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[Cagbee]

I've been playing df for, god 2 years???, and I've had some pretty awesome fortresses. However, how these forts fail is kind of entertaining... losing IS fun! so i was wondering what is the best fort fail you have ever had? the bigger, the more random, the silliest, the better.

Mine happens to be when a cave dragon invaded my fortress, from below my primary defenses by slithering/climb/swam??? up a pipe to my "great hall" scaring the ever living shit out of my dwarves before being scorched... *sigh* RESTART!!!!

[NJW2000]

A forgotten beast: a mighty ape spitting of flame, towering and bloated with antennae and external ribs. It roamed the caverns beneath my fort for a year, sending up miasma from the bodies of the strange creatures it fought, and flames and smoke from its fireball rampages.

  Whlie the central staircase of my fort reached directly onto the caverns, we were protected, or so we thought, by an artifact floor hatch. Unfortunately, while massacring the collection of animals caught in the cage traps surrounding the stairway in the caverns to the fobidden fort entrance, the monkey noticed a dwarf wandering in the burial grounds, at the lowest level below the caverns, dotted with glinting electrum sarcophagi. Apes can open hatches.

  After that, the beast travelled up my fort, killing all on every level it came to, eventually leaving none alive but the animals, after the panic room, devoid of provisions or escape, was unsealed for oxygen and a last desperate rush. All dwarves died that day, as the military went at it one by one and perished in the flames and smoke.

  All? But no. One survived, a humble hauler who had been taken by a strange mood, tasked by the gods to create an eldritch artifact. He grabbed boarskin and rough black zircons, and waited undeterred in his workshop while the foul creature went past. Once it had finished its slaughter and waited in my burial grounds, surrounded by blood and smoke and miasma, he finished his artifact: fit for the burial of the fort, a black boar leather hood studded with black zircons.

[Olith McHuman]

Back in 40d, I built the perfect defense against sieges: a giant 5 z level water tank with an outlet near my entrance. Goblins approached my gates, then they got flooded.

Now, my fort was a bit of a twisty mess with hallways and tubes of water running every witch way, so I decided to beautify it by smoothing the walls. Well, someone placed digging designations instead...

Just for fun, I reverted and did it again. My fort (mining tunnels included) took 17 single steps to flood.

[Max™]

I picked a nice spot with hematite and marble near a volcano, dug down, started designating my rooms and entryway and whatnot, had the idea to hang a floor over the magma and put my forges on it, breached the wall above the magma, started building, then noticed cancel spam... and that the floor I had specifically built above the magma was now UNDER the magma, with more pouring into the access room... and for some reason magma pouring in through the entry way... and over the top where the wagon was... BECAUSE THE VOLCANO ERUPTED...


When I embarked the magma was a good 8 or 9 z below that point... and not spilling over the upper edges down the sides, so yeah. Never seen it before, sadly haven't seen it since.


Dwarf Fortress: Where losing your dorfs and fort and work to an erupting volcano is amazing and enviable.

[Robsoie]

I had in my log one of my best failure, it was in the good old 40d

My fort was next a river that i used as a water source. I had a meeting hall and dwarves were socializing, and i think that was my mistake.

I started to notice lots of blood running in the river, checking i saw those good old DF finest and several dwarven corpses, and more adding with time.

It was not fishing and drinking anymore, it was war, and my fishers/drinkers warriors were losing very obviously.
After the death count slowed down and stopped, it was 15 dwarves that i had lost there in such little time.

And then i understood why making my dwarves having a meeting hall was a mistake
It took some time but it finally ceased after a while, but it was 20 more dwarves that met a unfortunate end, it was really insanity in there and on the surface of my fort.

40d didn't had ghosts, but still miasma was going to be a serious annoyance, and my few surviving dwarves were already on the edge enough, i didn't need a round 2 of the previous festivities.

I tried then to make coffins, very slowly as i had so few dwarves working, but the goal was to hopefully get some happy thoughts and keep my few survivors happy enough to avoid them launching a new bloody mess ... until i could get a new migrant wave to help with making some defenses, as my now very underpopulated fort wasn't going to complete the needed work as fast as it could have before the fun started.

Outside what happened was that the migrant wave was not coming, but a goblin ambush did.
Oh well, let's close the bridge ... hey wait a minute where is the lever ?
*remember the "party" * ... oh no ... oh well , i guess it was time for an end.

[Minion0ne]

everyone speaks of features to be coming, but i am having a hard time finding the posts for such. any help?

[NJW2000]

Wait, MaxTM, Volcanoes erupt??

[StagnantSoul]

In one of my favourite forts, where I had a ton of raising bridges set up to make a totally sealed square fort when a lever is pulled, I crushed my entire military in one lever pull by accident. I fought off a siege, then ordered the walls be put back into their open state... The military was walking right up to where the drawbridges slam down to get to the open gate. 50 legendary dwarves, atom smashed in a fifth of a second... There were artifact weapons and armour on a lot of them...

