Dwarf Fortress ~ Understanding stairs and constructions

welcome to what I hope will be just a short tutorial on how tiles actually do work in Dwarf Fortress this is tile so that if you're thinking of stairs ramps constructions fortifications etc a tile is like one square in the actual game itself and I wanted to sort of just show how it works just that we can visualize it when you're looking straight down on your actual plan what I've done here is sort of like as if I've dug out an actual section of a mind so I've dug out a corridor I've got a little dwarf star standing on the on the area and then we've got like a flat wall towards the end here so they've just literally just dug through to this particular point over here now when every tile you need to consider is actually not not just a single cube which is the way that I guess the it's the easiest way to think of it as a cube but there's actually two portions to the cube you've got the main portion which you've dug out for this particular area but there's also a small floor area as well so every single tile consists of like a main section and a tile and a floor section so you've actually got the two different areas so let's have a bit of a think about how stairs work in Dwarf Fortress and you've really only got three types of stairs you've got upstairs downstairs and up downstairs and it's a bit complicated you don't just go to a tile and make a stair and then like the way that I guess a lot of people would sort of think that it should work is that you make a stair in your tile you then gets rid of whatever's above it and oh you know that might be the way that you sort of look at it look at it or if you dig down sort of straight down from a stair then sort of makes a stair in this bottom section this is not the way it works so the three different types of stairs are first of all the up stair now when you build an up stair in Dwarf Fortress you're really just taking it out of just the main section of wherever you're currently are looking it doesn't automatically connect you with the area above it doesn't connect you with the area below of course either so for look so when you actually get there constructing you're only taking this sort of stair out of this sort of area to make a down stair a of the you would actually need to go and designate this particular tile as a down stair area and so to make that a down stair area what it would then do is it would actually then create another stairway leading down in that in that top section and it would then get rid of all of the other bits and pieces from up in here as well so you'd end up with with a hollow area above for downstairs and in this set in this large gap area and then just the downstairs within connect to the upstairs so that way you would then go through so designating just a downstairs as a building as it as a designation where you actually channel it out gets rid of the gap in the main area and just puts it down stair in this particular portion to make an up down stair and like let's just say that we wanted this one to be an up down stair if we hadn't like if this was actually channeled out let's just say we're just dealing with designations at the moment because I haven't designated anything for going through here I can just designate a a up down stair at that point and actually get it to connect construct and up down stair that like in this particular one as well and so then I would actually have up down stair going both ways it still wouldn't do anything underneath underneath here if I wanted to then have enough an upstairs whoops hang on a second I would actually then just need to actually create a stair there which would then just replace that portion of the tile with an actual stair so that's how that would then work so you would still leave the floor intact in here this floor then be chopped down because it's an up down as well and then this one would be then worked so you've got to think in terms of these two different layers when you're doing any of this sort of work which can get a little bit confusing I guess but it is I guess just the way the way it works so when you've got just an upstairs or only dealing with sort of like your main area when you're doing with just a down stair you're dealing with this area here and up down stair works in both and it takes up the full tile so let's now look at something a little bit different let's look at channeling so let's just say that we give the designation to channel which is actually the H key by default so we're going to put a channel in in this area through in here so let's just say that we're sort of wanting to to work a channel in what a channel will do if you put it into a solid wall it will actually get rid of this area you will get rid of the floor and it will also get rid of this area under here so it's a fairly quick way to do Lux to strip-mine like if you wanted to sort of get rid of two Z levels in one go you would just go to the top layer somewhere in the top layer and then just give the channel command to just walk walk your way through and it will then get rid of both this one and the first of it will get rid of both the the main and the floor and then also the main of the one underneath it and of course if you you know do it for a couple of them it will get rid of say those two but then leave a ramp running up that other other slope it will leave a ramp basically wherever it finds that there's a wall or something else that it can actually get to on the other side so in fact this in this case if we did it it would actually end up with a ramp that goes this way as well so you'd end up with a ramp both ways so and if you then continued on over this way the ramp would disappear so this ramp here would actually go and you would end up with another ramp that sort of does this so that's sort of how that would actually then work if that was all sort of hollowed out so that's how channeling works if you sort of going across once again thinking in terms of this sort of like the main area that you're working on in the floor area gets rid of both the main the floor and the end the main underneath oftentimes though you actually don't have this main area often in just doing it on floor anyway so you're just actually working on a flat a flat surface in which case it just fits rid of your floor plus the main from underneath it hope that makes sense I hope that this is sort of helping I'm not going to talk for much longer about this I think that's pretty much it really but - then remove different things you then got to think about what you are impacting so let's just say that we have a steer that's actually in here and it's in fact let's make that a gap and we wanted to actually put a stair in there an up-down stair in here but we start the floor intact what we can do is we can use that we can construct an upstairs so we can actually you go to the build menu and construct an upstairs going up and then we can dig a downstairs going back down through to create our up downstairs so that's sort of how that would actually work Oh hope this is helpful yeah oh it's sort of confusing even trying to talk about it to be honest oh well all right this has made much sense thanks for watching

Channel: DasTactic

Views: 200,697

Rating: 4.9104142 out of 5

Keywords: dwarf fortress, df, bay 12 games, let's play, lets play, gameplay, game play, game footage, how to, tutorial, strategy

Id: x_21Y34Yx4c

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 12 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/swampthingOG]

Imagine a game so complex, it needs a tutorial on stairs

[u/clinodev]

/u/DasTactics is amazing, and while it's been rightly pointed out that his newer tutorial series is out of date, I'm not actually aware of any up to date comprehensive tutorial series (but I'd love to be shown I'm wrong!) I fairly regularly use that series to refresh my memory (the minecart tutorial episodes in particular have gotten a lot of play, lol.)

I do wish they were more active here!

[u/Garfriend]

I learned how to play watching all 70+ of his tutorial series.

[u/pondipat]

DasTactic fan here. He has some DF fun videos.

[u/jreddit0023]

DasTactic has a very good tutorial series, even it is somewhat dated. https://youtu.be/0SKS_3qV2Wk

[u/Scion-Of-Bacon]

Lol I've watched this video like 3 times in the past 2 years and I finally think I know what I'm doing lol

[u/stombion]

DasTactic taught me how to stair... and how to DF in general.

[u/tunathetitan]

I need one of these for mist generators

[u/MrZipar]

If you channel a spot, do you receive the minerals for 2 cells? Is it a method of strip mining 2x as fast?