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[Dampe]

I can't front, I have no idea how stairs work.
Constructing them, how they're used, none of it.
Help me.

[Arx]

You can designate stairs to be dug in rock. Unless I'm badly mistaken, Down Stairs can be designated on tiles that have been dug out, but Up Stairs and Up/Down Stairs must be designated on solid rock/soil tiles. An Up stair will reveal the tile above it, which must be dug out as a Down or Up/Down stair to be accessed. A Down stair reveals the tile below it; same story. An Up/Down reveals both above and below; same story.

Constructed stairs allow you to put Up or Up/Down stairs in places that are already mined out. Otherwise they work in the same manner as designated Up or Up/Down Stairs.

For more information.

[Quietust]

An Up stair will reveal the tile above it

Last I checked, this is not the case - only downward stairs reveal the tiles beneath them.

[ancistrus]

To put it simply,
movement between level Z and level Z+1 via stairs is possible if there is a downstair tile at X,Y,Z+1 and an upstair tile at X,Y,Z. The special tile "up/down stairs" simply counts as both upstairs and downstairs tile. Whether the stairs were constructed or carved is irelevant.

Try not to think about stairs as of their real world counterparts, they have little in common.

[Reelya]

Quick start - digging into the ground.

On the ground level designate a down stairs. Your miners will dig this out. The down stairs is basically a hole in the ground and you can floor over it later if wanted.

Now, your dwarves will only dig the top bit of the stairs at this point. What you need to do next is go to the z-level one down, and designate either a matching up-stairs right below the downstairs, or an "X" up/down stairs, which you can extend as you go, any number of levels down. You can then dig sideways on any level with a finished stairs. You don't have to wait for the first part of the stairs to be done before designating more - you can designate multiple joining sections of the stairs at once and miners will start on each part as they get access to it.

If you need stairs in a place that's already dug out, you need to use the construction menu, and have some building materials spare. You order e.g. an up/down stairway built on the ground somewhere. This is how you build upwards for towers, or reconnect broken stairs systems (if you accidentally ordered your dwarves to destroy a stairway).

You can also order constructed stairs built in place of natural ones. e.g. when you dig out your first downstairs, you can later put an up/down staircase in it's place so that your fortress becomes the foundation of a tower.

[sal880612m]

I think carving stairs as sort of a Z-level task. If you designate and upstair a stairway is carved out of the space designated but it looks something like this

-------  <-Roof

      --|
   --|       <-Stairs
--|

So even though the stairs do go up, they are totally unusable as the are. You then come in and designate a downward stair on the tile above that and you get
        --|
    --|
--|

        --|
    --|
--|

The other way around would be similar. I imagine Up/Down stairs as being something like this
______                                 _______
| ^ | v |                               |            |
| ^ | v |   and the next level   |  v  | ^  |
|_____|                               |_v_|_^_|

but all in the same tile with ^ being up and v being down.

[Reelya]

Graphs and charts are just going to confuse the guy. Step by step instructions are more useful.

[Dirst]

Graphs and charts are just going to confuse the guy. Step by step instructions are more useful.

Stairs never made sense to me until I saw the diagram in the wiki.  And it looks a bit like Dig Dug, which is a plus.

Edit: Spelling is hard.  Not as hard as a dwarf's head, but still hard.

[sal880612m]

Graphs and charts are just going to confuse the guy. Step by step instructions are more useful.

People have already given him that and not everyone is the same in terms of what will click with them so I tried a different approach.

[Dampe]

Nah, it's fine, I think I've finally grasped the concept.
I'm a little ashamed, however, that my first fortress that appeared like it might be even the slightest bit successful was toppled due to a lack of stairs.
Don't ask.

[Arx]

Been there, done that. Couldn't work out why my miner wasn't coming back to the surface after I knocked down the steps by mistake. That was my second or third fort.

[Caz]

[weenog]

Nah, it's fine, I think I've finally grasped the concept.
I'm a little ashamed, however, that my first fortress that appeared like it might be even the slightest bit successful was toppled due to a lack of stairs.
Don't ask.

Don't feel bad, it's happened to all of us.  I had the majority of a fortress population die of thirst when I screwed up a designation, removed the stairs, trapped them all in the sun room, and the snack bar ran out of supplies.

[Hetairos]

Don't worry. It took me about 20 years of game time to figure out all the types of stairs. Before that I would just build the up/down ones everywhere.

[MDFification]

Don't worry. It took me about 20 years of game time to figure out all the types of stairs. Before that I would just build the up/down ones everywhere.

The fact that you actually managed to keep a fort going 20 years without understanding stairs is bloody remarkable. Almost as remarkable as the fact that your first fort survived 20 years.