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Author Topic: Digging a hole for a well, general digging and dwarves working together  (Read 228 times)

dima131

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Hello, i am a new member of the forum, and played DF 5-12 times in the period of last 10 years, including the steam version. And in all of them I have a giant unsolvable problems that take me out of the game loop when I know that I need to build any complex 3d structure, or sometimes a thick wall (3 stones width or more). In case of 3x3 well, one of my dwarves will start digging in some sort of a stair pattern down and the other will destroy first blocks, so the first one will stuck between levels. It could be many times in the row. Then at some point he will dig down a level, get back higher (on a thin roof layer) and continue making channel from there, will hurt himself or will be lost and someone will later find his body.
It feels like they are very dumb characters in the mute movies, hurting each other. And it shouldn't be hard to safely dig a hole in the ground for any person.
Similar with the way they are digging big rooms, or long channels around the map. For some reason differnt dwarves can randomly dig the big room or run around the map to very inefficiently dig two perpendicular channels - they will start from the top left one, digging left one down, then run to the other one, dig it to the right, then run back to the first one and so on.
Similar thing was with thick walls, when dwarves were either locking themselves out of the food source and dying, or locking the other dwarf. I am not sure if the last one was fixed, but I think these problems can be fixed in all of the versions by making special types of structures like connected spaces, and pathfinding in them. To make an efficient plan on how to build it without dwarves hurting or killing each other. 
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