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[Mishrak]

My first legitimate fort attempt died when I tapped a cavern but didn't seal it and a giant bat came and ate everyone while they were making bedrooms.

My first surviving fort had 4 archery towers with doors on the outside and a huge moat and an obscene amount of cage traps.  My first goblin siege was wiped out by the cage traps alone.  I've since stopped using them in large quantities.

Then I found Captain Duck's youtube videos and nothing was ever the same...

[vjek]

I tried to follow the guides, but made the fatal mistake of trying to build a farm on a mountain biome.

Oh the frustration.  " I do what it says, and it doesn't work.  Why, Great Armok, Why?! "

All good now, though. 

[tahujdt]

Cage traps.  Everywhere.  It really spoils the !FUN!...

Unless you leave those gobbos their weapons and use them for gladiatorial combat.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Galdiatorial? Is that a word?

[Larix]

I used as little spoilers as possible to learn the game (and still don't know how to minecart, because it's just ludicrously hard to learn by doing) and had most trouble with farming. I'm not even mentioning seed barrels, my problems were more fundamental:

i had read Boatmurdered, so was under the impression a farm needed mud. So i went and irrigated every farm, usually by opening up pools. In consequence, all my farms were near pools, regardless of where the workshops, stockpiles etc. were.
I assumed placing farm plots was just a two-keystroke deal like placing beds and the like. Only after trying out constructions i realised i could put more than one grid at a time under the plow. Before, i tended to have 60-100 farmplots, each 1x1.

[Psychopulse]

I didn't do much other than dig.  One time I remember accidentally digging away half of a small mountain in the middle of the map before it caved in.

Eventually, I had to go to the wiki and I still use it to this day.

[fourpotatoes]

Many things. The worst among them was thinking I needed to vent out my butcher's shop with a hole outside....Goblin's walked inside the hole and killed everything.

I did the same when I brought my forge, smelter and wood furnace indoors. I didn't go through with opening them to the outside when I saw they didn't produce any smoke, but I'd placed them specifically with that in mind.

Like many others, I'd been reading Boatmurdered, so my first fortress ended up a great sprawling complex built across only a few z-levels. Apart from the kitchens, stills, and clothing industry, the fortress was incredibly inefficient, with workshops, stockpiles, bedrooms and dining halls spread across a loose grid in the south and a small expansion in the north. Even with some 250-odd dwarves I was hurting for dwarfpower. When I first opened the northern expansion, crops would wither in its fields because my farmers and haulers couldn't keep up with the distances involved.

With dining halls in particular I got a little out of control, putting in at least seven in the main fortress. My very first one, the Old Red Hall, was barely bigger than the bedrooms I make now; on the other hand, the (failed due to evaporation) Fountain Hall was so big it needed two designations. The Green Hall, a largeish hall cut into olivine, and an unnamed moderately-sized hall near one of the housing wings were probably closest to what I build today.

I brought water from the creek in the north end of the map down a canal and into a tunnel, where it ran open alongside a pathway that dwarves would use to reach the original well, part of the mines and what became the central tower. Having read other stories and the wiki, I was paranoid and put pressure-reduction fittings everywhere, which led to extreme inefficiency. My first cistern took months to fill, which led to the construction of the Murder Reservoir near the supply canal when the baron and tax collector arrived.

Since everything was depressurized, I ran most of my water supplies in open canals with a maintenance walkway alongside. I still prefer the aesthetic of this design, but I rarely build it anymore because I usually keep my distribution system pressurized.

The worst single incident that was my fault occurred while I was building a parapet around one of the towers. I managed to drop a floor through the ceiling of the control room, taking out an important lever, crushing one of my founders and injuring bystanders (the control room also being a barracks and dining hall).  I stared at the screen for a few minutes after it happened, wondering if I should just abandon.

[blaster339]

I gave my sheriff a whip, thinking it would make a good punishment weapon. There were 3 survivors.

