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[PringleMan5]

Hello everyone!

I have a question about shaft digging. I have seen in other threads people making reference to what seems to be an ability to designate a whole shaft, e.g. a 4x4 square designated for plain mining across 30 z-levels. My question is how do you do that? I tried to just move between Z-Layers with one corner on one level and another corner on another level.

The reason I am asking this is because I have already laid out my main stairs shaft and am preparing to do the stairs. As well I have determined I am going to do a double-wheel Tower Reactor that will also serve as my magma pump (I saw the piston-pump thread already but there is something to be said for a system you can use with the flick of a switch as opposed to the problems assosciated with resetting the piston).

So yea, how to designate across multiple levels?

[FleshForge]

When using channel, it's pretty much never safe to designate more than one Z-level at a time by any method I've heard about.  Since channelling is done partly out-of-order, there is no guarantee that tiles will be there beneath a given miner, and cave-ins are pretty near certain.

Additionally, you have to be pretty careful to channel each z-level in order, working downwards; if you skip a level, you will have a cave-in situation again.

[JAFANZ]

To designate across multiple z-levels you, AFAIK, need to use Macros, either DF2010s in-built Macroing, or something like AutoHotKey (seems to be the main one for DF, & theres some AHK scripts on the wiki, plus you could probably beg some others from people here on the forums).

Edit: For channelling multiple levels, I'd recommend defining the area as a ramp/causeway, waiting until it's been dug out, then repeating the process/macro at one z-level lower (& one level shorter), still requires some micromanagement but less likely to cause a cave-in. of course the other common method is to mine/channel every 2nd/3rd level, build a (S)upport structure to support the top level, channel around it, & collapse the Support Pillar, the top-level will cave-in any floors below that are only one level thick, thus saving you some time when digging out large pits (just make sure the lever to collapse the pillar is some distance away from the area to be collapsed & none of your dwarves are below any of the levels that'll be caving-in).

[FleshForge]

Even if you do have a way to easily designate multiple levels for channeling, you'll probably lose some dwarves when they go to dig it out, just be warned

[forsaken1111]

Use stairs first.

Dig down stairs at the top level, then up/down stairs all the way down through the area you want to be an open shaft and up stairs at the bottom.

With the stairs in place, not only can you do things for aesthetics (I smooth all the shaft walls for example) but you can safely channel 1 level at a time from the top. The dwarves will channel out the tile above while standing on the up/down stairs below them.

Once you reach the bottom, just use d->z to remove the up stairs.

[Da Spadger]

Just [d]ig out the rooms you want channeled, then drop some constructed floors on them from above. Faster, funnier, deadlier, more dorfy.

[peregarrett]

Well, I can think of two relatively safe ways of digging that.

1) Z-by-Z. You designate square section to be channeled, wait for miners to dig it out ant thed designate same section one stage down. Btw you can designate all work at once and use burrow to force miners do that step by step. Once the level is cleared, you add one level to that burrow.

2) Thin shafts. You designate several vertical 1x1 channel tubes to be dug. Each miner digs it's own tube directry under his feets. When all shafts are done, you designate next ones. The key is to isolate them from each other, by solid rock or empty space. Burrows are heplful there too.

[xellas84]

There's also the 'controlled cave-in' approach.

Designate 1 up/down stair shaft as far down as you need to go.  Have your miners dig (NOT CHANNEL) out each level in the shape you want the shaft to be (Has to be consistent!).  This will leave a series of floors all the way down in the shape of your desired shaft, with no risk of caveins while your miners are there.  Go to the level 1 zlevel below your top floor, place a single support to hold it up.  Channel out an outline around the TOP floor so that the top of the shaft is supported by only the support on the second level.  Hook the support up to a lever, get everyone as far away from your shaft as possible, pull the lever.  The support drops the top floor, and it will crash through every floor on the way down until it hits a 'supported' floor.  If you did the mining right, that will be your BOTTOM floor.  You now just have to clean up the mess at the bottom of your shaft, and you've cleared out however many levels safely (And in a dwarfy fashion!)