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[Psieye]

Many people would build a magma pump stack (or giant cave-in piston) and bring the magma all the way up to the surface to power their industries and moats. I chose to do the reverse - bring the surface soil layers down to where the magma sea was.

After numerous deaths to cavern critters, a lot of really bad logistics (long walk distance to bed, drink or food) and discovering how amazingly cave-in fragile the stalagcite pillars are in caverns... I accomplish my objective. Something I discovered: not all items get destroyed by a cave-in. A cave-in occurs in 2 phases: first the rock 'teleports' to the bottom - time stops while this tetris calculation is done ignoring thin floors etc. Only afterwards does gravity kick in for everything else. So it turns out, items (e.g. rubble) that were left on hollowed-out floors only fall after the cave-in tetris is finished. Thus I had a quantum stockpile of junk rock on every square of the 'roof' of my cave-in tetris block.

Then I discovered that you can't bring sand down to you this way - when I dug out the thick sand block I got ordinary rock floors. Also while making this fort, I found that cavern moss 'creates' soil instead of mud underneath after grazers chew through it. Now I'll have to make a new fort to get this dream of "sand tiles right next to the magma sea" happen (my current biome has clay soil show up instead).

[alcohol_dependent]

Many people would build a magma pump stack (or giant cave-in piston) and bring the magma all the way up to the surface to power their industries and moats. I chose to do the reverse - bring the surface soil layers down to where the magma sea was.

After numerous deaths to cavern critters, a lot of really bad logistics (long walk distance to bed, drink or food) and discovering how amazingly cave-in fragile the stalagcite pillars are in caverns... I accomplish my objective. Something I discovered: not all items get destroyed by a cave-in. A cave-in occurs in 2 phases: first the rock 'teleports' to the bottom - time stops while this tetris calculation is done ignoring thin floors etc. Only afterwards does gravity kick in for everything else. So it turns out, items (e.g. rubble) that were left on hollowed-out floors only fall after the cave-in tetris is finished. Thus I had a quantum stockpile of junk rock on every square of the 'roof' of my cave-in tetris block.

Then I discovered that you can't bring sand down to you this way - when I dug out the thick sand block I got ordinary rock floors. Also while making this fort, I found that cavern moss 'creates' soil instead of mud underneath after grazers chew through it. Now I'll have to make a new fort to get this dream of "sand tiles right next to the magma sea" happen (my current biome has clay soil show up instead).

This is a Good Idea.

I'm assuming you caved in all the way to the surface. If that's the case you should have outside tiles in the deep. If they are stone, I think if you muddy these, grass will grow instead of fungi on any tiles that are considered outside. If the grazers eat the grass, it will turn into soil as you say. I also assume you knew all that but its not immediately obvious for anyone else reading.

Are you sure it always turns into clay soil? Try muddying more stone and having your grazers eat it. Also, try caving in on some other biomes if you embarked on a multiple biome site like a good dwarf. Actually, you could probably test this before a massive cave in by having your grazers eat on the original "surface" area and see what turns up.

[Psieye]

No, I'd need to test it by having grazers eat cave moss around Ground Zero before I do the drop - that will show what soil type I get on my Surface Tetris Block. Grass will grow on Outdoor tiles and moss will grow on Indoor tiles to my knowledge, but it does not matter which it is as the soil type of that biome at that layer is more or less unchanged.

[SirAaronIII]

I guess you could embark on a place where the main surface soil layer is a kind of sand, and then do it.
But that takes too much searching.

[mimmfantry]

erm, deserts?

[SirAaronIII]

... I am such an idiot.
Anyway, there won't be many trees, and if you're a noob like me obsessed with getting into only warm, no-aquifer, forests, then it's gonna be pretty tough.

[Psieye]

Blargh, I realise what my problem was - "Sandy Clay" is clay, not sand. Well, I've done it at my new fort now - deliberately gen'd caverns to be SPACIOUS so I could fit a large block through without worrying about stalagcites messing up the design. Now I have my miasma-erasing zone to dump all my corpses generated by my deep underground entrance/gauntlet.

[JmzLost]

A cave-in occurs in 2 phases: first the rock 'teleports' to the bottom - time stops while this tetris calculation is done ignoring thin floors etc. Only afterwards does gravity kick in for everything else. So it turns out, items (e.g. rubble) that were left on hollowed-out floors only fall after the cave-in tetris is finished. Thus I had a quantum stockpile of junk rock on every square of the 'roof' of my cave-in tetris block.

This is very interesting.  I'm planning something similar, dropping 3 soil layers 135 z-levels and turning the resulting shaft into a Dodge This! trap.  I thought I'd need an extra layer on the bottom because I remembered loose rock ending up buried inside the bottom layer of the plug I dropped.  Probably because I created the hole using channels in 40d (it was only 12 z-levels deep), so all of the stone was already on the bottom before the cave-in.  If all but the bottom layer(s) of rubble end up on top, it simplifies things a lot.

JMZ