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[Benjamin the Rogue]

Here's to Ogusposmlo, The Portentous Dimensions. Lost to the hammer of Armok. Here's to the The Splattered Canyons, a civilization wiped from existence just as it was beginning to reclaim its lost glories from the edge of extinction. Here's to the The Handles of Justice, the company that made redemption a possibility by reclaiming Clearbanners from the Forgotten Beast that had destroyed it. And last but not least, here's to Queen Tholtig Laboredfancied, the last Queen of The Splattered Canyons, who sent out the company to save her civilization from annihilation while she herself stayed at the tiny camp they had wrested control from the elves in the only victory of the 276 year war.

Drink, and honor these who came before!

So I completely wiped out the save file for my first ever reclaim game that I had been playing for the last three months by accident this morning. I had moved the save file to another folder so I could retire it and look at current history in the Legends Viewer to inspect some elves I had slaughtered in the first elf attack on my fortress. I wanted to see if I had killed any prominent ones in relation to the ongoing war. I also wanted to see why I hadn't gotten any new migrants in a long time. Turns out there were only five other dorfs left at the capital with the queen. But I overwrote the save file with the wrong one. Unfortunately it wasn't even a good save file I overwrote it with. So it's gone.

I'm too tired after doing physical therapy and other stuff at the VA today to be too bothered, though I am very annoyed with myself for letting my exhaustion make me so careless. But I wanted to make this thread to give a space to people who have lost promising worlds to accidents or hardware failures or the like. I couldn't find a thread for this, but I only spent 20 minutes searching through the forums to see.

So if you've lost a world and a good team, post about them here! We shall drink to honor those who came before the gods!

[azrael4h]

I just lost the fortress Cloakmirrors, a marble castle in the desert when it happened, due to messing around with graphic packs in LNP. One of them caused it to throw up an error, and I couldn't get it to revert to a working pack or default ASCII.

Lesson learned, don't use graphics packs.

[Thorik]

I just lost the fortress Cloakmirrors, a marble castle in the desert when it happened, due to messing around with graphic packs in LNP. One of them caused it to throw up an error, and I couldn't get it to revert to a working pack or default ASCII.

Lesson learned, don't use graphics packs.

How exactly did this happen? Which tileset did you try use? I mainly use the vanilla curses x16 square (for the bearded dwarf sprites rather than smilies) but want to theoretically be able to switch to mayday or some newfangled tileset.

[Urist McVoyager]

"Messing around with graphics packs" sounds like the person kept switching between them. It gets a little squirrely if you do that, IIRC. You're best rolling with one pack from beginning to end and genning a new world each time you switch.

[Thisfox]

I have not one but two toasts to offer:

Here's to a Fortress long gone, where I had the child of an Outpost Liaison locked in a wellroom with the other children, a vampire manager walled into his office for more than five years (yet still doing his job), and not one but two fiery forgotten beasts loose in the hallways, taking potshots at each other, at the furniture, and at anything else that happened to jog up wielding a pickaxe with a murderous glint in their eye. It will forever be frozen in chaos.

I tried to pull the save file to give it to other players, and was inexperienced in doing such things (I've never bothered to savescum before, and actually haven't bothered to since either) and I royally screwed it up. Whoops.

Here also is to Alligator Creek, my most beloved fortress, where I lost several of my first seven dwarfs within seconds of arrival. This marvellous fort had a natural waterfall at least 7 z-levels high, beautiful engraved marble hallways (which flooded every year and filled with alligators, due to the downstream end of one river not melting as fast as the upstream end) and a lot of dwarfs with so many missing limbs, all the tasks they could perform was clean the floor and engrave the walls (Alligators love eating hands and feet, it turns out). This was fine, as there was a lot of blood, and mud, to clean up.

Such remarkable Fun I had in Alligator Creek! Dwarf children saved from alligator attack by their armless parents, the one-legged military clubbing an alligator to death with their crutches, a dwarf child making an alligator-bone shield as his artifact... The walls were engraved all over with artworks of alligators, alligators menacing dwarves, dwarves menacing alligators.....) Eventually practically every dwarf had a crutch. One dwarf child was such a good crutchwalker, he ran rings around the fully-limbed new migrant arrivals. Literally.

Alligator Creek died due to updates making the fortress practically unplayable, and a small fps issue: I saved it forever, but I play more modern versions now. I remember that fort with love.
(edited for grammar)

[Benjamin the Rogue]

I just lost the fortress Cloakmirrors, a marble castle in the desert when it happened, due to messing around with graphic packs in LNP. One of them caused it to throw up an error, and I couldn't get it to revert to a working pack or default ASCII.

Lesson learned, don't use graphics packs.

Ooof, I lost a very promising fort to something just like this. It was my first attempt at a reclaim and the place was loaded with iron ore, coal, and two levels down a whole layer of marble. I tried switching between different tile packs to see which ones I liked the most. I was only a single year into when I screwed it, so it was that awful. Just sucked I lost such a good spot. I had to regen the whole world.

I have not one but two toasts to offer:

Here's to a Fortress long gone, where I had the child of an Outpost Liaison locked in a wellroom with the other children, a vampire manager walled into his office for more than five years (yet still doing his job), and not one but two fiery forgotten beasts loose in the hallways, taking potshots at each other, at the furniture, and at anything else that happened to jog up wielding a pickaxe with a murderous glint in their eye. It will forever be frozen in chaos.

