Dwarves absolutely refuse to haul wood. Please help!!

[krayy]

I've read many forum posts looking for a solution and nothing applies. I have a stockpiling zone set to gather wood. I've tried making new stockpile zones with all items allowed. i've ticked and unticked whether to only gather from certain stockpiles. I've looked in work orders and ticked/unticked the setting to ignore wood gathering. I've set the zone to disallow barrels, I've messed with how many wheelbarrows are allowed to be in the zone. I've set some dwarves to ONLY do hauling. I haven't set any burrows so that's not the issue.

What options do I have? My fortress is coming to a standstill because I cant gather wood, it's infuriating.

I should mention that my dwarves were gathering wood ok until one day they just stopped. I can't say what changed, other than re-making the staircase that leads to the surface.

[Instigator]

Will they still go to the surface to gather plants or fish or something?

[Sinclair]

Can the dwarves access the surface? Perhaps the game somehow messed up your staircase and it's no longer traversible. A properly carved staircase should have up/down stairs on all levels except the top and bottom one. If you see any level along its run where there are either stairs going only up, or only down, the dwarves will not be able to walk past that level.

[Teemo]

Dwarves generally do jobs based on proximity when they have multiple competing jobs with the same priority to them. What this means is that wood hauling is very low priority for most dwarven forts because those logs are sitting outside (which dwarves don't like going outside), and pretty far from lots of other jobs they could be doing. What I would recommend if you want a higher priority on getting wood brought in, do these steps:

1) Dig out and place a wood only stockpile just inside your fortress, near to the exit to get to your trees.
2) Designate a burrow outside that encompasses the area that you chop trees down, and also encompasses this stockpile you made.
3) Assign 2-3 dwarves to the burrow.

After doing 1-3, those dwarves assigned should have very few jobs they can still do other than hauling the logs outside to the stockpile you created inside.

4) Go to the stockpile(s) you actually want to store the wood and make a link saying they can take wood from the stockpile just inside your fortress.

Now, those logs scattered all over the map outside will be in a better location for your dwarves to move farther into your fortress. Also, whenever you don't want those 2-3 dwarves to be outside collecting logs, just open up that burrow you created and suspend it and they will go back do doing all the other jobs. When you're ready to clear another section of forest, activate the burrow again.

[krayy]

Ok update for you all. Turns out the stair's leading up to the surface, didnt actually lead up to the surface. Some old stairway down looked like it was connected - but it wasnt. There were some holes in the surface floor that dwarves were using instead, but I covered them up with floor tiles - leading to about 20 dwarves outside dying of dehydration.

I appreciate all your responses very much! I feel like a bit of a tool but I'm sure you can imagine how it really seemed like that staircase was working. I've decided to just start a new fortress and organise it better this time

[Instigator]

Originally posted by krayfish(she/her):

Ok update for you all. Turns out the stair's leading up to the surface, didnt actually lead up to the surface. Some old stairway down looked like it was connected - but it wasnt. There were some holes in the surface floor that dwarves were using instead, but I covered them up with floor tiles - leading to about 20 dwarves outside dying of dehydration.

I appreciate all your responses very much! I feel like a bit of a tool but I'm sure you can imagine how it really seemed like that staircase was working. I've decided to just start a new fortress and organise it better this time

No worries. This is a big part of dwarf fortress. Things start going not according to plan and you have to suss out why. Unfortunately there's not great tools for identifying pathfinding problems.

[Teemo]

Originally posted by Instigator:

Originally posted by krayfish(she/her):

Ok update for you all. Turns out the stair's leading up to the surface, didnt actually lead up to the surface. Some old stairway down looked like it was connected - but it wasnt. There were some holes in the surface floor that dwarves were using instead, but I covered them up with floor tiles - leading to about 20 dwarves outside dying of dehydration.

I appreciate all your responses very much! I feel like a bit of a tool but I'm sure you can imagine how it really seemed like that staircase was working. I've decided to just start a new fortress and organise it better this time

No worries. This is a big part of dwarf fortress. Things start going not according to plan and you have to suss out why. Unfortunately there's not great tools for identifying pathfinding problems.

So one thing I do with my fortresses is use ramps instead of stairs as I go down into the earth, specifically 3 wide ramps. This way if I want to eventually relocate farther into the ground, I already have a path all the way down to a new depot location, and secondly it means I never run into strange stair issues and lack of access.

[keyface]

I don't know if it is still true, but also remember notes saying that ramps are faster for hauling than stairs.