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[Madventurer]

You have already found many problems for this, but the biggest is, WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT ALREADY!?

[SkillageFTW]

The walling off a vampire is really a possible idea:

-they can survive indefinitely

-IF you make the room nice enough to give happy thoughts they will be able to survive indefinitely, indefinitely!

Vermin and other things aren't a problem if you have their favorite material engraved and statued...
The problem is, it is random what their favorite material will be!

[Leafsnail]

Barring walling up a vampire indefinitely, there is always a way for the RNG to kill you. Even vermin can cause unhappy thoughts.

You can do things to put your happiness through the roof, though.  Vermin wouldn't put much of a dent in that.

[Karakzon]

Does raw glass count as an uncut gem for mood purposes?

No. Moods specifically ask for types of glass, or for gems, and don't take one for the other.
=Uncool-

Problem:
You can cast obsidian, dig it out, then cut the rock into gems. and yes, cut rocks count as gems.
infinate gem and stone solved in one go.

[Leafsnail]

Do they count as uncut gems, though?  Surely cut obsidian would be a cut gem.

[Steb]

Can coffins not be recycled? And since ghosts die of old age now we need only entomb those dwarves whose ghosts are, so to speak, "alive." Once a dwarf has been dead for [MAXAGE] years the skeleton can be dumped and the coffin re-used.

If not, can we not build an infinitely tall tower, filled with coffins/slabs, using obsidian?

[CodexDraco]

You have already found many problems for this, but the biggest is, WHY AREN'T YOU DOING IT ALREADY!?

Because forever is hell of a lot of time, and it's impossible to verify you have succeeded. Plus, shooting mine arts to goblins is way funnier.

[Kofthefens]

Let a vampire get a mood. Once it is complete, cage it, wall it up, you're good.

[Niyazov]

What's the oldest fortress on record? Barring vampires, it would probably be worth a laugh to run a 1x1 walled pocket world plump helmet eating + well drinking fort hands-off for a couple of days. As dwarves die there will be nobody to farm unless labors are assigned through some sort of scheduled external keypress macros, though. Berserking from failed moods also will be an issue in a hands-off game but traps can probably deal with it.

I'll try this tonight and report back when the fort crumbles. I'll change announcement settings to prevent pauses. For simplicity I'll embark on an island to cut down on caravan traffic. Is there anything else that I ought to consider for a hands-off fortress? This experiment can't really prove that a fort can survive indefinitely but it should be able to find unexpected limiting factors.

 I imagine that one hard cap on fortress longevity is maximum world age, which is a factor of what kind of integer toady used plus other possible intentional or unintentional in-game limits that I don't know about.

[CodexDraco]

You should be able to us dfhack to automatically set farming/brewing jobs.

[Niyazov]

You should be able to us dfhack to automatically set farming/brewing jobs.

Thanks for the tip

For my initial goals - a decade, then a century- it shouldn't be an issue. If it turns out to be possible for a fortress to run for more than a century, eventually all dwarves not born in the fortress will be dead and dfhack will be needed. As long as even one dwarf has the planter labor turned on it shouldn't be a big deal unless the population somehow gets huge, which can hopefully be avoided using the popcap and the babycap.

[Leafsnail]

You are allowed to intervene, so automating that intervention with DF Hack or whatever utility should be ok (as long as you don't do impossible things with them).

[Niyazov]

You are allowed to intervene, so automating that intervention with DF Hack or whatever utility should be ok (as long as you don't do impossible things with them).

My personal aim is to have a fortress that will run on normal dwarf fortress principles for as long as possible with zero external intervention, which makes things a little tougher. Depletion of food stocks after the death of the last farmer is an absolute high limit for hands-free operation; running out of clothes is a lower limit but I am trying to compensate for it by running an unsealed fort with a resetting dodgem trap plus a multi-z-level drop. If I were to put a depot inside the fort it would kill the dwarf caravan too; that would provide an eternal source of food for a small fort, but it would also create ghosts. If I can figure out a way to only kill pack animals it may be possible to run a fortress that auto-robs the dwarf caravan forever, but the fortress will quickly fill with unwanted items.

[Kogut]

Drop caravan 1 level? It should crash wagons.

[Lagslayer]

Drop caravan 1 level? It should crash wagons.

But would it anger the caravan? Or it's civ?