I tried to pull the save file to give it to other players, and was inexperienced in doing such things (I've never bothered to savescum before, and actually haven't bothered to since either) and I royally screwed it up. Whoops.

Here also is to Alligator Creek, my most beloved fortress, where I lost several of my first seven dwarfs within seconds of arrival. This marvellous fort had a natural waterfall at least 7 z-levels high, beautiful engraved marble hallways (which flooded every year and filled with alligators, due to the downstream end of one river not melting as fast as the upstream end) and a lot of dwarfs with so many missing limbs, all the tasks they could perform was clean the floor and engrave the walls (Alligators love eating hands and feet, it turns out). This was fine, as there was a lot of blood, and mud, to clean up.

Such remarkable Fun I had in Alligator Creek! Dwarf children saved from alligator attack by their armless parents, the one-legged military clubbing an alligator to death with their crutches, a dwarf child making an alligator-bone shield as his artifact... The walls were engraved all over with artworks of alligators, alligators menacing dwarves, dwarves menacing alligators.....) Eventually practically every dwarf had a crutch. One dwarf child was such a good crutchwalker, he ran rings around the fully-limbed new migrant arrivals. Literally.

Alligator Creek died due to updates making the fortress practically unplayable, and a small fps issue: I saved it forever, but I play more modern versions now. I remember that fort with love.
(edited for grammar)

Alligator Creek sounds dorfy as all HFS! I still haven't ever shared a save file for any forts yet, but mostly because I don't think I've really set up any that are worth it. I'm working on building one that can be used for a DnD campaign though. That one I'll probably share. It just takes forever getting the proportions and layout right.

[StrawBarrel]

Kind of off-topic, but good luck with your physical therapy and stuff, dude. Although the very badass Ogusposmlo, The Portentous Dimensions was unfortunate and unforeseen casualty of exhaustion, at least you know you're giving 110% to the road to recovery. Here's to hoping for the best. Keep at it. :)

[Benjamin the Rogue]

Kind of off-topic, but good luck with your physical therapy and stuff, dude. Although the very badass Ogusposmlo, The Portentous Dimensions was unfortunate and unforeseen casualty of exhaustion, at least you know you're giving 110% to the road to recovery. Here's to hoping for the best. Keep at it.

It's been a rough year, but I think things are getting better! So thank you for the best of wishes, I appreciate it, even if my reply is a handful of months after the fact!

I haven't been able to play most of this summer, but I'm looking forward to the new release drawing closer. Many, many new worlds will be created and destroyed at Armok's pleasure when that happens. I've since learned to organize the folders a little better to avoid what I did in the first place.

[Fleeting Frames]

Also, remember: Mere delete button just sets the area to be overwritable; it doesn't mean the thing is necessarily gone if you haven't used that disc sector since then.

[bloop_bleep]

I remember one of my first forts -- I had finally started to get the hang of it, and was creating a pretty darn decent fortress.
Which was then lost, due to a save compression error. I've turned off save compression in the init files ever since...

[Benjamin the Rogue]

Also, remember: Mere delete button just sets the area to be overwritable; it doesn't mean the thing is necessarily gone if you haven't used that disc sector since then.

Yeah, I was just simply too exhausted to bother. And It's been a while. I don't know if I would go through such a process unless it was something really, really important though. I don't know what I'd use for that or how to go about it, so it's something I'd have to decide to put a bunch of time into learning.

I remember one of my first forts -- I had finally started to get the hang of it, and was creating a pretty darn decent fortress.
Which was then lost, due to a save compression error. I've turned off save compression in the init files ever since...

You sound like you had a lot more success with your early forts than I did. I thought "Build Burrow" was how you got them to dig for two days of playing, and couldn't figure out what was going on. It wasn't until two weeks of constantly and stubbornly playing Dwarf Fortress that I got a fort that didn't die the first year from either thirst, hunger, booze-withdraw induced temper spirals, goblins, or other random creature attacks.

[KittyTac]

Also, remember: Mere delete button just sets the area to be overwritable; it doesn't mean the thing is necessarily gone if you haven't used that disc sector since then.

Yeah, I was just simply too exhausted to bother. And It's been a while. I don't know if I would go through such a process unless it was something really, really important though. I don't know what I'd use for that or how to go about it, so it's something I'd have to decide to put a bunch of time into learning.

I remember one of my first forts -- I had finally started to get the hang of it, and was creating a pretty darn decent fortress.
Which was then lost, due to a save compression error. I've turned off save compression in the init files ever since...

You sound like you had a lot more success with your early forts than I did. I thought "Build Burrow" was how you got them to dig for two days of playing, and couldn't figure out what was going on. It wasn't until two weeks of constantly and stubbornly playing Dwarf Fortress that I got a fort that didn't die the first year from either thirst, hunger, booze-withdraw induced temper spirals, goblins, or other random creature attacks.

I figured it out in one evening, due to the quickstart guide. First fort was lost in a modding accident, however.

[Benjamin the Rogue]

I lost a somewhat promising start to a modding accident. It was messing with the skins to see which ones I liked best to try out something other than Mayday. I didn't think to back up the save, but at least it was on a fort I hadn't spent much time on. It just had nice deposits of hematite with clay and sand deposits. It was a nice warning not to try that with my bigger save files. I still just use Mayday. I should look around again with the graphic packs and see if there isn't one I like better. I just wish the Masterwork mod would work on my computer.