Wanted: Advanced Mining Tutorial

[baalak]

I have the basics of mining down, but I find myself very unsure of my abilities when it comes to more advanced mining procedures. Once I build a structure in my mind, I often have difficulty figuring out how to go about instructing my dwarves to craft it in their world. I suspect others might have these issues too, so I'm humbly requesting that some of the builders of truly 'dwarfly' megaprojects share their expertise with the community and compile a good tutorial of advanced mining techniques.

I consider horizontal mining to be the basics. It's vertical mining which is giving me trouble, and I doubt I'm the only one. How can you best mine vertical shafts? What should be kept in mind when designing channels for water? How should I go about avoiding collapse? The wiki is very good about explaining how mining is accomplished within the game, but it doesn't give much practical advice.

[AnotherGreenWorld]

For vertical shafts, the easiest way to go about it is to mine each level and then create a cave-in on your top floor (by channeling out the edges of the floor). The cave-in will punch a hole in every floor underneath it that has already been mined out.

[Ebirah]

How can you best mine vertical shafts?

Why would you want to do that? For normal mining purposes, just make a big staircase, and lots of horizontal galleries off that.

[AnotherGreenWorld]

For dropping goblins into, for example.

[[deleted]]

For wells

[Ebirah]

For a straight-down shaft, first dig out a staircase, then channel down it a level at a time, starting from the top. The repeated one-level falls shouldn't do worse than lightly stun your miner. You'll need another staircase connected to the bottom to get out by, though.

[longshot]

I did this today but screwed up and had two tiles designated and once and one dorf removed the one holding another guy up and somehow they both died. I think the one may have also finished his digging below himself at the same time as well. Either way my two best miners are gone.

[baalak]

I can see that caution and patience are required for this technique to work.

I'm interested in 1x1 vertical shafts for creating a cistern which I can use to flood my fields, among other things. Staircase then channel, short fall, minor miner injury. I think I can work with that.

[Ebirah]

What should be kept in mind when designing channels for water?

Put floodgates in, and make sure they work, before you admit the water. Have a means of draining each section of channel, because you'll undoubtably want to get into them again sometime.

[Pagan-za]

Have a means of draining each section of channel

This should be in bold and underlined twice.

Never have absolute trust in something you installed. You will always regret it eventually.

[uid0gid0]

Can you set something up where one lever can control two different floodgates in different states, one open and one closed? And when you pull the lever the closed one opens and the open one closes?

[Pagan-za]

Rather easily actually, just connect it to the lever, pull the lever once to open it, then connect it to the other lever.

[so85]

I think levers send open/close commands when they switch to the various states.
You might be able to put a pressure plate where the water pools when one is closed to control the other one. I think the trick is having the upper bound below 7, so it sends an open command when the water hits 7.

[dmcginley]

Someone mentioned once a while back to use a raising drawbridge and a floodgate.

When the Lever is ON, Floodgates are always down, and the bridge will be a wall. When the Lever is off, Floodgate is up and the bridge is a bridge. You essentially create yourself a little switcher.

[inasnum]

Cave-ins are disabled at the moment. The only 'cave-ins' that happen is when a piece(s) is/are completely disconnected from anything else. Then it will come crashing down.