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[catote]

Im building a 3 level wall around my entrance.
It's working out, but painfully slow.
So Im looking for experienced tips, to improve the process.
Mainly so I dont have to micromanagement so much.

Right now this is what I do for level three:
- dwarves have two staircases
- they are ordered to make floor
- afterwards I will order them to make fortifications.

This is how it looks from above (X stairs . floor, F Fortification)

FFFFFFFFFFFFFF
.......................X
.......................
FFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Its a very time consuming process, since I can only order 1-2 floor tiles at the time. Since they must connect to something already build.
Plus the keystrones involved are cumbersome: b,shift,c,down,enter,[move cursor a long distance],[time consuming selection from list of materials],enter
Furthermore I get tons of cancellations, and need to remove suspension. One reason can be their pets getting in the way.

How do you handle this task?. Perhaps some scaffolding???

[crazysheep]

Based on the layout you've given us, you can actually order way more floor tiles to be built. What you can do is use the keys umkh to change the number of floor tiles to be built. Unless you're trying to do something fancy like having a specific tile colour or pattern, there's no need designate floor tiles to be built individually.
Also, the key combination Shift+Enter can be used to select all of a particular material for construction, so that should help with selecting materials for construction.

[MonkeyHead]

Question: why 3 z-levels up?

You should be able to lay out a 10x10 area of flooring to be built as long as one tile to be built is in contact with a valid floor/stairway already built.

[catote]

Thanks, solved my problem: I can order a very long floor to be build, it just needs to connect.
I was building the floor 1 tile at the time.

[weenog]

Are you building from with rocks, or blocks?

If you're not using blocks, start doing so.  They're much faster to transport, IIRC faster to build with too, and they save you material.

Or you could do like I'm doing and just pour out ice walls with pond zones and a bucket brigade, but that really depends on your local climate.

[peccan]

As for pets getting in the way, you can assign them to a pasture somewhere. Cats are tricky, but walls and a tightly closed door helps with that. Kids can also get in the way but are harder to keep away. But for those you can always Google "dwarf fortress child management" 9v9

[xpi0t0s]

I used to build with floors, but now I use stairs instead.  They are much easier to deconstruct later if you need the materials.  At ground level construct a wall and some up stairs:

Above view:
uuuuu
WWWWW
Side elevation:
Wu

Above that construct some up/down stairs but leave the wall for now. Side elevation:
 x
Wu

Now you can construct the next level's up/down stairs and the current level's wall at the same time.  Side elevation:
 x
Wx
Wu

With floors they can only be constructed and destructed one square at a time.  Stairs can be con-/destructed in parallel, although the ground floor layer of up-stairs requires an extra level of material.

[Kaos]

you may want to build walls and carve fortifications into them afterwards, it leaves the floor above instead of you having to build it. when you build a fortification in the level above there's no floor, if you build a wall there is, if you carve the fortification out of the wall the floor above remains.


scaffolding: i like building up/down stairs 1 tile away from the actual wall, then connect it by building a floor:

Code: [Select]

WWWWWWW
...F...
...X...

W= wall
F= floor
X= stairs
.=open airthis way when i don't need the scaffolding any more, i de-construct the 1 tile of floor connecting the stairs to the wall, and then de-construct the ground level upstair so all the levels of stairs cave-in at once, instead of de-constructing all the stairs step by step, level by level... you might want to build a support in the lower level and trigger it by lever to avoid any fatal accident with the cave-in, but usually if you keep everybody away the dwarf de-constructing only gets stunned by the dust cloud...

[Triaxx2]

Since I automatically roof over my enclosures, I have the last level move it's stairs into the wall. Then I only need to disassemble those two stairs and fill the hole in the wall. Now safe from building destroyers, and I can use the interior space for storage.