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v0.34:Construction
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Constructions are buildings such as floors, walls and stairs. They can be made of any solid material, wood, stone, metal or glass, and are accessed by pressing the build-Construction keys.
Unlike most objects accessed from the build menu, Constructions are treated as inert terrain features when completed, and can only be interacted with by look-ing at them or by pressing d-n to designate their removal. Using the query or task selection will give no information after the construction is completed, but will allow removal, suspension, and an idea of the current status before the Construction is complete.
Required labors
In order to make a construction, a dwarf with the appropriate labor is required. Wood requires carpentry; stone, glass, and soap require masonry, and metal requires any form of metalsmithing. No experience is granted when building constructions.
No labor is required for removing constructions - nobles and children can and will tear down walls given the opportunity.
Constructions and Designated formations
Constructions are similar to designated formations. However, unlike the walls and floors surrounding mined or channeled spaces, constructed walls cannot be smoothed or engraved. In order to construct smooth stone walls and floors, blocks need to be used in place of raw stone. Wood, metal, and glass constructions are not considered either rough or smooth, but in the case of wood, building with blocks will increase room value - metal bars have the same value as metal blocks and are thus interchangeable (though blocks may be preferred to simplify resource tracking), and glass can only be used in block form.
Order of Construction
Constructions are built in a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) order. That means that whichever Constructions are ordered first will be built last. Also, if there is a large group of Constructions being built, and a new set of constructions is ordered, the Constructions in progress will be ignored until the new constructions are finished.
Respecting the LIFO order is also necessary to efficiently and correctly construct multi-z-level walls.
See also Mega construction
Avoiding Entrapment
When building walls to close off portions of caves or mines, masons have a habit of standing on the wrong side and trapping themselves within. If this occurs, you can always have the mason remove a piece of the wall again to escape, using d-n to designate the removal as mentioned above.
To avoid this happening in the first place, know that masons have a preference on which side of their work target they will stand. Masons will stand on the side that is most orthogonal to the direction that they acquired the stone to build the wall with, even if it means stepping over the construction zone to build the wall. A stone to the south of a wall will cause that wall to be built from the south, even if other directions are available and are a "higher priority" direction (directional priority used for mining and deconstruction) or will result in entrapment.
Masons do not like to stand on a queued construction, though, and will try another position to get at their work. Planning the order of construction with this in mind, one can often avoid entrapment. If you want to override the mason's preferred side, designate another construction or other activity to occupy the space in question, then suspend that work. The mason will then avoid working from that space if at all possible. Remove the suspended job q-x after the desired construction is complete.
If the preferred location is a spot where a building is already present then a suspended construction is not an option for keeping the mason safe. In that case you will need to designate the areas that will trap the builder as a Restricted location d-o-r. Once the construction is completed, assuming the dwarf doesn't trap himself anyway, you can clear that traffic designation d-o-n. Be aware, however, that this does not always prevent the mason from standing on the wrong side of the construction.
A sure-fire way to prevent a mason dwarf from walling himself on the wrong side is to place a door on the tile where you DON'T want him to end up. It might be necessary to build extra two wall tiles in order to install that door. One can then simply forbid the door and the dwarf will have no option but to pick the remaining side from which to complete constructing the wall. If built underground, the excess door will also work as an alarm system since building destroyers, namely Blind Cave Ogres and Forgotten Beasts, can and will destroy these doors, prompting a warning message, alerting the player to their presence.
Destruction
Constructions are generally inert, resisting building destroyers, but will be destroyed if magma and water can interact in the square of the construction to form obsidian, or in a cave-in. Building and removing a construction can change the floor it is built upon to a default value, removing things like engravings and the "magma flow" floor above semi-molten rock.