Lol isn't it?

[flameaway]

Hmm.

When do you stop being a newb at DF?

I don't feel like an expert at anything in the game, and I've been playing about nine months now.  I haven't met the caverns or any of that content yet.  Haven't touched Legends, or Adventure Mode.

I'm still finding interface features every once and awhile... (Anyone else remember that Trash80 Star Trek game? No instructions, you had to figure out the commands by trial and error.  Was a lot of fun for a late seventies game.)

Still, if newbs are allowed to comment on newbs, I'd say the most important thing to do in the beginning is to get beyond trying to win.  You ain't gonna.

I think I really started enjoying the game, instead of simply being challenged by it, once I got that losing really is fun.  Let the simulation run when things don't go the way you want, amazing things happen.

Watching a tantrum spiral food fight in the dining room was new gaming experience for me.

[TheKaspa]

Being still a newb at DF, I am still unable to manage the military, and I tend to do a lot of savescumming.

[BoredVirulence]

Not to say I've completely outgrown those days, but my first memories were of dehydration and farming mishaps.

I remember reading that you needed to irrigate your farms, so I was using the bucket method. Except with only 3 buckets, nothing got done. Then when they got sick of water they just died of dehydration, sometime before that I learned clay or underground soil works fine. Next fortress I make farms early, and get booze set up. Then once again they start dying of dehydration. Then I learn they are sick of dwarven wine, resort to water, then get sick of both and die.

I also vaguely remember a few miners mining themselves into future magma reseviors, getting trapped, then stoping work to hunt vermin, so they never mined their way out. I lost a very intricately designated fortress to those 3 lost picks...

[Houndstooth]

Still a newb, my first serious attempt at a fortress died of dehydration.

In a related note, I still am not entirely sure how wells work, so I stick to booze. Good ol' booze.

[GuesssWho]

I still can't do much with the millitary beyond 'create squad, tell it to kill X'.

[Lich180]

First few forts died to starvation or dehydration, since I was just learning and forgot to focus on important early stuff like stills and farms 

Best fort death was one ages ago... Accidentally unsealed the first cavern level and didn't block it off well enough... A troll ran through, straight into the bedrooms, and started killing everyone. Of course, I didn't have a military or even basic weapons, so I drafted everyone and sent them to wrestle the troll. the tell suddenly went all Neo on the dwarves, and splattered everyone all over the walls.

No incidents like that for a while now, since i'm way more cautious than I should be

[Larix]

My first attempts at beekeeping - wow. I think i had started getting my head around screw pumps by that time, so thought that you had to hit 'c' and 'g' to switch the hives to whatever the informative line said. I ended up with a bunch of empty and another bunch of nonproductive hives.

Then the problem with successfully pressing honey from the honeycombs - the job kept aborting with "needs liquid container" while i had large numbers of both pots and jugs. Eventually, i lined up several more jugs to be produced, and when a dwarf finally took the pressing job again i watched them like a hawk and verified that those mysterious 'liquid containers' were indeed jugs. Took a while to work out that my beards 1) blocked large numbers of jugs by stuffing them in bins and carrying those bins around and 2) blocked jugs by filling them with products without ever displaying that filling status.

Coming up with a functional workaround for the stuck beekeepers was trivial by comparison, although the first serious case was fairly frustrating - i first 'solved' that one by building a 3x3 wall block over the location the beekeeper wanted to go. He finally went and performed other jobs, but sent 'cancels Install Colony in Hive: Cannot find path' from time to time.

[black47]

Twice I had a moat all around my fortress entrance, and while [d]esignating the ramps on it to be removed, I did so from corner to corner, not realizing that this would also designate the stairs to the rest of the fortress to be mined out.
What I had in the end was 20ish dwarfs running around in the courtyard dying of thirst/starvation without me realizing why they didn't go inside and work/drink/eat properly.

I lost a fort to this, I figured it out the second time it happened.