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[Uthimienure]

I've thought many times that wheelbarrows and stairs don't play well together in real life.

Could we have an adjustment made so dwarfs can't use stairwells so easily with them?

[SixOfSpades]

I believe it's been repeatedly suggested that the existing "stairs" be renamed "ladders" (as they go straight up & down in a 1-tile footprint), while new
"stairs" (can be used by laden / handless dwarves, but not wheeled vehicles or beasts of burden) would measure 1 x 2 tiles, and
"ramps" (can be used by any) would be at least 1 x 3.

Barely relevant real-world fact: It is possible to lead a cow up a flight of stairs, but not down.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I believe it's been repeatedly suggested that the existing "stairs" be renamed "ladders" (as they go straight up & down in a 1-tile footprint), while new
"stairs" (can be used by laden / handless dwarves, but not wheeled vehicles or beasts of burden) would measure 1 x 2 tiles, and
"ramps" (can be used by any) would be at least 1 x 3.

Barely relevant real-world fact: It is possible to lead a cow up a flight of stairs, but not down.

That seems like an unnecessary change, there's plenty of space in a tile (being roughly 2x2x3 meters) for a staircase like this to make sense.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What I'll agree with though is that it makes no sense to drive a wheelbarrow up something like that, I usually build ramps alongside my staircases just for flavor.

[Starver]

I prefer to believe that tech-savvy dorfs are just putting the right sort of wheel on their wheelbarrows (though it should still give an upward movement penalty and increase downwards accident tendency, as should ramps, especially if damp and/or mossy). That's just in my head, though.

I think we were half-promised a vertical rope access at one time (like a well, but bucketless and maybe mechanismless if it's to be shinned up and down not hoisted with assistance) which was due to help out with old-style channel-without-ramping and mid-cavern-ceiling breakthrough access, and that might have been loadless/no-carry in nature (unless, with mechanism as well as anchor-block, the courier of an item shins down and up the rope, to attatch the load, then 'well-draws' the load up themselves) for rescue or exploration (or retrieving pocketable/backpackable items?). That it could be let down at need and retracted otherwise would have (properly coordinated) made a good selective entry/exitway or even a kind of sallyport you could deploy as necessary over defencive walls (back before flyers and climbers made that a little less secure).


I think a paternoster (multiple ropes plus material for 'stages', in a number related to the Z-reach, at least one mechanism (maybe two) and a power-source or integrated dorf-spot for manual winding) has been suggested, and could be non-cargo (step-type, see also the Man Engine) or cargo-capable (supervised cubicle loading, depending on how the cargo is conveyed in) has been put forward, as have inclined-plane/funicular rail systems (with shared, half-shared or separate rails, the first two needing mid-point passing junctions of one type or other), but most of this was probably rendered null with the minecart addition (except for the one-tile X*Y footprint nature of the more vertical types) and probably mostly because they are/seem out-of-era.



There's a lot of potential changes, but nixing longstanding stairway/barrow traffic (and the rest, like carrying minecarts, or indeed just hefting a walltile's-worth of stone up any tween-level route, single handed with nary a sweat) is probably not going to happen. Says I, now practically inviting this to be in one of the next major revamps of gameplay.

[Uthimienure]

Hold on folks! What I'm suggesting isn't complicated and doesn't require anything new to be added.

Adjust the movement cost of stairs for wheelbarrows so it becomes impractical and we have to build ramps, simple as that.
If that's not an easy programming task (compared to most anyway), then I'm silly.

[Starver]

For my part, I was running with the ideas and giving some of the prior ones.

But messing with pathing has been done a little (fliers and climbers have special compensations, but mostly it's the same pathing tree for everyone), though when you have to access a detour just because you're now wheelbarrowing it is added complication. (If not infinite difficulty, will you decide to barrow up some stairs rather than go to an accessible  ramp perhaps half a map away?)

This is also a problem with some of the other vertical movement methods I mentioned. If a counterweight funicular needs not dissimilar loads going down to haul the ones going up (down only could be retarded with brakes) then do you head towards it to ascend? (Probably better done as a cart-stop situation. With "release upper load only when there's an equivalent lower load to pull up" as option, but then you have to deal with delivery-to-lower-terminus haulage then haul-from-upper-terminus and discourage any source->destination single effort.)


If you're bothered by this, build entirely without stairs (to the extent you wish to, at least, perhaps use scaffolding stairs to places there's going to be no barrow-pushing, siting a stockpile at the base ahead of time is just good practice for that kind of thing anyway) and keep your conscience clear.

But I think it is a little bit complicated to hard-code in, and may need significant additional memory to allow unless there's been a development already, that I've not remembered correctly, which grants the same ability to realise such diverted routing. Somebody will remind me if that's so.

[Uthimienure]

It doesn't bother me that much, and if it did, then the 1-tile ramps would bother me as much, lol, they're so steep you could barely walk up them, let alone push a loaded wheelbarrow up!  But no big deal, really, and the steepness is... the way it's going to be.

For your funicular, a variable counterweight is easy enough to just abstract as an integral assortment of counterweights which the a dorf places on the lighter side to balance it. IMO, it doesn't need to be detailed or modeled, just abstracted.  I like this funicular idea, especially after having ridden some in Switzerland.

[xZippy]

It makes sense, but I don't see it as a thing we truly need.

[Bumber]

(step-type, see also the Man Engine)

Platforming since before Mario was cool.