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[Zantan]

I've been hearing a couple people saying that having separate up and down stairs is somehow better than lots of up/down stairs, but I don't understand why this would be the case.  It could be useful if your dwarves only need to travel 1 z level, but if you have a large flight of stairs, the distance traveled by the dwarves would be doubled (instead of going down, they have to go down and over to the next flight).  Could someone explain this to me?

[kaypy]

I'm not sure of its veracity, but there are tales of dwarves falling down stairs for a variety of reasons. Obviously a single level fall will be less dangerous if it actually happens. And it doesn't really cost much, since separate stairs doesn't necessarily mean by a large distance: I tend to put them a few tiles apart... just in case...

[Smew]

I actually cannot see how that would be useful, it would require more effort for stonecrafting dwarves that go up and down levels, and would require more walking out of ALL your dwarves, really.

[Elvin]

Asides from the whole thing of falling down stairs ( I think this happened to me when a guy got knocked backwards during a fight, fell right the way down to the bottom of my shaft.) it increases miner skill by making them mine out more area of the fortress. Plus I think it looks better, but that's just my opinion.

[Derakon]

Miner skill is hardly an issue in most forts.

You may be able to stop dwarves from falling down staircase shafts by installing hatches on the stairs.  Hatches act like doors, and so won't slow the dwarves down any. If the blinking bothers you you can always hide them.

[mjo625]

I don't think the falling down thing happens in the current version anymore. Any advice you find saying seperate up/down stairs is better than a shaft of up and down stairs is probably just out of date advice from older versions.

[HammerHand]

On the other hand, any advice you find about using ramps instead of stairs might still be worth listening to.  Traversing stairs consumes a dwarven step (that is, the Dwarf is on one level, steps onto the stairs, then steps up/down the stairs into the next level), whereas a ramp does not (the dwarf is on one level, then steps onto the ramp and goes about his business). 

The difference is that the ramp is somehow on both z-levels at once, so once a dwarf steps onto it he simply steps off on the level he needs to be on.  Stairs are not, and so the dwarf must step from the stairs on one level to the stairs on the next.

Mind you, when trying to design a fortress around this mechanic (exploit?) I failed miserably.  I routinely had Dwarves that would refuse to go up the ramps once they had built/mined them, leading me to replacing them with stairs instead.  I dunno.  Maybe I just never figured out ramps.


... Of course, my information could all be old, too.  The wiki is a good informant, but not necessarily a completely accurate one.

[mjo625]

Mind you, when trying to design a fortress around this mechanic (exploit?) I failed miserably.  I routinely had Dwarves that would refuse to go up the ramps once they had built/mined them, leading me to replacing them with stairs instead.  I dunno.  Maybe I just never figured out ramps.

I think ramps are un-usable unless they're next to a wall.

[Xinael]

Yes, and because of that you can end up with ramps like:

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| ____
|\.....
that your dwarves will have trouble traversing because they won't like jumping the gap at the top. You basically need to have an open square above the wall that the ramp is on, like so:

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_ ____
 \......
but then the sideways movement negates the saving that you made by installing ramps in the first place. Might as well stick with stairs.