Print

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

[YomToxic]

Channeling. The dorfs dig holes into the earth. This has been a mainstay in building the Dwarven Cyclotron Cannon in almost all my DF runs. Come DF2014, I'm hit with a problem - dorfs dig a hole 3-4z layers down, then inexplicably float up the hole, leaving the next 3z channel undug... and inaccessible to anyone else.

So, my question is simple: How do I stop dorfs from floating off from half-unfinished work? Or did the latest build give dorfs rocket packs?!

[Shonai_Dweller]

They give up digging and climb out (climbing being a df2014 feature). Which explains what're doing, but not really why. Seems like this odd behavior has been reported before.
Until they start digging properly again, try digging your hole with a cave-in. It's not much extra work.

[Bumber]

Try locking them in with a hatch. They shouldn't climb if they have nowhere to go to.

There's a thread somewhere discussing solutions. I don't have time to find it right now.

[Loci]

Try locking them in with a hatch. They shouldn't climb if they have nowhere to go to.

Nope. When a dwarf channels the tile under himself he starts to fall. When a dwarf starts to fall, he tries to grab a hold of the wall. When a dwarf successfully grabs the wall, he's climbing, whether there's anything to climb to or not.

The obvious answer, then, is to make your pit larger so your dwarves won't have to channel the tiles under themselves.

[Bumber]

Try locking them in with a hatch. They shouldn't climb if they have nowhere to go to.

Nope. When a dwarf channels the tile under himself he starts to fall. When a dwarf starts to fall, he tries to grab a hold of the wall. When a dwarf successfully grabs the wall, he's climbing, whether there's anything to climb to or not.

The obvious answer, then, is to make your pit larger so your dwarves won't have to channel the tiles under themselves.

They'll lose their grip eventually. You could even have them smooth the walls first. (You probably don't want anything climbing up your pit anyways.)

Edit: Also you could try digging an up/down staircase first and channel that. It seems to work in 40.13, but I haven't tested it after the job priority update.

[PatrikLundell]

I don't think Loci is completely correct. Dorfs usually manage to channel straight down to create a single tile chute, so I think the climbing is rather due to them deciding to stop digging and eat/drink/sleep/vacation/party/harvest instead, unless there is nothing or magma/water below, in which case they try to grab the wall. It's rather inconsistent, though, since dorfs who dig themselves in because of skipped tiles just sit there, rather than climb out (which is not exclusive: I had a miner who decided to climb the inside of a volcano wall to reach the fortress proper, when I wanted him to stay where he was due to the siege, and thus had blocked all normal access).
You can build a staircase to get back to the building site, but it's frequently easier to dig a parallel staircase and then breach the wall to the digging site. You can then brick up that breached wall while your miner continues downwards. If it doesn't matter to the construction, I'd dig that staircase in the tile adjacent to the chute and just leave it.

The problem with digging a staircase and then channel it out is that you risk getting two miners on the job and channeling done such that you get an unremoved part in the middle (often complete with a stranded miner). With a single miner you can micro manage it using job priorities to designate 7 tiles per session, but the other miners should be burrowed so they won't "help", but obviously that's the time the selected miner decides to take a break. Designating one tile at a time is safe even with unburrowed miners, but time consuming (both in player and DF time).

[taptap]

For large holes I mine out with adjacent staircase and drop a floor to remove all the floors at once.

@Patrik: Should be not that hard to remove mining labour on other dwarves for the short period? Or just lock in the miner doing the stairs already (can be only one), a simple door would do then.

At least for fluid movement I keep stairs as they are superior (you have maintenance access when empty) to chutes, of course minecart dropping is the use op has in mind.

[PatrikLundell]

@taptap: Disabling mining on other dorfs should indeed work, but you then can't have them work elsewhere, which may or may not be an issue. It shares the problem of you selecting the dorf who's going on a break with burrows, though. Locking the dorf in will work as well, until the bugger gets hungry/thirsty... and just sits down to mope.

When I make a mine cart chute I also make an impulse ramp powered spiral up around it (all in a 3*3 footprint). Since it's messy enough to designate the digging without constantly changing digging priorities I specify all the digging with the same priority, occasionally resulting in miners digging themselves in and a need to get the partying partner to stop partying and go to the rescue (by digging the ramps the first one skipped). Normally, though, they can just walk back up using the spiral track when other needs take over from digging, and then walk down again to continue.

