v50 Steam/Premium information for editors
  • v50 information can now be added to pages in the main namespace. v0.47 information can still be found in the DF2014 namespace. See here for more details on the new versioning policy.
  • Use this page to report any issues related to the migration.
This notice may be cached—the current version can be found here.

Tower (project)

From Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Revision as of 20:32, 22 April 2019 by Loci (talk | contribs) (+construction)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is about the current version of DF.
Note that some content may still need to be updated.

Not to be confused with necromancer's towers.

A tower is any vertical structure consisting of multiple levels of a similar shape stacked on top of each other, often connected by stairs.

Crossroads Inc.'s Roadtruss tower megaproject

As a player construction, a large tower can serve the same role as a below-ground fortress, but without the drawbacks of cave adaptation: all of its tiles being Light Above Ground, so the dwarves will always be exposed to sunlight. However, it takes a large amount of resources (usually stone or wood) to construct a tower; while a source of clay or green glass can alleviate this, it is still much less efficient than carving out a fortress entirely beneath the earth.

Usually, a tower is built from constructed walls, floors, and stairs, although on some levels (such as those being used for the barracks) walls may be carved into or replaced by fortifications. With sufficient planning, a tower can also be cast from obsidian or, in an appropriate biome, ice.

Construction

Because dwarves require an orthogonally adjacent tile to construct walls, creating a multi-z-level wall can be a logistical challenge. It is possible to use the floors provided by the lower level walls to construct the next level, though this requires staggering construction designations to build the walls farthest from an access point first. If you have an abundance of material (and plan to build floors on the inside anyway), you can use the implied floors from the walls below to construct an inner ring of floors, then use those floors to construct an outer ring of walls. Less resource-intensive temporary access can be provided by building one-tile-wide bridges as "scaffolds" around the interior.

Alternatively, staggering the tower walls can simplify construction:

     z              z + 1           z + 2    
...........                                  
..       +++++++++           
.........       ++       +++++  
.........       +     +       +     +  
.........       +     +       +     +  
....X....       +  X  +       +  X  +  
....O....       ++       ++O++  
.O.O.       +++++++++           
...........                                  
                                             
  .  ground                                  
    wall                                    
  X  stairs                                  
  +  floor provided by wall below            
    wall built last                         

This design lets you designate (almost) an entire level at a time using large swaths, allows multiple builders to work simultaneously without problems, uses fewer blocks and jobs, and requires no slow remove-construction jobs. It can be continued higher by alternating the top two levels.