You need to generate a new world to get stepladders; if that doesn't fix it it's an issue with the graphics packs.
Hey Peridexis - coding noob here, and I was kinda wondering something.
Of course there are major updates here and there, but when they are minor updates to the coding - such as 40.14 to 40.15 - why does all modding for them have to be reformatted?
This is not me being ungrateful or anything, God knows I'd be unable to play DF without your pack, just wondering what are the complications from a technical standpoint.
(For many of the smaller updates the raws didn't change, so graphics and mods were fine)
For graphics, stepladders present two issues: they're defined in the raws, and they need to be displayed. Graphics packs work by messing around in the raws to point things at different tiles in a custom tileset (and unit sprites, but that's another story); so they have to both add stepladders to the raws and work out which tile to display them with - which might mean a big shuffle, since you can only use a limit number of tiles. A saved game is really sensitive to the raws - because they inform *what* got saved (what happens when someone's carrying a knife, and an update removes knives from the game?). To avoid pain, these changes just don't affect old worlds.
For some of the other stuff (Therapist, DFHack) the basic function is reading and editing the RAM in use by DF, and the patterns change with each code update so they have to map the whole thing again and recompile. By the time I wait for those and graphics, check updates to keybindings and settings, etc. it can take a couple of days - in this case longer than usual because the emotion/thought upgrades make things a lot more complicated and needed a lot of patches.
Hope that helps!