I tried to proceed to another floor and wound up stuck behind a piece of scenery (I believe it was a furnace of some description?) that had spawned right in front of the stairs. I was not allowed to go back to the staircase, or to move at all in fact. I managed to get out of it with a Potion of Spacial Distortion, but if I didn't happen to have one on hand, that would have been very troubling.
That's odd. While blocked hallways do happen from time to time in the game, stairs aren't supposed to be placed directly behind objects. Options for getting out of such a bind include skills with teleports, knockback attacks, or digging powers, which amounts to nearly 1/3 of the skills in the game, IIRC. Not that you'll always have them leveled up to the relevant ability at the moment you get stuck, but it's often a good idea to specifically include such a skill in your build and get it relatively early in your advancement. If you don't have the skills to get out, aside from the Spatial Instability Infusion, you might try one of the various knockback items, such as a Handy Wand or Concussion Bomb. If it happens again and you don't have the skills or equipment to escape, and you don't mind a slightly cheaty solution to your dilemma... Save your game and quit. Relaunch with the -debug-flag on*, and once you're back in the game, press Shift and "P" at the same time, which will teleport you back up to the previous floor. Save and quit. Reload the game without the -debug-flag. Then take a different staircase down so you don't get caught again. Personally, I consider the very slight danger of getting stuck somewhere to be part of the challenge of the game. The first character I ever got down to the "moonbase" on level 3 "died" to being marooned on an island when I drank an instability infusion. Them's the breaks when you drink mysterious potions. I let that one go because dying is fun. In your case, though, I would totally feel justified in using the debug flags to solve the problem. I mean, it just doesn't make any in-character logic that you can't go back up the stairs because the bottom of the staircase below and ahead of you is blocked. Clearly, that's a bug. *: The -debug-flag is a command line option you can give when launching the game. If playing with Steam, you can right-click on Dredmor in your Steam library, then select "properties". Somewhere in there you'll find an input field where you can type -debug-flag to enter debug mode the next time you load the game. If you aren't using Steam, there's various ways to use command line options depending on your system, and a quick google search of the topic should turn up the details for whatever platform you're on.
Thank you for the tip about the debug menu! I'll be sure to check that out if any more furnace/stair shenanigans crop up in the future. I mostly posted this topic to make sure that the game creators are aware that this bug even exists so they can act accordingly. While the whole thing was slightly worrisome, I'm not particularly upset about the issue. Games have bugs, it's a fact of life. EDIT: I am indeed using Steam, if that affects this bug report at all. Sorry for not specifying that right off the bat.
In light of this, I would like to suggest to the devs that the game be changed so that either both tiles of a staircase act as staircases (rather than just the frontmost tile) or so that the game drops you infromt of a staricase instead of on it.
