Print

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

[Nukeitall]

Hey folks. Been bumping into this problem and I was wondering if you guys are encountering it.

Basically, my miners keep dying despite having adequate passage to upper/lower levels. Do ramps seem to decay over time and need to be rebuilt? Obviously this has caused the deaths of ...many mining teams as I read a book while my dwarves scurry about.

I've tried using stairs, but the linking system, while adequate, appears wonky.

[BurnedToast]

I don't use ramps much, but I don't think they ever decay. the few I built always seemed to stay there working.

Stairs are not so bad, just build an up stairway, go up 1 z-level and build a down stairway in the same square and it will work fine. I use stairs all the time for everything and never have trouble. It actually works much better if you build all up/down stairways (except on the top and bottom levels of course).

does it say what your miners are dying of?

[Fishersalwaysdie]

I had a similar problem (kinda similar):
I had my dwarfs dig out a huge hole under human building. When they dug channels above the water level one of them decided to sleep on the tile that was about to be dug out. The other one just dug it out under the first one. After that she just sat at the stairs staring at the body of water in which her partner just drowned because of her. I had her dug out more ramps and stairs, but she just didn't want to climb them and finish demolishing the building like I told her.

It was epic AND annoying.

[Lord_Phoenix]

Ramps can only be approached to go up or down from certain directions, thus, they can be problematic if there isn't sufficient space around them for your dwarves to maneuver into position to go up or down

For instance, if you build a ramp down, and then wall it in with a door like so, to create a little entrance hut:

code:

  
www
wRw
wDw

The ramp will not be usable to go down, nor will dwarves be able to go up it.  That's because moving south on a down ramp makes you go down.  So, in order for the dwarves to get up the ramp from below and out of the hut, they have to move south after heading up the ramp to reach the door, but since the ramp is all they have to stand on, every time they try to reach the door, they simply move underground again.  

Putting the door on the north side will fix this, but the same thing happens with up ramps on the north side, so you can't have a ramp going down to a north facing door, because moving north after going down the ramp sends you back up the ramp.  To make ramps more useful, you have to build ramps at least 2 tiles wide leading into hallways at least 2 tiles wide, so your dwarves have room to maneuver into a location where they can move up the ramp.

I only use ramps on main thoroughfares, so wagons can get through, for everything else, stairs is probably the best.  You can dig straight shafts of them and they don't have any directional approach issues.  It's much easier to designate them to be dug out of the rock than to construct them with the build menu.  If you have trouble figuring out how to build them, basically, you just (d)esignate a down stair (j in designate) on the top level of the staircase, then move one square below that and designate an up stair (u in designate I think) if it's the bottom of the staircase, or if it's still got a ways down to go, designate up/down stairs (i in designate I think), in the squares between the bottom up stairs and the down stair at the top, all in a straight up and down shaft.  It's a lot easier than building them (through (B)uild - C), as building them from materials can be a little wonky when it comes to where dwarves need to stand and all that.  

If you aren't certain how deep you want to go with the staircase, just make the bottom stairs an up/down stair and you can expand it at any time.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Lord_Phoenix ]

[Lactose]

there's actually a bug that prevents certain dwarves from using ramps.  The way I fixed it was by drafting the trapped dwarves into the military then stationing them up a few levels above the ramps.  They walk right up them.

[Faces of Mu]

I've noticed this problem quite a lot, and have since moved over to using stairs (which is a shame because ramps can be convenient ways of creating channels from below). I can understand Lord Phoenix's explanation, but I don't see this problem on natural ramps around in the wilderness. All creatures seem to get around fine then.

I DO also have problems with down ramps showing where there's no corresponding up ramp underneath.