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[Pillbo]

With the UI updates it would be a good time to improve the way constructed stairs are built. Because you can't designate a construction on a tile without something to build it onto, right now you have to designate a staircase, wait for it to be built, then designate the next level, repeat until you're finished.  This is one of the most annoying things I regularly encounter in the game.

Making the constructed staircases designate-able across z levels with the click/drag wall updates would be a big improvement.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Dec 21st 2020 Devblog:
"Stairs can now be designated in a way that puts an up stair at the bottom and a down stair at the top, with up-down stairs in between, without having to designate the top and bottom separately - just select one column and it handles it."

[DwarfStar]

I don’t think that addresses the same problem. The OP is talking about constructed stairs, I think, based on the description of the problem. Whereas, the dev blog post is about designations.

The problem with constructed stairs is that there is no way to extend them except one at a time, because you need a walkable spot to reach each Z level. With floors, you can lay down a whole field of them with only the edge immediately reachable, but the game allows that because the other floor pieces will all eventually become reachable.

Theres an issue though if you try to apply the floors’ liberal-placement concept to stairs. It would require multi Z level constructions. Not impossible but not currently something the interface can handle.

The other way would be to allow you to add a stair on top of a planned-but-incomplete tower of stairs. That could work, probably, but be tricky. The construction placement code could check if you’re building a stair above another stair, and then start the materials search from the lower one (since it’s currently reachable). This could get complicated as you build a potentially complex maze of staircases above where they are actually pathable-to. At some point you start to need to find paths through the sets of designated-but-unfinished stairs. Tricky, indeed.

[Pillbo]

The OP is talking about constructed stairs

Exactly, [b -> C] menu stairs built from materials, not the [d] menu stairs that are dug.

[DwarfStar]

By the way, if you use DFHack, you can use planning mode to lay out a vertical tower of constructed stairs. The materials will be chosen according to the rules you set, as soon as each Z level becomes reachable.

[Quietust]

The other way would be to allow you to add a stair on top of a planned-but-incomplete tower of stairs. That could work, probably, but be tricky. The construction placement code could check if you’re building a stair above another stair, and then start the materials search from the lower one (since it’s currently reachable). This could get complicated as you build a potentially complex maze of staircases above where they are actually pathable-to. At some point you start to need to find paths through the sets of designated-but-unfinished stairs. Tricky, indeed.

Rather than special-casing it for stairs, the "build construction" interface could be made to treat all planned constructions as being "finished" for the purpose of determining accessibility. For example, when the player goes to (b)uild -> (C)onstruction and selects one of the available types, iterate over all currently-planned Constructions and temporarily place specially-flagged Construction map tiles in their locations, then remove them all (and restore the original map tiles) once you exit out of the build menu.

This would result in a few extra delays (from having to update the map's path connectivity data), but it probably wouldn't be much worse than the delays that already happen when the game assembles the build item selection list (and has to determine the distance to every building material).

[DwarfStar]

Yeah, totally agree. In fact, planning mode in DFHack is a perfectly fine existing solution to the problems I was talking about. I just didn’t realize it until a little while after I posted that.