This game needs a much, much, much, much better tutorial. I literally have no idea how anything works.
The game tells me that putting too many faces in a row is bad. Ok, but how do I tell how many is too many? Do I just have to place more until something goes wrong?
Once a face is disabled, how the heck do I fix it? I tried making a 2nd upwards shaft, but apparently you can't dig up all the way to the surface, nor can you place a 2nd furnace. So I connected the new shaft to the existing shaft, but air won't flow there for some reason. What the hell am I supposed to do?
When I mess something up, how can I undo it?
I've had to read every sentence in the tutorial at least twice to make sense of it. I've read "Cloth carries air up a dead-end heading to its face." 7 times and still have no clue what it means.
Thank you, this is fair, and we are treating it as a bug report against the tutorial. Short answers from the game's own rules:
Too many faces: every face adds firedamp to the air passing it, so the air leaving the last face in a row carries all of their gas. A face stops when that air is over 2 percent, so how many fit depends on how much air the road gets. SAFETY LAMPS in the shop show each face's firedamp before it stops.
A stopped face starts paying again by itself as soon as its air is good. Feed the furnace (F), or use a door to send fresh air to it before it passes the other faces.
The second shaft: the surface cannot be cut, so a shaft you dig stops one row short and no fresh air can enter through it. The SECOND DOWNCAST in the shop sinks a real one from the surface and brings in a second current.
Undo: doors, cloth and overcasts come down free with the same tool. Roads and faces stay.
Cloth: a heading is a road that ends blind, and air will not go up it on its own. Cloth hung where it meets a through road turns part of that current up to the face.
(Our replies here are written with AI help.)
Thank you for spelling out where it lost you. 0.1.7 rewrites the How To around your questions.
It says what a road, a face and a heading are, and gives the gas rule as numbers: a Top or Main face needs 0.26 air, a Deep face 0.63, and faces in a row their sum. Point at a face, or tap it with the Face tool, to read its air. A withdrawn face restarts by itself once its air is clean; Furnace Up is the quickest fix.
Doors, cloth and overcasts come down free with the same tool; roads and faces don't. The surface can't be cut, so a shaft dug upward takes in no air, and the game now says so. The shop's Second Downcast gives a second current.
Cloth on the face at a dead end splits it in two: air runs in one side and out the other.