Print

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

[Pan]

Really, am I the only one out there who dislikes these 'grand' staircase designs? Think about it - What's grand about a large staircase? Besides, how do they even work? DF staircase are like elevators, and when viewed in Stonesense, the flights of staircases look so weird.

Is there anyone else who dislike staircase shaft fortresses, and instead prefer using ramps, or non shaft staircase designs?

[Psieye]

Ramps here, for the purpose of wagons and safety (oh and less steps to move).

[rawrcakes]

I always use ramps. If I want a circling staircase-feel, I make my ramps in a square and ascending/descending pattern ala. towers in Adventure mode.

I dunno, I just don't like staircases. I feel they break the flow of my dwarves. It's much cooler seeing them scurrying around in my labyrinthine corridors, than having them enter a teleportation pillar, then reassemble at an arbitrary floor of my inverted tower.

[Starver]

Stairs all the way.  At intersections of a regular grid.  And I also tend to use ramps diagonally along the lines of the grid, across a swathe of Z-adjacent corridors.  I've posted plans for this, before, so I'm not repeating it.  Can't do a thing for the alleged safety issues (I've never had anyone fall down my 50-100z stairwells!), but it gives "Manhattan with diagonals" travel access.  Also does nothing for the frame-rate, I imagine, because of the huge inclusive search space that'll be stored each time.  But that's not what I'm designing for.

(Don't use stonesense, but I thought it rendered stairs fairly logically, from what I see in forum post screenshots.  YMMV if you use it regularly/real-time, naturally.)

[Stefrist]

I'm using a central pillar 7x7 with ramps in order to get the wagons coming.
It looks prettier than just central stairs (and it supports my completely built-up fortress)

(I did have a fortress where people actually did fell down regular staircases)

[Jingles]

Unless its for industrial, construction, or service way purposes, I always use ramps. 

I also don't really understand how up/down stair cases work, nor how dwarfs drag lead bins up and down them.  I always imagine them as some sort of weird scaffolding.  Some one suggested spiral stair cases but I just don't see it.  Especially given the movement options from an X.

[Flying Fortress]

All my fortress have one central staircases, ramps take up too much space and require way too much planning imo.  XXX all the way down to magma has always been my preferred mode of climbing.  (The only time I ever use ramps is in the main entrance for wagon compatibility for my trade depot.)

[Sus]

My current design is 3-wide ramps down to the depot and from there, one set of 1x2 stairs leading up (to the farming / refuse stockpile level) and another leading down (to the workshops, forges and living areas) ♪and a third one leading nowhere, just for show♫ (sorry 'bout that, couldn't help myself). Access to pastures, archer towers and other "secondary" areas is usually via just a single 1x1 staircase.

[Aspgren]

I strongly prefer ramps but in some instances staircases are very practical. I would never build my entire fortress around one big staircase but I don't mind making a multi-level wing that has a small central staircase. If I am building above ground then the material I save make it all worthwhile.

[Flying Dice]

I normally use a 3x3 central staircase design, but I've recently switched to a 3-wide ramp spiral for the movement bonus it provides. Still staircases all the way for military and mechanical systems access, of course.

[slothen]

I've always used central staircases.  The security (and safety) issues they introduce can be somewhat mitigated by liberal use of hatch covers.  I also avoid extending the central staircase to the surface level or too near the caverns..  I use ramps for aesthetic reasons, or when i want to change z level along a path or hallway.  If its just two rooms stacked vertically I'll use stairs.

Recently though I've taken to a new design strategy.  Instead of a central staircase with rooms clustered about it, i've turned everything on its side.  I have a long central hallway (with a few nice turns and bends in it) with different modules attached to it, each "module" consisting of 5-10 z levels of moderately sized rooms stacked on top of each other.  This allows plenty of room for workshops and stockpiles from related industries to be only a few z-levels apart.  They're each easily expandable by adding z level's above or below.  If each module is built spread out (several unrevealed tiles between each module in a horizontal cross section) then there is plenty of space for expansions and customization for each module (room for a garbage chute, special locked room for specialty decorations or material types, farming modules can expand upward to the soil level and then expand outward in pasture).

In central staircase forts, to take advantage of efficient vertical stacking you have to add additional staircases near the related workshops and stockpiles.  So instead of just one central staircases, you've got tons of other staircases too.  To keep stuff close together, you cluster around the central staircase, and additional expansion has to be farther out, or farther down.

[Broseph Stalin]

I do a 1x3 staircase that alternates between up and down. It prevents accidental falling , doesn't add too much to travel time, and looks more natural.

[jhxmt]

Recently though I've taken to a new design strategy.  Instead of a central staircase with rooms clustered about it, i've turned everything on its side.  I have a long central hallway (with a few nice turns and bends in it) with different modules attached to it, each "module" consisting of 5-10 z levels of moderately sized rooms stacked on top of each other.

I actually really like this idea.  I've been getting bored of my standard central-staircase playstyle, so I might have to try this kind of 'modular tower' structure when I next upgrade (next version). 

Yeah, I tend to stick with central staircases simply for ease of planning/designating, but appreciate they introduce other issues (security/pathing FPS).  I've never really followed why ramps can take fewer steps for dwarves to traverse, though - surely there's a horizontal step at each z-level that isn't there with stairs?  Or am I missing something in ramp-logic world?

[dwarfhoplite]

My fortresses usually spread on single z level apart from graveyard which usually takes too much space.

[Funburns]

I love central spiral ramps. A while back I made several spiral ramp designs in Quickfort, and I've been using two of them for every fortress for a year now. My favorites are double and single helices.

Screenshots of the two ramp designs I use most often for large, but not wagon-scale, stairwells:



These ramps, created for aesthetic reasons, still maintain high efficiency. This is because a dwarf, moving right next to the center shaft, only has to move horizontally one tile per Z level crossed.

I usually put the double helix staircase in the center of a fractal bedroom design like this one, modified so the up/down stairs are instead statues or, in particularly large versions, little waterfalls, or even café plazas with small food/drink stockpiles, tables and chairs. If I can, I rip out all the stone that doesn't form bedroom walls (dwarves ought to have some privacy, and they love the engravings) and replace it with clear or crystal glass. The single helix is for places where long, dark, claustrophobic tunnels reaching deep into the earth are more fitting.

All of my spiral ramp designs were originally based off of a giant diagram of evenly spaced radiating lines I'd created for a city-sized spiral ramp with 32 stages per revolution, all of them exactly aligned. That was for an immense pit I built a city in back in the early days of DF2010. It took several days to complete; I still have the CSVs for it, but it turns out the amount of mined space required for more than one revolution of that helix taxed my computer too much to use.

Recently though I've taken to a new design strategy.  Instead of a central staircase with rooms clustered about it, i've turned everything on its side.  I have a long central hallway (with a few nice turns and bends in it) with different modules attached to it, each "module" consisting of 5-10 z levels of moderately sized rooms stacked on top of each other.

This is a good idea. Suddenly I'm wondering if it's possible to make a double helix staircase wind horizontally into a mountainside..! Or even at a 45^o angle, though I suspect that would require using a vast amount of space to capture its complexities.



Edit: Fixed image link: the URL changed. x2