Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't know about the flies, but as to the second part: the best way to think of it, I've found, is to say that downward stairs are carved out of the floor, whereas upward stairs are carved out of the wall. Hence, if you carve a downward staircase, you won't have any material left in that tile to carve an upward staircase.

In any case, have you tried building an upward staircase (b-C-u I think) in that tile? IIRC, it should work, I've got a couple of upward stairs that were built over downward stairs.

I can attest from experience to the fact that water does push sideways, and that if you stand a dwarf in a column of up/down stairs and flood it with water from beneath, the dwarf will not move up or down any z-levels.

My first water tank had one wall about five z-levels up built entirely out of wood, which was bad since I desperately needed that for other purposes. Unfortunately, it was also full, and I hadn't come up with the idea of attaching one of my floodgates to a drain yet. I figured whatever, I'll designate those walls for removal and lose some peasants, no big deal.

Unfortunately, the fortresses' entire juvenile population decided to remove those walls when I wasn't paying attention. Three children died that day from the world's largest water slide, sans slide. Fortunately, one of them was the Duchess', which led to a festive centerpiece for my zoo. (I swear, the little buggers made it at least six squares over)

The second one was an external column I'd built to see if I could induce the U-Bend bug (I'd hoped it would fill my tank faster than pumping up from the river). Unfortunately it didn't work, so that chamber became my dwarf-killin' room. Draft the wounded, station them there, forbid the door and pull the lever - instant drowning. They never moved up any z-levels unfortunately.

The short answer to your question is "No."

The long answer is "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo."

If you're not getting new dwarfs, it's likely because you've been killing immigrants or caravans. If I recall correctly, you get new immigrants when the caravans bring back word of how well your settlement is doing; if they don't come back, the game uses the previous value for a few years, and then afterwards they forget about you. Also, the nation you come from gets news of how many dwarfs die in your town; if there's a high death rate, you get fewer migrants for a while. It sounds (from your 84 dead dwarfs) that this might be the case. You'll probably get new immigrants in a year. For now, enjoy the lag-free-ness!

Also, just as a side note, in my experience the population cap is a soft cap; my fortress that I've always been playing with a pop cap of 100 frequently has a population of around 110. I stop getting new immigrants until it drops back down.

[ January 30, 2008: Message edited by: Tacroy ]

I think you can view->inventory->mark for dumping. Otherwise, I know that going into Stocks and marking the item to be dumped works, but you have to have your stocks at maximum accuracy (which you should do as a matter of course - just avoid the stones category)

I've actually done a lot of work that involved pumping water back into water-generating tiles, and it works remarkably cleanly. The only caveat is that water will spread in a radius of about two tiles in every direction (including diagonals) before being absorbed, but the depth drops off exponentially. If your water source is  bordered by anything except for water sinks and blocked tiles, there will be flooding; however, if you only have one tile of water sinks, all the water will be absorbed except for a few puddles on the far side.

A possibly helpful diagram:

code:

---

w = water flows through these tiles
. = floor
# = wall
~ = water sink
#ww#
#ww#
.ww. <- these floor tiles will be flooded
~~~~
 #ww#
.#ww#. <- these floor tiles will be flooded as well
~~~~~~
#ww#
#ww#
~~~~
.... <- these floor tiles will be damp (water depth of 1 or 2, never more than that.)

---

Note: I am assuming that brooks and aquifers work the same way. If they don't, feel free to yell at me.