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[ragincajun]

Is falling down stairs something new (relatively new) in the game?  I was using up/down stairs as scaffolding; fully supported from below by other stairs and then deconstructing enmasse one level at a time.  I lost three dwarves to falls.  Really freaked me out because I don't recall falling on a stairwell being a thing before.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Is falling down stairs something new (relatively new) in the game?  I was using up/down stairs as scaffolding; fully supported from below by other stairs and then deconstructing enmasse one level at a time.  I lost three dwarves to falls.  Really freaked me out because I don't recall falling on a stairwell being a thing before.

Before what? Game has been around for 12 years.
Falling down stairs has been a thing since I started playing about 4 years ago.

[Senator Jim Death]

I seem to remember avoiding long up/down staircases for a while now. In more concrete terms, the wiki explicitly mentions that stairs are ignored by falling creatures at least as far back as v.31.

I would believe they've done so for as long as falling has been a thing, but I can't prove it. I don't concretely remember the intervening periods between old-2D-DF and our current version.

[Starver]

It's been a complaint of people for as long as I can recall.

I also know that I've been using tall stair-stacks, despite this threat, for most of my playing life and haven't had such an accident as I'm led to believe can happen.

Maybe I've just never had a fight happen on a stairwell, the (momentary) loser going tumbling to the ground-that-isn't there, etc and doing an impression of a slinky. Though my last fort latest version had some cavern-creature sneak in and definitely was in a knock-down fight with several dwarves sent to help the one that got ambushed. No-one (even the creature) fell down stairs, despite a stairwell being the scene of the various (across Zs) encounters. Maybe just luck.


Thus I know it's a thing, but don't know how much of one. Your scaffolding-dismantling deaths sound like a confluence of actions and places to stand to do them that interacted badly with yet other actions. But that's a guess. If it is, though, then better micromanagement might have helped avert such disasters.

(I also don't use stairway-scaffolding, having other solutions to various building configurations, so haven't tried mass-removal a layer at a time. I'd suggest, though, make it every-other top-level stair-scaffold, then start with the remainder after enough clearance of the first lot. Might avert a repeat of this, if I've imagined the situatkon right. Only mildly more awkward to do.)

[anewaname]

To avoid those accidents while mass deconstructing, you want your dwarfs to deconstruct from the tiles below. Their path to the scaffolding needs to be from a lower z level, otherwise some dwarf stands on a staircase while is another is deconstructing it, then falls down because he has nothing to stand on .

[PatrikLundell]

I've never had any known cases of falling down stairs for any reasons other than deconstruction bugs, where the stupid buggers deconstruct the stair they're standing on rather than from below or the side, even though there were safe places to stand.

This doesn't mean to say I disbelieve the reports saying fighting can result in falls, only that this hasn't happened to me, even when fights have happened in stairwells.