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[Arekis]

Hi folks,

There's something I've been curious about: I'd like to be able to build a construction (floor/wall/etc) that is not necessarily connected to anything (say when building a tower outside).  As far as I know, this is not possible in DF.  However, it gets tedious building upwards or outwards since you have to wait for one stair/floor to finish before designating the next one to be built.  It would be significantly faster to designate all the constructions in one go.

Are there any tools that currently do that or anything similar to that?  Is this within the realm of possibility?  Say, using DFHack?  I can see a number of issues cropping up, like caveins and material assignments, but if it's possible, it could be huge timesaver for outdoor projects.

And just to be clear, I don't want the dwarves to build something that's floating, I want to be able to designate construction that's not connected to anything yet (but will be when nearby constructions are done).

[Shaostoul]

As far as I know you are stuck building up and down. I haven't seen anything making the process easier. Flying dwarfs doesn't solve the problem either, they need to be able to path to where it is they need to go.

-edit- And to clarify, you have to be able to path from walking, not flying.

[0x517A5D]

In DF, you can, frinstance, designate a wall as long as any part of it is connected to a reachable floor.

You can then come back through with the t key and cancel (x key) individual tiles of the wall.  In particular, you can cancel the ones connected to the floor without canceling ones farther away, even "suspended in midair".  I often do this on my skyscrapers.

Making a utility to do the kind of designation you describe would be difficult, because each tile marked for construction needs to be assigned a specific piece of building material.  So it's not as simple as setting a "build a wall here" flag.

I think such a utility would have to call into parts of DF code, which is very difficult to do in the first place, and nearly as hard to maintain for each new version of DF.

[Arekis]

I think such a utility would have to call into parts of DF code, which is very difficult to do in the first place, and nearly as hard to maintain for each new version of DF.

Thanks.  I haven't explored DFHack in depth, so I don't know if it has hooks to get to that kind of data.

How about this hacky workaround: create (through cheating) a pillar of floors/walls/stairs going up as a scaffold.  Designate the constructions around it, then delete that pillar (through cheating).  Is this in the realm of feasibility?

[Shaostoul]

I don't think at present there is a way to delete any present tiles, except for water and magma.

[0x517A5D]

We can currently pop obsidian walls into existence, then dig them into up/down stairs, then later remove them by channeling.  dfliquids can do the creation.  It would be incredibly tedious with the current interface.

It might be feasible to edit a tile, changing the bitfield that DFHack calls TileClass from EMPTY to STAIR_UPDOWN.  You might also have to change the TileMaterial to OBSIDIAN, or maybe you can just leave it as AIR.  Then later, revert it to EMPTY.

Edit: After doing this, one would probably need to save and reload the game to update the pathfinding data.

[Shaostoul]

Well, if you know how to do the coding, go for it! I wouldn't have the slightest clue where to start.

[Arekis]

Intriguing...  Perhaps this method warrants some investigation.  Thanks for the tips!