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[Leonidas]

I had always heard that a falling creature took no damage if it fell onto another creature. Recently I had cause to question that.

I have a long vertical shaft down the center of my fortress. I built some grates in key spots, and hooked them to levers. Foolishly I trusted in traffic zones (d-o-r) to keep dwarves off the grates. I loaded up a game, fiddle around for a minute, and get a tragic message about a dwarf learning the effects of sudden deceleration.

So I crash it and reload. I wanted to see what happened. And there in the shaft, around z 90, is a falling dwarf. He'll hit bottom at z -10. Maybe he's into base jumping.

So I decide to be clever. I decide that I can save this base-jumping dwarf. I delete my meeting zone and put a 1x1 meeting zone in the splatter square. Then I find some idle dwarves and herd them into a 1x1 burrow. And that part works. When Urist McFreefall reaches z -10, there is at least one dwarf to catch him, along with lots of spare stones and various garbage.

But it doesn't work. The falling dwarf breaks into pieces and scatters all over the place.

Is the conventional wisdom wrong on this? Do creatures no longer cushion the falls of other creatures? Or was this an unusual situation, and the general rule still holds?

[Urist Da Vinci]

I retested this in the arena. When a creature falls on another creature, both are uninjured and both fall to the ground. The creature that fell is also stunned, but not the creature below.


In your case, there was probably no-one beneath the falling dwarf at the moment of impact.

[Nivim]

 He did say there was at least one dwarf...were all those dwarves lying prone? It might be possible that the same effect that allows any number of units to be in the same square while prone also takes them out of check-list for impact. There's also the small possibility that Toady set it up so if there's a mountain of junk in the square, falling units hit and explode on that junk.

[Leonidas]

I can send you the save file. I tried it several times. I really wanted to save that dwarf.

Maybe it's the garbage in the square, but I think it's more likely the height of the fall. It's over 100 z levels. Maybe the creature at the bottom provides a cushion, but not an infinite cushion.