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[Leonidas]

Having alternating up and down stairs is inefficient. It takes two more tiles of movement for a dwarf to go up a level than shafts of up/down stairs. Use ramps instead.

It's easy enough to build some sort of spiral that your dwarves can climb up just as quick as up/down stairs and still have the safety of them not falling unconscious and falling down stairs to their deaths. If you're really that worried about it.

It also looks pretty cool, like a spiral staircase.

I like the idea of ramps, but it seems like they would chew up a lot of space because they need solid walls to hold them up.  I guess you could minimize that with careful design.

[Albedo]

The spiral works out to be a 3x3 tower, based off a central support column.

 +►+
▲▓▼
 +◄+

(If you do it right, you can have 2 paths spiraled within each other.)

For a caravan, it's 9x9.

[slink]

In my very first fortress I used nothing but up/down staircases, for many levels, and I ended up with dead Dwarves lying at the bottom of all of them.  This may not have been due to falling, but after I read about it in the Wiki I ascribed it to falling and have never used those since.

My Dwarves have also fallen into wells, especially the children.  That is why all of my reservoirs now have a staircase that exits next to the well.

[Leonidas]

The spiral works out to be a 3x3 tower, based off a central support column.

 +►+
▲▓▼
 +◄+

OK, but then what does the next level looks like?  Because each of those ramps requires empty space above it.  Two ramps per level of the tower I can see, but it still seems like four would require many more walls.

In my very first fortress I used nothing but up/down staircases, for many levels, and I ended up with dead Dwarves lying at the bottom of all of them.  This may not have been due to falling, but after I read about it in the Wiki I ascribed it to falling and have never used those since.

My Dwarves have also fallen into wells, especially the children.  That is why all of my reservoirs now have a staircase that exits next to the well.

Yeah, that was my experience.  But maybe that was an earlier version of the game, when dwarves were clumsier.  Have we seen more than one version since z-levels came out?

[Jim Groovester]

I believe 33a is the first version featuring z-levels, and there have been a lot of changes since then.

Since 40d, (and very possibly 38c) I've never had dwarves tumble down up/down staircase shafts. Never. Not once. The set of incidents I've observed of dwarves falling down stairs to their deaths is the null set.

You get the picture.

The spiral works out to be a 3x3 tower, based off a central support column.

 +►+
▲▓▼
 +◄+

OK, but then what does the next level looks like?  Because each of those ramps requires empty space above it.  Two ramps per level of the tower I can see, but it still seems like four would require many more walls.

Here, let me show you what Albedo's getting at:

Code: [Select]

Level 0
+++++
++▲O+
+▼O▼+
+O▲++
+++++

Level 1

+++++
+O▼++
+▲O▲+
++▼O+
+++++

The Os are columns.

You just need to repeat this design for each level, alternating between the two, to get a spiral ramp looking thing that is just as efficient as having dwarves climb up/down stairs.

You can shrink the design down to a 2x2, but you can only have one ramp up per level.

[Aspgren]

In my very first fortress I used nothing but up/down staircases, for many levels, and I ended up with dead Dwarves lying at the bottom of all of them.  This may not have been due to falling, but after I read about it in the Wiki I ascribed it to falling and have never used those since.

My Dwarves have also fallen into wells, especially the children.  That is why all of my reservoirs now have a staircase that exits next to the well.

Children fall into wells? That has never happened to me ... it has only happened once, when I put a well in the barracks.

Bad idea if ever there was one... but yeah. There might be all kinds of reasons you want to run maintenance on the water system - so when I have water flowing there are always floodgates and levers and ramps and a path on which dwarves can move safely next to the canal and cross it on grates ... I use grates because they're purdy.