[Ghills]

Older version - 31.21? - experimenting with cage traps.  I set up a huge swath of them outside my fort and got an entire herd of elephants.  In the middle of collecting and taming the elephants a siege showed up.  Massive death and tantrum spiral ensued.  In desperation, my dorfs prayed to Armok *cough*dfhack*cough* who sent lava on the goblins.  Events spiraled downward from there.

My fort finally ended an ashy wasteland full of blood and corpses, mini volcanoes littering the surface.  All the dorfs who went above ground were hardened - the ones who weren't tantrumed constantly. An accident flooded my front gate, sending a rain of blood and corpse ash onto the farmers and kitchen. Gold statues and guardian war elephants kept a shaky lid on the chaos, but as soon as clothes started rotting I knew the fort was doomed.

[RocheLimit]

In one particular fort circa DF2012 my goal was a giant circular tower stretching high into the sky and down to the caverns.  To that end, instead of piercing the 1z aquifer at one point, I decided to drop the entire circular pattern (surface was left intact).  The drop went fine and the dwarfs wasted no time setting up shop on this level for farms, beer production, and pastures.

A year or two later, they finally breached the first cavern layer, and orders went out to wall off the tower's circumference.  A month later, the cave ins began happening.  All I would get would be "A section of cavern has collapsed!", the screen would zoom to the air above the pastures, and I could only watch helplessly as the cave in tossed my working dwarfs about, occasionally crushing a tame animal or a luckless dwarf.  I'd repair the damage, only to have the cave in repeat elsewhere, sometimes 1, sometimes 3 or more.  I couldn't figure it out!

Until, that is, I decided to go step by step, watching the area it continued to zoom to, until I found the culprit.  And I did, O yes I did.  The culprit was: a plant.  You see, it was the giant drop I did earlier; it threw up bits of mud that, somehow, became stuck in mid air.  When the caverns were finally opened, spores found their way to these bits of mud, and began to grow.  And, once grown, it would immediately realize there was no ground underneath, and cause a cave in.

As my fps was already pretty low because of the construction, I decided to give it up as a lost, though very entertaining, cause.

[TheCheeseMaker]

Terrifying reanimating biome.  In evil biomes I usually have a 2 gate system.  The depot is behind the first gate, with the rest of the fortress behind the second.  Usually the second gate is closed and the first open, allowing for the merchants to access the depot without putting the fortress at risk.

In my fourth year, I tried to clear the caverns of undead. I failed and the entire military was destroyed, but no civilians died.  Meanwhile, an elven caravan is attacked by undead ravens and one elf dies. I don't realize this because I'm too distracted with the caverns.

Summer comes, human caravan arrives, and I pull the levers in the wrong order, so the fortress is briefly exposed to the surface.  The elf corpse enters the fortress and murders my entire 140 population fortress.. 140 civilian dwarves versus 1 elf corpse, and they all die.

[Max™]

Wait, MaxTM, Volcanoes erupt??

Haven't had one do it again sadly, but yes, that one did.

I know I had some world gen parameters that were producing things like water capping a volcano on unpause and once had ice do this. Not sure what happened to make one erupt but I know part of the volcano was adjacent to a glacier biome.

[miauw62]

I picked a nice spot with hematite and marble near a volcano, dug down, started designating my rooms and entryway and whatnot, had the idea to hang a floor over the magma and put my forges on it, breached the wall above the magma, started building, then noticed cancel spam... and that the floor I had specifically built above the magma was now UNDER the magma, with more pouring into the access room... and for some reason magma pouring in through the entry way... and over the top where the wagon was... BECAUSE THE VOLCANO ERUPTED...


When I embarked the magma was a good 8 or 9 z below that point... and not spilling over the upper edges down the sides, so yeah. Never seen it before, sadly haven't seen it since.


Dwarf Fortress: Where losing your dorfs and fort and work to an erupting volcano is amazing and enviable.

I want that color palette. (its beautiful ;_;)

my most ayy lmaorrific fail was making a well in the middle of my grand dining hall and forgetting that water pressure was a thing.
they all drowned ;_;7

[NJW2000]

Wait, MaxTM, Volcanoes erupt??

Haven't had one do it again sadly, but yes, that one did.

I know I had some world gen parameters that were producing things like water capping a volcano on unpause and once had ice do this. Not sure what happened to make one erupt but I know part of the volcano was adjacent to a glacier biome.

Could it have been ice melting?

[Witty]

Mine was more a self-induced fail. Back in 34.11, I was finding the game far too easy for my tastes, so I decided to add in some more difficult critters to combat. After some raw fiddling, I added in, among other small things, this wonderful bugger and started a new fort. I encountered it pretty early on, and it nearly wiped out my fort within the first year. But I persevered- fought off a couple goblin sieges, etc. Things were going well. Maybe I hadn't added enough, I thought.

Then the third goblin siege arrived. Hordes of goblins - all riding grootslangs. All of them.

And that's the first time I had ever been defeated by a goblin siege.