Bay 12 Games Forum

For example, in my fortress, the workshops are all in a "tower" sort of formation.  I have 8 stairwells connecting all the workshop levels to the stockpiles.  When I was digging magma chambers to go below my magma forges and smelters, the stones generated were causing my stonecrafter dwarves to take a really long route into the chambers to grab the stones.  I couldn't connect my normal staircases to the chambers because then I would have flooded the entire lower half of my fortress with magma.  I ended up forbidding all the stones to stop it.

This raises another issue with some of the solutions we've suggested here.  Each level of a fortress isn't necessarily connected (and rarely is).  Keeping the distances to staircases won't account for the fact that different staircases lead to different sections that don't connect.  This makes a practical solution trickier.  Although one thing does come to mind.  DF can already compute whether or not your trade depot is accessible and display the accessibility of every tile.  Rather than a simple binary "can get there" or "can't get there" state, it could keep the path distance to each tile (and for efficiencies sake it could possibly only compute this value for tiles within a certain distance.

I do, however, agree that this isn't a bug.  The dwarves do exactly what they're supposed to; it's just that what they're supposed to do is rarely the best.

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(And, as a programmer, I know how terrible it would be to run an A* search between every object and the target square just to generate a list.)

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That is true.  But in this case we don't really need a perfect solution.  An acceptable solution might be to simply compute the cost to reach each floor from the given workshop.  This has its own set of problems, though.  Dynamic things like drawbridges kind of throw a wrench into the whole process.

It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than what it is.  The problem came up when I was digging magma channels for my smelters.  I didn't want to dig staircases down to the channel from my main fortress, so I dug it starting at the vent.  As I got under my workshops, my dwarves started walking all the way out to the vent and down through the channel to collect stones to make their crafts.  I decided to just forbid everything down there, but it seems like an unnecessary step (since the craftsdwarves were ignoring the stone stockpiles near their workshops to walk down and grab stones 2 levels below them.

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You do make a decent point here, though.

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Except that, by that reasoning, simply mining out a hallway should reveal what's above you.  That's also assuming that when you dig, you actually do dig out the area up to the next type of stone.

I'm with ein Syndication here.  I've always considered floors to be half-way between z-levels.

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Originally posted by benoit.hudson:
<STRONG>They grab the "nearest stone" as measured if there were only one z-level, and no obstacles.

It's bloody annoying.</STRONG>

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Which is exactly what I said they weren't doing.  They weren't walking across my fortress and then back to grab a stone that was under them.  They were walking across the fortress to actually grab a stone that was nowhere near them.