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[Quantum Toast]

Turns out that if water gets poured down a pipe and can't get out the bottom, it overflows. Who knew?

Also turns out I should've had more doors between the waterworks and, well, everything.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

My most recent fort I started clearing out a courtyard so I could set up a safe outdoor farming area and trade depot. I dug halfway through it before realizing that there was still a dirt ceiling over it(how does a 10x10 tiles of dirt stay up anyway?!?) and switched the remaining designation from dig to ramps. Only I forgot that didn't take care of the ceilings that were already there.

So my miner dug the supporting walls into ramps, landing that 10x10 square of dirt ontop of her, crushing her to death instantly. Nevermind that dirt somehow crushed her, instead of breaking apart. So... one of my 7 dwarves was dead. Well... I guess I could turn my expedition leader, who was a trader, into a miner... I won't need him all the time, after all.

So after making sure there was no overhanging dirt to fall on my trader, I started digging the ramps out again. I did forget to clear out the trees, however... and a tree fell ontop of my expedition leader. He died. I was down to 5... Farmer, Mason, Carpenter, Metalsmith and Woodcutter. I needed all of them and didn't have anyone to spare for a miner. Not to mention both picks had been crushed. I don't like savescum, but I didn't see any way I could continue that fort without starting over. 

[Dragula]

Hahaha, this thread makes me happy. Seeing that I'm not the only one that does moronic stuff on occasions.

[Fossaman]

Not a mistake per se, but I once hooked up about a thousand mechanisms to various objects in the process of building a megaproject fort based on an incorrect assumption about fluid mechanics. I was fortunate enough to abandon that fort before actually flooding things and trying it out. I only discovered the error when I used the same flawed technique on a small scale in a later fort.

For the record: Screw pumps will not pump water if there's nowhere for the water to go. I don't know why I thought they would.

[csebal]

For the record: Screw pumps will not pump water if there's nowhere for the water to go. I don't know why I thought they would.

They used to do that AFAIK, but that behavior was changed a while ago in a patch.

[Shurikane]

When aesthetics go bad...

While preparing for Project Superbowl, I drew up a sketch of my vision.  I was planning to have a circular bowl surround a magma pipe.  To allow some space, the bowl would have to be a bigger circle than the pipe itself.  With that in mind, I got to work.

Only, when it came time to set up the initial foundations, I completely forgot about my sketch and instead tried to follow the line of terrain as well as I could to facilitate building, taking twists and turns as needed.  I placed the glass blocks, dug out the spaces and the thing was nearing completion of its first phase.

I opened Visual Fortress and realized that my structure was UGLY LIKE SIN.

Superbowl was, in 3D, a mishappen amphitheater with nothing close to the circle shape I had envisionned.

I grew so disgusted with the fort that I abandonned it immediately.

[Itnetlolor]

When aesthetics go bad...

While preparing for Project Superbowl, I drew up a sketch of my vision.  I was planning to have a circular bowl surround a magma pipe.  To allow some space, the bowl would have to be a bigger circle than the pipe itself.  With that in mind, I got to work.

Only, when it came time to set up the initial foundations, I completely forgot about my sketch and instead tried to follow the line of terrain as well as I could to facilitate building, taking twists and turns as needed.  I placed the glass blocks, dug out the spaces and the thing was nearing completion of its first phase.

I opened Visual Fortress and realized that my structure was UGLY LIKE SIN.

Superbowl was, in 3D, a mishappen amphitheater with nothing close to the circle shape I had envisionned.

I grew so disgusted with the fort that I abandonned it immediately.

You know in VisFort you can change the block heights right? Provided the Z-level forms looked incorrect. Nice to know if you're making 3D spheres or vertically round areas.

The circle chart picture is also a great help when it comes to making round edges or circles.

[Shurikane]

The problem was deeper than simple block height - in my case, the arc of circle I wasn planning to make (seen from above) ended up looking more like an amoeba. 

[Danjen]

Reading of the map data resulted in an exception.

Exception type:
Overflow exception

Overflow exception in a flooded fort? Hahaha, the irony is epic!

[katyrnyn]

Biggest mistake I ever made?  I started playing Dwarf Fortress.
 

Seriously, though, the last big mistake I made was in one of my early forts well over a year ago.  I built this really nice, 10+ z-level waterfall chamber.  Worked like a charm, except that Dwarf Fortress water doesn't follow the law of conservation and the system overflowed.  Quickly.   

The mistake?  The lever to shut the system off was on the same level as the "gallery" for the waterfall chamber.  And the entrance to that level was in the waterfall chamber.   Much fun ensued when I ordered the lever to be pulled. 

[Aspgren]

Second biggest mistake:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Not paying attention while rebuilding the top floor of a tower. Suddenly there's a cavein.

Have you ever had a cavein on layers of constructed floors? It tears through them creating a hole across Z levels. Like the acid in alien. Before I knew what had happened there were dust clouds on all 5 stories. A child and many animals were crushed. A bin of iron armor was destroyed and half the god damned population were knocked over. One of them into a well.

In the end the death toll wasn't so high. It was 2-3 dwarves because of the cavein. The seriously wounded were about the same number. It crippled alot of war dogs though and one dwarf went melancholic afterwards.

Well... Lesson learned.

Edit: I just remembered an early and much worse mistake. I didn't bother to look up my foodstores or how to harvest fish. I didn't have ANY other source of food and due to large amounts of skeletal hippos around I was building walls left and right instead of making farms.

By the time I realised it, it was too late. I had tons of fish but nothing edible. I finally understood and I ordered animals to be butchered and fish to be cleaned - but it was no use. All dwarves cancelled their tasks to hunt vermin. The entire population perished and the skeletal hippos didn't have anything to do with it. Well.

Okay the skippos killed any caravan that dared approach me so that's also why there wasn't any food.

[gtmattz]

Biggest mistake I ever made?  Googling 'dwarf fortress' after hearing about it from a random source...  Now my wife hates me, my kids want for my attention, and all my RL friends think I have gone bonkers... ("WTF is that on your computer? Is that a GAME???") 

[Falconer Lombard]

Building a new fortress, found a nice 1*2 area with forest, sand, a magma pipe, flux, iron, and only one aquifer. Unfortunately it was also evil, but on a tiny island I figured this was a non-issue. Big mistake, zombie whale ate all my dwarves except one who sealed himself off in a tiny part by making a wall. It actually went well for him for a bit. Coming out of hiding with a passage built up to the food stores and quickly building a wall to seal that entrance before the whale got to him. Flooded some areas with the aquifer for farming and had a nice place for him to live. Then he went into a strange mood and went crazy since there was no glass for him.

Fare thee well Endok. You were my coolest dwarf.

[pushy]

One classic big mistake from the 2D days was accidentally removing a support in a 7x7 or larger room and forgetting to replace it, thus getting the inevitable cave-in, typically in my dining hall or meeting hall

In 3D, I had a huge area dug out intended to be a meeting area, but I hadn't set up the zone yet. I decided to channel out the ceiling so that my dwarves wouldn't get cave adaptation while standing around gossiping. As the meeting area was empty, I decided it'd be quicker to set up a controlled cave-in by channeling out the edges only so that the centre would collapse into the empty room, rather than digging out one row/column at a time.....only problem was that I forgot that in the two floors below the meeting area I'd already dug out a dining room and food stockpile room which were hives of activity (and the dining room was serving as a temporary meeting area). My "controlled" cave-in went right through the meeting area's floor, right through the dining room's floor and into the food stockpile's floor.