Print

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

[Jacko13]

Recently acquired DF addiction. Started Fortress 3 on v .34.07 (Previous fortress died shortly after goblin invasion fought off with excessive cost)

Not had a problem with stairs before but I seem very stuck. I built a  double (two tiles vertical) downstair. Beneath that I built double up/downstairs going down 6 levels. Now I have dwarves dying of thirst on levels 2 and below and refusing to come up to the food stockpile (with plenty of drink in it. I checked using z key) on my entry level. I just watched one dwarf come upstairs but the others wont??? I built another staircase elsewhere in the fort, but they wont use that one now either?

Help? I dont mind my fortress dying but I want to understand what I did wrong...

[Thief^]

Have you done anything with burrows? If you've created a burrow and assigned those dwarves to it, that doesn't include the food/drink stockpile, they'd starve / dehydrate like you're seeing.

[Garath]

try and build a wall all along the route and see where it becomes impossible to build (don't actually build, but... oh well, you know what I mean)

I'd say check your stairs again, make sure only the ones on top are down stairs and the rest up/down

Any chance you have accidentally forbidden an area or activated a burrow?

[BigD145]

Are any of your drinks owned by one dwarf?

[CognitiveDissonance]

If in doubt, carve a new staircase elsewhere. I have not actually used up/down in... a long time, so they may be some issues there.
If still in doubt, carve a new staircase to the surface. Rebuild after.


Things I have done wrong:
- Reversed up/down stairs (derp)
- Designated stair tiles to be "mined" before they were carved. Result = no stairs
- Placed hatches and locked them
- Accidentally used "channel" instead of "stair down"

Do any of those sound familiar?

[greycat]

Now I have dwarves dying of thirst on levels 2 and below and refusing to come up to the food stockpile

Did any of them actually die?  Are they showing "Thirsty", "Very Thirsty" or "Dehydrated" on the wounds screen?  It's normal for dwarves to show "Thirsty" for some time, especially if they're in the middle of a job.

(with plenty of drink in it. I checked using z key)

The total you see under z is for all the booze in all the barrels added together.  This can be misleading, especially if you have just a couple barrels with a lot of booze in them, instead of lots of barrels with just a little bit.  When a dwarf drinks, she seizes the entire barrel, and holds it until she's done drinking.  Nobody else can drink the rest of that booze until she's done.

So if you have 50 units of booze, you might think that's enough for 10 dwarves, but if it's really just 2 barrels of 25 apiece, then only 2 dwarves can drink at a time; the others will have to wait.

I just watched one dwarf come upstairs but the others wont???

If one dwarf can go there, then it's not a pathing/accessibility issue.  If you didn't mess with burrows (you would know if you had), then it's not a burrows issue either.

So, I still think the most likely cause is "not enough barrels of booze".  It's an easy mistake to make (I made it).  Go back to the stockpile and actually look at each thing there using k.  And when in doubt, make more booze.  You can't have too much.

[Garath]

do you actually have a bookkeeper updating your stocks to any reasonable accuracy? The z-screen can be misleading if you don't.

[Jacko13]

Thanks for all the suggestions... many of which have been separately helpful.  However I never did find the problem.  In the end I built another staircase system elsewhere in the fortress and all runs smoothlyish (with only one dead of thirst dwarf). Population approaching 100... frantic preparation for the impending invasion demands my attention!  Thanks  again.

[Milcheax]

As far as I've understood it, and also in my own "woopsie" actions:
If you create a DOWNstair on one level, and UPDOWN on the level below, the dwarves treat the DOWNstair as a one-way DOWN path, and even though an UPDOWN is below, will not be able to come back up.

I had created a z-0 3x3 down stair, and all updowns below that, only to have my miners not able to come back up, until I crafted another pick and had somedwarf build a new set of stairs.  Woopsie.

[Sphalerite]

As far as I've understood it, and also in my own "woopsie" actions:
If you create a DOWNstair on one level, and UPDOWN on the level below, the dwarves treat the DOWNstair as a one-way DOWN path, and even though an UPDOWN is below, will not be able to come back up.

This is not true at all.  I have many places in my fortresses with a down stair on one level and an up/down stair below it and have the dwarves use it without problems.

[BigD145]

As far as I've understood it, and also in my own "woopsie" actions:
If you create a DOWNstair on one level, and UPDOWN on the level below, the dwarves treat the DOWNstair as a one-way DOWN path, and even though an UPDOWN is below, will not be able to come back up.

I had created a z-0 3x3 down stair, and all updowns below that, only to have my miners not able to come back up, until I crafted another pick and had somedwarf build a new set of stairs.  Woopsie.

Yeah, that's not how stairs work at all. You did something else wrong.