Any ideas why can't I build a metal door? (originally a rant titled "Why can't I build THIS time?")

I realized my first draft had become a rant when I mentioned my fermenting vat, so trying again.

I managed to dig down from my basement to find the source of the constant screaming I heard. Now I have a nice neat ladder to a subway line, and killed the irritating shouting mutant, but there are two sludge crawlers down there in an eternal wrestling match, so I want to build a metal door to keep the other dog from jumping down there. Why is it I can’t get them to attack a spider, but I can’t keep them from attacking 2 sludge crawlers on another Z-level?

Right. Not a rant.

So I gather everything I need according to the recipe, at least to build the metal door frame, which might just level my fabrication to build the door, but it says I can’t construct there (in the wall opening). I thought maybe it doesn’t it like the dirt floor so I get what I need to build a scrap metal floor (don’t have concrete). Can’t do that either. I guess I can’t build a scrap floor next to a concrete floor? Or is it building a scrap floor over a dirt floor it doesn’t like? I read about people building crazy ingenious things, but I can’t put a door in an opening in a wall?

Right. Not a rant.

Any ideas on what I’m missing to build my door?

And while we’re at it, any ideas on how to bring a German Shepard up a ladder? Stupid dog.

You’d probably be able to get the dog to attack the spider if the spider was actively hostile (as far as I know “hostile” creatures are hostile to everything not of explicitly friendly “factions”). Once the spider tries to attack you the dog would probably attack it.

I believe the ability to tie a leash to animals and lead them with it has been implemented, and this may or may not work to get the dog to follow up (I haven’t played a version with it implemented).

A very cumbersome alternative would be to build a “vehicle” with an animal container (there’s one for large animals such as cows, but I think there’s also a dog sized one), load the dog into the container, remove the container from the “vehicle”, haul it up the stairs, mount it onto another “vehicle” and let the dog out. I don’t know if the dog would be released when the container is removed from the “vehicle” though.

When it comes to doors, they may require adjacent “proper” walls (note that I’m guessing here).

Thanks PALU. I think you’re probably right about the spider, and I’ve just discovered that my friendly NPC works the same way. Zombies are all in with their attacks, and so is the NPC in response. When I was attacked by mutants and spiders in my basement subway, though, they would run away when hurt bad enough, and the NPC would immediately stop attacking them. That’s good to know, if only to always have a pistol available to finish them off rather than letting them heal and come back with friends.

Dogs can be led by a leash in experimental builds. It works OK but it is definitely still a bit buggy. The dog whistle works well to make dogs stop attacking, and less so to come close to me. It is how I got the dog away from the sludge crawlers. I could then tie the dog in a spot away from the fighting monsters until I figured out how to get it back up the ladder. The dogs will follow you up and down stairs no problem. This is a ladder though, and the dog either can’t climb it, or it won’t follow me up with the sludge crawlers fighting 3 tiles away.

But you were right about your answer to that problem as well. There’s a pet carrier. I searched my piles of stuff for ‘pet’, and discovered I’d picked up something called a ‘petpack’ somewhere. It’s a pet carrying backpack. A little soap and water and dog rescued!

The door thing is (was) just sad. The build menu says I can build it in open spaces (no walls at all). It says I can build it in existing doorways with existing wooden doors. It says I can build it in the basement, just not in the opening between the walls. I have a 3 tile tunnel to my stairs down to the subway: the basement wall tile that I broke through, a second tile, and the end tile with my stairway to the subway which comes out as a ladder on the bottom (for some reason it wouldn’t let me build my stairs in a 2-tile tunnel, or maybe I only checked “mine downstair”, not “dig downstair”). Anyway, after dragging away everything in the entire 3-tile tunnel, I found that I could build the door (or a junk metal floor) in the middle tunnel tile, so that’s what I did.

I think the software thinks that the first tile, where the old basement wall was, already has something constructed there, and so can’t put something new there. When I first dug through the wall, it created a deep pit there, which I filled in after I fell in. Maybe the program now considers that a filled pit … and after writing that I go and check and discover that, indeed, that tile contains a shallow pit. I didn’t fill it in all the way. DOH! So I filled it in all the way, and now I can construct things there.

The nice thing about my rants, is that they are almost never justified.

And a good thing about your rants is that you didn’t just rant, but went back to investigate things further when the steam pressure had been released down to a safe level…

It’s also good that you described what you did so others can benefit from it (the opposite of the useless “Never mind, I solved my problem” posts).

1 Like