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[Zemouregal]

I felt like making this thread after, incidentally, I accidentally designed my fortress like one of those Japanese castles on those fortress hills, without the castle.

What accidentally great designs have you made?

[Goblins]

Accidentally, I made an aquatic underground fort.  Now I just wish my dwarfs had gills...

[RenoFox]

The most common accidental design I end up with is a central staircase with several narrow working areas spreading from it, when the only available spaces for them were along the mined out ore veins.

An unique but notable accident was a long horizontal fortress, when I encountered an unexpected aquifier and had to expand a long way sideways to find a way down.

[Thisfox]

I accidentally made a fort which had all the dorfs insisting on walking through the stinking refuse/butchering rooms two levels above the kitchen/dining area, because of an extra staircase I forgot I had built when filling the cistern. Changing their pathing didn't help. Eventually I locked the doors to the main staircase from the refuse/butchering area, and thus accidentally made a fort with horrible framerate whenever I wanted to butcher an animal, or tan its skin, as dorfs tried to path to the butchering levels and couldn't work out how to do it, and then had to walk through the entire kitchen levels with their half-tamed meat animal.

Accidentally, I made an aquatic underground fort.  Now I just wish my dwarfs had gills...

Yes, I have one of those as well.

[neblime]

Accidentally, I made an aquatic underground fort.  Now I just wish my dwarfs had gills...

Yes, I have one of those as well.

me also.
it seems indicative of a naive architectural style

speaking of refuse too, I once got an artifact adamantine animal trap (worth over 1 mil) so i thought it would do well in the middle of the dining room.
Then of course, it caught animals which promptly rotted serving as a constant miasma generator for the dining room

[☼!!Troll Fur Sock!!☼]

I accidentally made an aquapark while trying to get some mud on the highest farms. The pumpstack would never run out of water (sea) or power (dwarven perpetual generator) and the shut-off lever was in the first room to be flooded. Only one dwarf died from drowning, the rest from injuries related to water carrying them all the way to the bottom of the fortress.
It didn't help that all escape ways to the outside were closed thanks to a passive-aggresive husk.
When I finally managed to stop the pumps by digging straight through them and decided to recover some stuff from inside the now tomb to my 5 out of 7 dwarves, the pressure launched the miner over a cliff...

[Cyroth]

I accidently build a fortress full of goblins once.
But then it accidently turned aquatic and everything was okay again.


Another time I accidently turned my large natural stone tower hanging from the ceiling of a cavern into one standing on the bottom of the cavern.
It had a rather unhealty effect on the people inside it during this transformation.

[evictedSaint]

I had accidentally constructed a complex series of constantly-running aquaducts hooked to a perpetual motion waterwheel after I breached a parallel aquifer on a multi-biome embark and couldn't figure out how to plug the hole.  My temporary measure of "pump the water away" became a permanent one.

[KingBacon]

Here are a few of my favorite accidental fortress designs:

All .34 days though

-I once flooded an entire level with magma due to a bad pumpstack. Now I put multiple magma safe doors between .

-Another time I dug a shaft straight down to the magmasea with my starting seven, created a nice little fort with no doors. Then I wanted access to timber (frozen ice biome), so I dug up towards the caverns.... Dug straight into an underground lake. No one died as I dug out a drain into the magmasea, but it did result in the mud fort. Made farming easy.

- Ahhh and there is Tinfingers and the tale of the Red Hand. An obsidian desert with fire clay and FUUUUNNN!!!!
Ogre once smashed a floodgate for the main entrance/flooding trap. River filled up that area, elven merchants got stuck and went insane. Created a nice lake. Created a nice entrance to the tower on the non river side, promptly got filled with ogres and elven ambushers.

But that isn't all. Tinfingers also had a nice curious underground structure and forges at the magma sea with ample surplus weaponry. Well I pierced the 3rd cavern by accident and around 400 zombies started flooding into the main staircase. My fort was split into two; so I burrowed my smiths into the forging area and forced them to mass produce arms and conscripted every dorf. Over one hundred bodies were thrown at the gap in the wall, a plug made of dwarven flesh to hold back the undead deluge. 70 souls died but the survivors were branded Veterans. I felt such pride when I saw these fellows in subsequent forts after I abandoned Tinfingers (constant Ogre/Goblin attacks and no migrants made the situation untenable.)

[Max™]

I was clearing a hill beside my wagon-shrine (I like to encase the wagon and build the entrance around it) and noticed a column of obsidian in the center, so I left it intact, smoothed it, engraved it, and built the whole fort around the design (with a mirrored one I dfhacked into place for symmetry) which inspired me to build magma pools as the outlets for a magma-flooding system:


The dorfs accidentally left the center section intact in that size and I stopped them before they removed more, and decided to keep the shape from the top down. Ended up dictating the whole fort layout to preserve the column+magma pool around it down into the living area.

[Findulidas]

I once made a fort with massive amounts of gardens on top of a steep volcano due to the fact that I suddenly felt like I wanted surface farms with a statue garden. Then when the goblins came I realized that the defense for those farms was completely insufficient so I made the sides a lot steeper and built walls around and then proceeded to build glass ceilings so the whole thing turned into several large greenhouses.

I accidentally made a fort which had all the dorfs insisting on walking through the stinking refuse/butchering rooms two levels above the kitchen/dining area, because of an extra staircase I forgot I had built when filling the cistern. Changing their pathing didn't help. Eventually I locked the doors to the main staircase from the refuse/butchering area, and thus accidentally made a fort with horrible framerate whenever I wanted to butcher an animal, or tan its skin, as dorfs tried to path to the butchering levels and couldn't work out how to do it, and then had to walk through the entire kitchen levels with their half-tamed meat animal.

Didnt assigning forbidden levels in the traffic weight work?