood reliever if you need it with some gear-mechanization of the hatch.

[anewaname]

Complete agreement with FantasticDorf's post. There are dangers to using up/down stairs everywhere. There is also a larger FPS hit every time a group of flying creatures enter the map and have access to both the surface and caverns.

I specifically choose up or down stairs, though I used to use up/down almost everywhere.

[DwarfStar]

Back to the OT, it’s easy to see how it looks like you told the game where to dig through the wall, since your designation goes right up to the wall of the room. But where you designated leads only up to the exterior of that wall. Imagine if you had designated the whole thing before anything was revealed: there would be a gap. When the room is dug out, the exterior walls become revealed, making the room look bigger than it is.

This has also been an interesting discussion of stair building tactics. I will add that it might not be terrible advice, for a very, very new player, just to use up/down stairs all the time. If you haven’t built a workshop yet it’s hopefully not an issue breaching the caverns. To build correct stairs, a player needs an understanding of the “floor” vs “not floor” anatomy of a tile. That probably comes after 5-6 hours of play, on average, to make a wild, completely unsubstantiated guess.

[Thisfox]

Yes, I don't know why I thought that, went and started a new fort on the weekend, and happily went about starting my fort off, and of course the stairs didn't work that way, I've got the top of a staircase heading down deep deep down into the aquifer and the top 2x2 is an up as it always is. I guess too much rum?
Anyhow, except in extreme circumstances, I do try to dig/build staircases that are updown to prevent confusion.

[FantasticDorf]

In other ways, a up-stair down stair in pure form is not unlike a ramp when driving a particular direction.

If you had a workshop that only ever outputs one thing to another stockpile, and never needs to intake anything from closer by than the pile behind it with outgoing traffic going one way (sand for example, just get bags and zone), its more than adequate to use one way stairs for alternative vertical routes across spaghetti floorplans as long as the craft dwarf isnt the one actually carrying the materials to slow down efficiency splitting them away from the workshop (workshop profiles to ensure).

Sand comes in, hauler grabs bags, goes up via up-stairs to minecart, deposits, then visits the nearest tavern because this is the civil-district of the fortress as they crossed layers from the industrial district coming up. You could have just put a minecart infront of it, but now you have empty space to cut a nice path on the industrial layer or another adjacent room and dwarves dont have to run to the nearest central traversal stairwell, being much more preferable to run from a place accessed quickly back down.

Othertimes its a informal enforcement of a traffic rule, parallel lanes to stop cramming down a busy central hallway, if there's a high density of dwarves instead of going laterally around it, you have to take the high or low road with single direction access and exit. With a ramp it'd be still chaos as dwarves would whimsically choose to travel down in either direction on any traffic rule potentially rendering it void of use.

[Garfunkel]

Just wait until you start using ramps instead of stairs. I like them since they look prettier IMHO than stairs do, but there are a lot of issues you can run into with ramps.

[Ziusudra]

When it comes to ramps the key is that they need at least one wall to lean against, otherwise they're just a mound that doesn't connect to anything.

[PatrikLundell]

When it comes to ramps the key is that they need at least one wall to lean against, otherwise they're just a mound that doesn't connect to anything.

Well, the also need a floor above the wall, or there's nowhere to go from the ramp. A floor on the other side doesn't work, for instance.