Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MaxTheFox]

I see a distinct lack of a story for those self-induced horror stories.

For me it's this: I was making deathtraps in my fort, wired to levers. One of them was a lava trap that would spill lava all over the entrance (Fuck The World-style). I didn't have to use it for a while so I kinda forgot about it. I put the lever in a random hallway that saw a lot of traffic-- there would always be someone to pull it, I thought.
Time passed, a siege didn't come... my best warrior was outside hauling things from a caravan.

...

...

And then lava spilled all over him, killing him very quickly. A gremlin made its way to the hallway, which was close to the caverns. I completely forgot about gremlins pulling levers at random. Don't put such things near caverns, folks.

Share yours!

[Thisfox]

I just had a lava trap of doom get tripped but it wasn't the stupidest thing I've done. The classic !!Well!! everyone already knows about isn't mine but should be mentioned in a thread like this one. One of my favourite stories.

Probably my stupidest moment was reflooring the wagonroad into my fort while the merchants were visiting, so that they couldn't arrive. Or there's the time I accidentally let a werebeast dorf out when the merchants were visiting, and caused a loyalty cascade that ended the fort.

No, wait, I know what it was. Trying to freeze-breach an aquifer in a tundra and not forbidding some poor frozen miners socks.
...Every now and again, another dorf would have his (socks) become X(socks)X and go to replace them, and drown.... and then a month later, another dorf would have the same thing happen. We slowly, ever so slowly, drowned the whole fort before it became obvious why they were going in there and doing this.

Also, I've embarked on an aquifer fort with no rocks or anvil a few times. Seriously dumb, as I could not achieve mechanisms....

(edit: I also recommend the Facepalm thread, which has many many many years of dumb moments in it)

[Quarque]

Building an obsidian-casting trap for forgotten beasts, with cage traps in front of the entrance to prevent other wildlife from interfering..
First time I lure in a forgotten beast, a swarm of crundles stumble into the cage traps. Half my fort run off to retrieve them *now* and die to the fb.

[A_Curious_Cat]

My second fortress ever (which I think used the last version that still had circus tents).

I embarked in a good biome and found my dwarves and wagon on a frozen river between two cliff faces.

The first time I unpaused, the river ice melted.  “Your fort has crumbled to it’s end.”

So I reclaimed

The second time, the ice held, but my dwarves were slaughtered by unicorns before the could start mining an entrance.  “Your fort has crumbled to it’s end.”

And so I reclaimed again.

The third time, the ice held and I was able to start mining out a fort (of course, I also had my refuse pile underground but with one of it’s walls open to the outside in a mistaken belief that this would prevent miasma).  I then decided to use up-ramps (or was it stairs) to access to surface above.  In doing so, I hit an aquifer.  Due to the design of the fort, everything and everyone got swept not the river…

“Your fortress has crumbled to it’s end.”

[PlumpHelmetMan]

Man, I wish my first few forts could've crumbled in such an interesting manner. For my first couple games it was usually just everyone dying of dehydration or me getting overwhelmed by the intricacies of fort management and declaring ruin voluntarily.

[A_Curious_Cat]

The first time I tried adventure mode (back when you couldn’t customize your adventurer but had to go with whatever the game gave you), I thought it would be cool to have my adventurer go around shirtless.  So I had them strip from the waist up.

Then when I was going through the status screen, I realized that my adventurer was female…

[SQman]

I was an overseer in Breadbowl, a succession farm. I wanted to make paths on the surface, and I needed jet.

The mining area was that huge excavated caverns that contained noble quarters, and there was jet in a nook near the ceiling so naturally I began digging. I got a warning about wet rocks but I disregarded it for some reason that I cannot recall now.
The aquifer was pierced.

Water rushed into the cavern, and the dwarves rushed frantically to secure the main stairwell with nearby boulders. The original entrances to the houses if the nobles were soon lost to the flood. I had to make pipe-like corridors to top floors of the houses.

In the end everything turned out to be okay, and the nobles could watch swimming cave fish from their windows.

[bool1989]

I used Tower Cap hatches in my magma flow control system, when I was trying to lower the magma level of a volcano so that I could install a pumpstack.

Turns out Tower Cap isn't magma safe, and my mistake in believing it was, meant that the magma level was perminately lowered, so I wasn't able to use that Volcano the way I planned to, as there was unfortunately no water on site that I could easily use to 'recast' the obsidian walls.

Luckily I had a backup save, but I lost a day's worth of progress on that fort.