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[lorem ipsum]

I'm pretty sure that everybody had at least one failed fortress when they were figuring out the game.
For mine, i only had 6 squares of garden. I disregarded the messages "Urist McStarving cancels make wooden barrel, hunting vermin for food" as a preference for large cockroaches more than a shortage of plump helmets.
whether by carp, flooding, or *gasp* drought, I challenge you to remember the first seven dwarves and their terrible, terrible, fates.

[etgfrog]

lets see...first fort i had was lost due to starvation...this was before dwarfs would go eat bugs for food...

[Vanaheimer]

I believe mine was a flood?

"Damp stone? Eh, keep digging you useless sod."

*WHOOOSH*

"...FUCK."

[TheBeardyMan]

I had just dug out a few rooms, when I breached an underground pool. The breach was above the water level, but that didn't bother the snakemen who popped out and ripped all my dwarves to chunks.

[lazygun]

Boredom!

It was one of the early 3d versions of DF. At the time, my only PC was a really creaky 400 MHz thing. Frames per second? More like seconds per frame! Even so, I could see the attraction of the game and I kind of let it run all day, checking back every 1/2 hour or so to see if anything interesting needed to be done.

I was happyhappyhappy when the first Mac version came out

My second fort - I built a well several z-levels below its water source

[wierd]

My first sting of the madness which is DF was in the 40d era.

My first fortress was dug into a mudstone hillside, after reading several primers and the wiki. I abandoned the fortress after it reached a population of 40 or so, due to boredom.

Savescummed out of fear after reading about insanity, and having one of the initial 7 have a secretive mood. (I still chuckle about that from time to time...)

Subsequent fortresses have all been various attemps at grand architecture that have died due to filesystem corruption, crashes during saving operations, or having the usb stick they live on travel through the laundry.

I have yet to see the "you had fun" dialog, despite several years of play time

[raptorfangamer]

Buzzards.

Spoiler: SPOILAHS! but proper fort (click to show/hide)

But my first proper fortress had me uncovering spoilerite and releasing the clown car, I thought some doors would stop them.
First they removed the lives of the miners who were down mining stuff.
Then I sent my militia thinking I would stop them with iron clad unskilled conscripts (that had bone helms)
After that I decided to open my failsafe which was at first sealing my fort from the outside by flooding the inner access, but I pulled the levers so it flooded
And I forgot I had a pressure plate that closed on gob and water step.
And I didnt know clowns couldnt drown.
Soon my entire fortress was purged, they didnt automatically target to the living quarters, and some survived.
And then a caravan arrived, but I didnt care about them.
The only survivor was the mayor and a cat, I wanted to get him to engrave the last bits of story of the fort (since by that time I learned trough the wiki that engraving could get some of the fort story carved into stone), but I didnt know how to set labors at that time.
He was getting hungry, and unlocked a door to get him to eat.
The cat alerted the clowns when it went trough the door and my fort soon died.

[KodKod]

My very first fort was brutally murdered by a bloodthirsty aquifer. Then again it was built on a marsh on the middle of an island with no neighbours, so looking back on it I don't consider it to have been much of a loss.

My first proper fort when I actually had a clue what I was doing was killed by diagonal movement, specifically of the goblins-through-wall-previously-thought-to-be-intact variety.

[NW_Kohaku]

The new version (0.31.01) came out.

Before starting my first fortress, and while setting up and running it, I religiously went over the wiki, so I didn't have any major catastrophes.  I only lost around 7 dwarves the whole fortress, and it lasted about 16 years, and I got the queen.

Then it got buggy because of a siege where units were standing off-screen that never entered or left the map properly, so it never ended.

I still keep it around, though.  It's the fortress that has the most meaning to me.  It's much uglier than my other forts, just because I made so many newbie design mistakes as I was testing out the system, so it has old, walled-over entrances, some strange pits, an open-air pit park that has no trees, an unfinished mega aquaduct system that "flushed" into the chasm, and a megagenerator for an unplanned megaproject that was to be fed by the underground river when I finally tapped it. 


EDIT
As for the first seven dwarves, they were all still alive.

Sunny was the mayor, and Luna was the Bookeeper/manager.  Sunny was the sociable and optimistic type, while Luna was diligent and intellectual but anti-social, and they were also best friends.  Luna had a fondness for the red-winged grackles or some odd red-winged bird and rings, while Sunny had a thing for adopting every cat in the fort and goblets. Backpit was my first miner and eventually engraver, and he was eventually Sunny's husband.  Easy Sol was the farmer, and he was married to the mechanic... whose name I'm not coming up with.  I can unfortunately only remember those four of the starting 7, but I had several more important names from that fort that I can remember, like Lady Zon the Dungeon Master, or Silverboots, the head of the military who died taking down the legendary marksgoblin general and about 7 of his compatriots with a baby in one hand, her crossbow in the other, and her daughter right behind her in the middle of combat.

I don't agree with the way many people treat forts and dwarves as expendable.  The game only has meaning when the dwarves have meaning.

[tahujdt]

Mine ended because I'm digging, doing good, doing all the things a good n00b does, when all of a sudden:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

An ambush! Curse all friends of nature!

Turns out my civ was at war with elves, and I didn't know to check that. I was thinking, "Gosh, I didn't realize I needed a military so early!"

[runlvlzero]

Goblins and the ensuing tantrum spiral, plus a few more goblins when it was down to two sane dwarfs and the gates had not even been repaired. One got killed the next season while hauling corpses to the crypt, the other hid in his bedroom and died there.

[rtg593]

Ambush killed my fisherdwarf, everyone else immediately tantrumed. Guess he was popular.

[Nonsequitorian]

I believe mine was a flood?

"Damp stone? Eh, keep digging you useless sod."

*WHOOOSH*

"...FUCK."

This so hard. Exactly like this

[zehive]

Well most of them I quit from frustration before anything actually killed me, so my first REAL death was when I underestimated the HFS and got destroyed

[SkyRender]

I've never once had a fort die of starvation.  It helps that the first thing I did when I realized how complex DF is was look up how to handle food production on the Wiki.

My first fort "died" to a combination of boredom and frustration.  I was introduced to the game via the infamous LP fort Boatmurdered, yet began with one of the late 3D versions (I think it was 38a).  Meaning I thought it was a 2D game still, and had planned for it accordingly.  After having dug up a good portion of the entire area available to me and not finding a single underground river, chasm, or magma flow, I figured I was missing something (especially since one of my Dwarves appeared to be somewhere that didn't "exist"; he was actually just at a different height level, of course) and quit the game.  Then I read on the Wiki about elevation levels, and man was that an eye-opener...  That fort got deleted FAST, let me tell you.