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[Qloos]

My major concern with stairs is that they are too simplistic, a dwarf can dig a 1 x 1 hole straight down with no problems.  Or a 3 by 3 hole straight down with nothing but "up down staircases"  Should a dwarf really be able to go in 10 different directions at once while using a set of stairs?

Proposal:  Staircases are always 2by1 tiles in size.  One end originates from a top floor, the other from a bottom floor.

Alt Codes used: 176,177,178
Stairs going down: ▒░
Stairs going up: ▒▓

[Sutremaine]

I've always imagined the actual stair as taking up half of the tile, with the rest being walkable floor. It's just another of DF's abstractions of space to me.

[Hyndis]

Ramps are more akin to stairs in how they are currently implemented.

To make up for this, I just force myself to never use up/down stairs. I always use either up or down stairs, but not the combination.

I usually combine them next to each other in the form of a stairwell, with a space for a landing on each floor. Takes up a lot more space and uses more digging, and a longer time to walk from floor to floor, but thats fine.

Walking up stairs should greatly slow anyone down. Just feels better that way, more realistic.

[Silverionmox]

Stairs thread

I've always considered stairs to be spiral stairs. Ramps need some adjustment, they would be just too steep to be useful for wagons etc. if the height difference was bridged in just one square.

[Safe-Keeper]

Only way to interpret them right now is spiral stairs. Without railings, presumably, since you can always just walk from one to another.

Yes, I'd like more realistic and intuitive stairs, too (as in, no more of that "half-a-stair" thing -- a staircase should be a full building that's 1x2 long, and 2 tiles high or whatever).

[pubby]

It's not like the current stair system is THAT much more unrealistic than any of the other things in DF.

And besides, the way it is now simplifies the game and pathfinding. I have a feeling that the game would play slower (FPS and player time) with stairs such as these.

[Tally]

If you really wanted to be picky, you could make stairs a 2x1 or 2x2 building diggable by miners that you can choose how many z-levels it spans, with a function similar to umkh on most other things. That's just an inconvenience to everyone, though.

However, I absolutely hate ramps how they are. It's too easy to get an endless spam of "Miner cancels dig: Cannot find path" because of some ridiculous buggery with how ramps work.

Currently, I think ramps are what need to be revised, not stairs. "What do you mean you can't go back up the way you came? It's a ramp, there's no exclusive one-way path with ramps!" I could understand if it were that case with wagons or other vehicles, but dwarves? Makes no sense.

[Nikov]

Not even my mineshafts use up-down staircases. I treat those more like ladders than parts of the architecture. At most, I use them when I want to excavate a really big volume of space for a vaulted ceiling.