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[Marlowe]

I have a fortress on a mixed Haunted tundra/Wilderness Taiga map. It's freezing. There's no aquifer, so no water. We are working on melting a pool with magma to create a cistern, but because of the slow speed of magma it'll take a long time for the well to be usable. So, short story, no water. We do have alcohol.

In autumn of the third year I get a rash of dwarves dying of thirst. They weren't wounded. They just stopped drinking alcohol and worked until they died. "Give water" tasks were created, and some of my other dwarves fetched buckets, but to no avail obviously.

The first few deaths seemed to be people who'd been working close to magma recently, and the magma forges are really far from the food stockpile. I wondered when it began if people were just taking too long to get to the stockpile for refreshment, and created a secondary drinks-only stockpile near the forges. However, as with the other times I've done this, only empty barrels turned up there (drinks-only stockpiles seem buggy).

In any case, as people started dying in the Dining hall, I abandoned this theory.

The deaths spanned the strata of dwarven usefulness. My second-best engraver, a good miner, and a furnace operator who was being groomed as an armourer were among the victims. So were a baby, a child, a peasant and an unemployed cheesemaker. All told we lost about ten dwarves to this. A heavy blow to a fortress that only had 57 population when it started. The losses in skills were even more severe.

Creepily, the deaths began about the time the yearly Dwarven caravan turned up, and stopped when it left.

We've had one previous case of this the previous spring, I'd been very annoyed at the time, but thought the victim must have been wounded and I'd simply missed it. Not so now. None of the dead gave any indication of trouble prior to the death notice, and only two died in their bedrooms.

It was extremely frustrating to have dwarves die on me in a random and inexplicable fashion. I almost abandoned in frustration. I've played through winter and into the next spring, and there's been no more incidents. But I don't know what's causing it and when it'll happen again.

Anyone had anything like this before?

[Marlowe]

[BUMP]

[Reasonableman]

This is most mysterious. Can you think of no way to replicate it?

[Weev]

If my memory serves correctly, Dwarves can die from heat, which means they can be hurt from heat.  Would it work in freezing temperatures as well?  It could be that they get a minor boo boo, which activates their "Clean water only" injury recovery function, and simply just die from dehydration.
Is your Trade Depot outdoors?

[Marlowe]

I see what you're getting at, but I doubt if a "minor boo boo" would keep a tough minor or engraver hurt long enough to get him to die of thirst.

The depot is topside, but under a roof. I don't know if that effects the temperature any. I REALLY don't think it's dwarves catching a chill while cycling goods through the depot though. I've had dwarves hunting, dwarves cutting wood, dwarves shooting goblins, dwarves fighting Skelks/Zelks/Skmuskox/Fire Imps and dwarves collecting the bits left over after performing said activities. These things all happen topside and don't appear to lead to mystery deaths.

EDIT: Although they do often lead to non-mystery deaths.

[Marlowe]

It's almost two years later and no repeat of the mystery plague. In fact, we've had no deaths at all since then. Even the hunter who lost consciousness while fighting a wolf and got torn up by it managed to get back up, break the wolfs head with his fire imp bone crossbow and had most of his injuries heal in the time it took him to walk back inside.

[sonerohi]

mayhaps the traders were all female and they beat the shit out of your dwarves after they wouldn't stop hitting on them?

[Jualin]

A while back I noticed my modded race of super-dwarves taking bleeding damage, even while inside. The only answer I was given as to how this could have happened was they were taking damage from the climate, the place being a cold, barren crack in the middle of nowhere, Snow Country.

I only noticed this after 2 dwarves died, but I also noticed that a couple of other dwarves had bleeding damage when viewed in Dwarf Companion.

I had given dwarves all the necessary tags so they could finish my massive construction within the space of year, [NO_DRINK], [NO_EAT], and all that to reduce anything that could take time away from the actual construction, so I never experienced any thirst-related deaths.

Also, I had no beds, it being rather early on. I have heard that removing all beds makes your dwarves ignore the rest task, but I assume if I had taken the time to make beds, the dwarves might have confined themselves to beds until their death.

[RavingManiac]

Could you have just... y'know... run out of booze?

If not, then I'm guessing that while you had booze, it was not in enough barrels for all the thirsty dwarves to use at once, thus some never got a chance to drink while they were beaten to the barrel by another dwarf. Drinking takes a ridiculously long time in DF, as a dwarf will eat a meal at a table twice as fast as he takes to gulp down some booze.

[Marlowe]

If not, then I'm guessing that while you had booze, it was not in enough barrels for all the thirsty dwarves to use at once, thus some never got a chance to drink while they were beaten to the barrel by another dwarf. Drinking takes a ridiculously long time in DF, as a dwarf will eat a meal at a table twice as fast as he takes to gulp down some booze.

That sounds like it. I did get down to about 10 booze shortly before the deaths occurred. I've kept my alcohol stocks over 100 since.

The trouble with Jualin's climate damage theory is that it doesn't explain a heavy number of deaths over a short time, then nothing.

On an unrelated note, Otor McJeweler was found mysteriously ripped to pieces today underneath a Hydra. Authorities are baffled.