Guru meditation request: underground floor height

Game Talk The Lab
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I constantly ask the main issue to myself - where dwarfes (in the dwarf fortress 2 game) put soil when they dig the courses?

and still a question already to our game - and why all Earth on game model inside made from stone?
that is if we dig out a ladder that down we will appear on the horizon where we have entirely a stone. whether it is possible to make with it something, to correct the world generator that he generated on the underground levels not only a stone. no, the stone let will be. but not nevertheless from a stone where throw a look.

in passing a question and as we build wells with water if we use only a shovel and we never use a pick, for pass of the stone horizon we by all means need a pick if to trust an idea of the creator of a game who claims that at once the layer of fertile soil is followed by a stone layer.

game use height mode - z-coordinate. what is laudable. and here the dimension on Z at us is unrationed, so it turns out. I mean a underground part of Earth. above the ground everything is caused by height of walls on the floor.

can be, the time who writes a game to the chief gurus to sit down in a circle to spend the guru meditation. and to make the strong-willed decision - the earth from a stone or not and what height at the underground floor?

and from this - if “Earth is from a stone” - then buildrecipes MUST use pickaxe for dig water-wells. because we need to somehow dig wells through the stone.

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AFAIK Toady made an explicit decision to not bother with soil moving, only dealing with a tiny fraction of the stone deposits to at least make the workflow resemble real mining. In the same vein (heh) he made digging itself orders of magnitude faster than reality, so the system is overall consistent, if fictitious.

For DDA, digging effort is more representative of reality, but we don’t deal with moving soil or stone around at all. The first is a policy decision, the second is a lack of interest and implementation. If someone PRed a reasonable system where digging produces tailings that you have to move around and stash elsewhere, I’d merge it. Off the top of my head, the simplest thing that seems like it would work would be to designate where to place your tailings after digging when you start, and we would create a “pile of soil” or “pile of rock” terrain there when the digging is completed. The low-effort implementation of this would require the target area to be “flat”, and piles would not be “flat”, so if you keep digging you end up having to keep moving further away to place your soil or rock.

Likewise, we don’t have a stone layer because tunneling isn’t that useful in DDA because it takes so much effort, so it’s not even reasonable to get that far. Again, no problem adding bedrock, the initial implementation could just forbid digging entirely, with a dig through rock action requiring rather heroic levels of effort.

It looks like regolith depth is pretty variable, I was able to track this down:

https://daac.ornl.gov/SOILS/guides/regolith_soil_sediment_thickness.png(image larger than 3072KB)

From eyeballing that, it looks like most of New England has 5-10m of regolith, with up to 25m around coasts and major rivers. If we say DDA has 10m of soil deposits it skirts the issue entirely, because z-levels only extend 10m underground right now.

As for wells specifically, this gnarly search indicates that there are ~5,000 sites in Massachusetts with well depth under 30’, so I think we’re fine there.

IIRC DDA labels all underground areas as “rock”, so that’s actually backwards, but in practice we treat it like soil, so it works out :smiley:
I don’t see a pressing need for DDA to handle the soil/rock transition unless someone decided to build a df-alike in the dda engine, because in dda proper there’s just no reason to dig that much.

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A z-level can be safely said to be about 2m.

While it still sometimes has to be “as big as it needs to be” because there are edge cases (landing on a tiny critter, deep mines), a single building story is the most important measure and most other examples are relatively close to it.

Z-levels don’t have those pesky common horizontal cases like running (<3tile/6sec) vs driving (tile=16km/h*6s=26.6m) vs car length (<1m) vs sight/hearing range (>10m). Those are all important and common, so there can be no single sane approximation of a tile width.
For z-levels, we have human height (<3m), building story (>2m), car height (quarterpanel could be about 1.2m). Maximum is close to 2*minimum and most examples are about ~1.8m. Trees are an outlier, but can be handwaved as “they are supposed to be 4+ z-levels, this just isn’t implemented yet and you only see the trunk”.