v0.31:Stonegears/Digging

Before doing anything else, make sure to recenter on the wagon with F1.

Designations

You can do many useful things in your fort with designations. A designation means (for the most part) "a wide area order to your dwarfs to alter your site". You can access the designation menu using d from the main menu:

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

Press Esc to exit the designation menu

Lets use downward Template:Lways as an example (first making sure that the game is paused). Use j to select Downward Stairway, then move the X cursor to the south of the wagon. Press Enter, then move the cursor one tile to the east. Where you pressed Enter will be a blinking +, which is the anchor for the designation. Now move the cursor four more to the east, then five south, then hit Enter. There will now be a six-by-six area of downward stair designations (NOTE: don't unpause yet):

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

The anchor and the cursor act as opposite corners of a rectangle which gets filled in with the selected designation type (just hit Enter twice to designate a single tile). Note that the tiles containing trees have no designations, since you can't dig stairs if there's a tree in the way, and a designation command will only select tiles where the current order is appropriate. The only feedback you'll get on how a designation command went are the highlighted graphics in the closeup view and the brown shading in the map view; if no tiles were selected then you'll get no warning or error message.

Since designations are merely orders to your dwarfs, they're easy to undo if none of your dwarfs have carried them out yet (which they won't have, if you kept the game paused). If you make a mistake or changed your mind you can undo a designation with x to select Remove Designation. Since the stairs designation was just an example, we want to get rid of them all. Press Enter when the cursor is at one corner of the square of stairs, move the cursor to the other corner and press Enter again; all the designations will be gone. The remove designation mode can be used for more than just fixing mistakes. For instance, you could designate a large rectangle and then un-designate a small hole in the center, which would be easier than putting multiple separate designations up around a hole.

Cutting Template:Ls and harvesting Template:Ls

Each of your dwarfs can be doing a separate task independently of the others, so we'll set a few of them to working on the surface while two of the others dig around underground. Use t to select Chop Down Trees and move the cursor ten tiles northwest of the wagon. Press Enter, Shift-→ twice, Shift-↓ twice, then Enter. This will designate a 20x20 area around the wagon for clear cutting. You could select the entire surface for logging, but since your dwarfs are morons your lumberjack would go all the way to the northwest corner of your site and start cutting trees there, rather than cutting trees closer to the center like a sane person; this also has the advantage of being a smaller area to undesignate. Trees instantly turn into logs once cut without the need for further processing, and leave behind no stumps.

Now use p to choose Gather Plants and select the same area, to designate shrubs to be harvested. Note that "shrub" is really just shorthand for "wild growing harvestable plant", since shrubs can yield anything from strawberries to wheat to tubers.

Digging

Now we'll designate the real downstairs that we actually want (j), since our dwarfs are going to live and work underground. This time, however, we'll use the mouse. Clicking the mouse cursor over a tile will choose just that single tile for the selected designation, rather than defining a rectangle; dragging the mouse while holding down the button will select all the tiles the mouse cursor crosses. Note that the X cursor will just sit there, not moving in response to what the mouse cursor does.

Okay, we want a horizontal (west-east) row of three downstairs just south of the wagon (see the notes section for why three, and also for weirdness about digging through sand). Once you've designated them, use Esc to exit the designate menu, then press Space to (finally) unpause the game. Your lumberjack will pick up an axe from the wagon, your two miners will pick up their pickaxes, and then they'll go to work.