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[PatrikLundell]

I've got deadly evil rain on part of my embark, and want to eventually clean up the mess. I can build a roof over the area that stops more of the goo from appearing, which has the negative side effect that it also blocks regular rain from cleaning it up.
Once the area is roofed over, I want to decontaminate the ground without having the dorfs step into it with their potentially bare feet (as there's no way to guarantee they won't discard their old socks and shoes just before going to work), and also to avoid the risk of their feet dragging it around:

- Building a dirt road clears the mess, but also has the dorf stand in it (although I haven't seen it dragged around, so if foot protection could be guaranteed [specific item uniforms on specific workers who are the only ones with building enabled?], it might work).
- Building a floor might work, as that's usually done from the side, but it would require extreme care with building material selection and probably dorf location at the time they take the job to avoid the morons from standing on the wrong side of the target tile, although burrows might cause cancellation spam rather than risk.
- Building a road might work, but I suspect the dorf would stand in the middle as with a dirt road (too long since I built any roads).
- Building a bridge probably has the same issue as with a road.
- Magma is dwarfy and all, but I don't want to burn down the fruit trees on the rest of the embark, but that can be avoided with a fire breach (i.e. floor/road [not wooden, of course]). Does regular (magma started) fire burn away contaminants?

Anyone who's got a good (preferably proven) solution?

More background: The area is currently contained behind a wall (with bridges to connect the wall to the embark edges), so I'm in no real hurry to deal with it, but eventually I'd like to get hold of some Sliver Barb and Glumprong logs. Also, some of the stupid visitors who decided to enter the embark at that section clutter the area with their corpses, which can complicate things (moving them out of the way in preparation for the decontamination), but some of their items are books which I think I want to get hold of.

[Fleeting Frames]

It's been too long since you've built any roads and bridges both; latter is certainly built from the side. Center-only building would make bridges spanning a gap impossible to make, after all.

However, roads are done from near center, yeah (tested to make sure).

Given this, military-uniform booted road builders or bridge builders seems best construction approach.

However, smoothing and digging also removes all contaminants from the tile; as latter can be done from underneath or directly/diagonally above in the case of downstairs it might also work (though I'd prefer bridges due aesthetics.)

[Leonidas]

Bridges are always built from the edge, which I'm 90% sure is always the near edge, or the edge that the dwarf first encounters. But before a bridge can be built, any objects on it must be removed by hand.

What about cleaning? Once you've built your roof, the floor is inside and should be eligible to be cleaned. Then you set the cleaning labor on dwarves who definitely have boots. Then you can check their boots afterwards and, if they're contaminated, put them in a squad and force them into a bathtub.

[PatrikLundell]

I certainly know bridges can cross gaps, but I rarely build large bridges directly on the ground, so I don't have had much opportunity to see how dorfs behave when they're not restricted to the edge.

Smoothing only works on rock tiles, and there aren't many of those on top of the soil, and I don't think dorfs clean soil outdoors (and even if they did, there is no control over where they clean, so they'd definitely would chose to start from some stupid direction.

Digging would work, but also destroy the terrain, but it's an innovative approach. Building stairs from above is safe for the first stair, but for the second one they've got pathing access to the ground, and so might select a stupid location to stand in.

I'm currently leaning towards the cauterization option, as that would mean they'd never get inside. There's nothing directly underneath, so tree deaths wouldn't have catastrophic results, although it might require some effort to put out burning books.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. It will probably be a fair while before I have a chance to test things out, as I probably have to wait for a new generation of dorfs to be produced and grow up to have the dorf power available to build the roof.

[Leonidas]

I use raised drawbridges as walls all the time, so I'm quite confident that a dwarf won't stand on a bridge that he's building unless he has to move items to clear the space.

Burrows restrict cleaning. I know this because I like to have huge bloody battles, and burrows are crucial to keeping civilians from trying to clean up the blood while the battle is still raging.