I agree that staircases work well for fluids, and there being no need for a chute for that purpose. You need a chute for power distribution, though, if you've got a pump stack with the top below the power generation, as another case where an actual chute is needed. In those cases I dig a staircase beside the chute, though, to allow the power line builder to actually build the power line.

[Bumber]

For large holes I mine out with adjacent staircase and drop a floor to remove all the floors at once.

Could you mine out a 1x1 staircase and drop something on that? IIRC, staircases are destroyed by cave-ins. I'm not sure if a constructed tile is sufficient to cause this, but you could drop a part of the ceiling or do an obsidian cast (which would be easy enough using a minecart.) Hopefully it punches all the way through to the bottom.

[PatrikLundell]

Or you might use a standard cave-in, without first digging out a space, build a mold, cast obsidian, ...
Admittedly, if that space is up in the soil, you'd either have to engineer the cave-in a few levels further down and complement this with traditional digging/stair removal, or use obsidian casting. Another problem with obsidian casting is that you need a magma proof mine cart, so you either need access to iron, steel (or candy), or buy one from the caravan.

[Bumber]

Or you might use a standard cave-in, without first digging out a space, build a mold, cast obsidian, ...

Explain. If you're trying to cave-in the entire pit-to-be that means you have to dig away the support from around the entire column and give it somewhere to go. It's a lot more work that just channeling a 2x1 pit or stairs plus 1x1 channel. The advantage of digging out a staircase is that they get atomsmashed in cave-ins and you can have a 1x1 chute. If I'm correct, and atomsmashing applies even when it's not the stairs doing the falling, you get a 1x1 pit with the bonus of not having to micromanage floor-by-floor designations.

[Pirate Santa]

Last time I tried it the game lets you build walls with nothing but a bridge next to them, however as soon as they are completed they cave-in.

Could you use that?

[PatrikLundell]

I was obviously unclear in my explanation. What I meant was to build the stairs and crush them with a natural stone single tile cave-in rather than a cast obsidian one, so, the same basic technique applied slightly differently.

It appears to be unclear whether a built wall provides enough crushing force to smash the whole stair. If that is sufficient, I'd still use a support to drop it, because building unsupported walls has a tendency to kill the builder (or the dorf removing the last supporting floor tile).

[Loci]

I don't think Loci is completely correct. Dorfs usually manage to channel straight down to create a single tile chute

That's because your dwarves have no climbing skill, so they rarely manage a successful wall-grab. You can verify that easily enough by modding dwarves to be legendary climbers (just copy the token from cats); a legendary-climber dwarf will rarely manage to dig a chute more than two tiles deep. 

I think the climbing is rather due to them deciding to stop digging and eat/drink/sleep/vacation/party/harvest instead

That's great, except for the minor detail of dwarves not using jump/climb pathing to find jobs (which is why they won't climb down the chute to continue mining). Aside from being a known quirk, that behavior is directly supported by your next statement:

since dorfs who dig themselves in because of skipped tiles just sit there, rather than climb out

There are, however, a few cases where dwarves do use jump/climb pathing. A dwarf who has used regular pathing to accept a job will repath using jump/climb pathing if the original path is blocked (even temporarily by another dwarf in a narrow hallway). A dwarf who is scared by an enemy will jump/climb to escape, while a soldier may jump/climb to engage a target. There are probably a few other special cases, but climbing in v0.40.24 is fairly well understood at this point.

Could you mine out a 1x1 staircase and drop something on that? IIRC, staircases are destroyed by cave-ins.

Up-stairs (and up/down-stairs) can withstand cave-ins, at least in v0.40.24. If you cave-in the whole stairway it will completely disappear, but that require channeling the 4 tiles around it on each level (or mining them out and collapsing something through them).

It appears to be unclear whether a built wall provides enough crushing force to smash the whole stair.

Natural walls don't have the "crushing force" to smash up-stairs, so constructed walls wouldn't either.

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks Loci for unmuddling a lot of things in your reply!