Ok, here goes.
I was in the middle of my second fortress. My first fortress was the standard "introductory fortress," with savagery and beasts lowered, so this was my first real Dwarf Fortress experience. I was around 2 years in, and I had finished every fort necessity (including a torture pit full of
FPS thieves cats and dogs) except for one due to its lack of usefulness in my previous game:
my military. I was in the middle of producing iron armor and weapons to give to my useless peasants brave warriors when I received the notification of a Forgotten Beast. I had placed cage traps around my stairwell so I thought,
Everything is fine.
Everything was not fineThe FB was a "giant elk" with "deadly dust." He began his attack by finding a hunter, then proceeding to block out my vision of the events by flooding the area around him with a dust cloud. When the dust subsided, the hunter was dead and the FB was untouched. He then began his march up the stairwell after, much to my dismay, walking calmly through my cage traps. I quickly commanded my squad of migrant fishery workers to don their armor and fight for the glory of the fortress. After commanding my squad to attack the forgotten beast, I discovered two things:
1. Fishery workers =/= skilled warriors
2. The forgotten beast's dust caused near-instant paralysis
Despite the valiant efforts of
The Mountain Clams, the Forgotten Beast had only minor injuries, and all of my weapons and armor were now covered in paralysis dust. I realized I would have to have my remaining dwarfs attempt to kill the beast, but when I went to my status menu to check who remained, I found that because I had never enacted the burrow while I was frantically setting up my military, 50 of my 60 remaining dwarfs had happily rushed to their deaths in hopes of taking cave spider silk socks off of their dead friends' bodies. The deadly elk worked its way through my fortress, killing my dwarfs as it went. However, even ending my fortress wasn't enough for it; it had to torture me as well. The forgotten beast killed everybody in my fortress with the exception of a single Dwarven child who happened to be the only one on the top layer of the fortress. I was forced to run my fortress for 2 in game months before the FB found the child, paralyzed it, then became preoccupied with destroying some stills and carpenter's workshops while the child's diaphragm stopped, suffocating her (at least that's what I think happened, I was preoccupied with shouting about how
stupid !Fun! paralysis dust is.)
Dwarf Fortress is a cruel mistress, but I can't wait to start a new fortress and get my revenge