What about buildings? With kennels you could clean up 5x5 areas.

With constructions, there's a trick that I use all the time to make sure that my dwarves don't trap themselves on the wrong side of a wall. Designate the wall you want, then surround it with walls that you immediately suspend, but leave blank the orthoganal tile where you want the dwarf to stand. The AI will always steer the dwarf to a tile that doesn't contain a pending construction. It's probably designed to prevent the dwarves from cancelling each other in a large multi-tile construction. I've never tried it with floors, but I assume that it'll use the same code.

[Fleeting Frames]

Just in case, I didn't mean building stairs from above (though that could work with burrow micro). I meant digging stairs from above:

I.e.
z1 . < .
z0 <<<

So there's never a walkable path between contaminant and dwarf.

[KevinM]

For a built road,  A dwarf will still wander around all of the squares to clean the contaminants, all without the need of fully building the road.  That's how I've been cleaning up my vomit piles in my outdoor sunbathing areas from time to time and I've watched them.  I designate a road build using a material (clay or wood) and immediately suspend it and a dwarf will wander back and forth in that area cleaning.  I think the same happens for a dirt road, since I think I've done the same but can't recall offhand.  That could be an issue since they're still wandering around in the contaminants.   

I don't think I've seen bridge building clean contaminants.   I have some vomit on a spot I'm creating a floor bridge when creating an atom smasher, since I tend to set them up outdoors as a tower instead of digging a hole.  It's possible it could be from after the bridge was built though.  If they do clean the bridge building area, it's possible that they act like the roads do.

[Leonidas]

I just watched a dwarf clean blood off a paved road, outdoors. So there's definitely no indoor requirement for cleaning.
Edit: And now I've watched a dwarf clean vomit off an indoor clay cavern floor full of fungus.

[Quarque]

Edit: And now I've watched a dwarf clean vomit off an indoor clay cavern floor full of fungus.

Yeah. They can also wander far into the caverns, toward that lurking forgotten beast, to clean up the blood of a crundle that died years ago. And then there will be no way to cancel the job. (Unlike hauling jobs, where you can forbid the item if a dwarf is about to commit suicide.)

[PatrikLundell]

Dorfs clean on constructions outside if the options are set up to do so, but not dirt. They clean on dirt indoors.

To recall a cavern cleaner you'd probably have to activate a civilian alert (a normal burrow will probably either freeze the bugger in place unless a job can be found within it, or have him walk all the way to the location and then give up).

Edit:
Finally reached the stage where I'd built a roof over the whole area, and tried a number of things (save scumming):
- Magma: Doesn't work.The vegetation burned, but the muck remained (and the fire spread outside of the containment).
- Dirt roads: Might have worked to some extent. Almost all of them got suspended because the huge piles of stuff on them, however (100? dead visitors cluttering the area with their stuff, plus a number of animals). However, it looked like the goo was cleared away underneath many of them.
- Cleaning: To my surprise they do clean dirt outside, and they did so fairly vigorously, including under dirt roads under construction (which is why I don't know if construction itself has any effect). I ended up trying dirt roads, cancelling most of them, and adding a few dirt roads targeting tiles that hadn't been cleaned.
- Floors: Dirt roads can't be built on rock (including muddy rock, unfortunately, so I don't know of any good way to get rid of vegetation so it can be smoothed away), so I've added a small number of those.
- A dwarf washer at the entrance showed it being contaminated and the contaminants being washed away, so the bugger still drag the muck around.
- I've yet to see if I get any casualties of the operation, as the effects are insidious. Looking at affected visitors you see them covered in muck, with wounds showing nothing, but a general look at them shows blisters everywhere, with destroyed tissue. What gets living creatures seems to be suffocation due to blistered lungs. The two undead villains teleported into the area eventually died, but it took a long time, and I don't know the cause, while the experiment one apparently was killed by a were.

As an aside, getting a dwarf washer to work with a slow aquifer is a pain...