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[Slappy Moose]

Post the worst mistake you have made, that could have ended in fatalities, a fort ending catastrophe, or a horrible invasion. Whatever happened that messed you up, post it here!

My latest and worst accident I have made involved a bridge trap. I had made a bridge over the only entrance into my base, and below it was a deep (5 z tiles) spiked pit. While digging out the bottom chamber, with the spike sin it, I put a forbidden down to the side, so my dwarves could collect dead goblin's armor and such. About two months after finishing the project, I had a few dwarves starve to death, but I could not find the bodies. Anywhere. I was missing a few soldiers, who would never show up to spar or patrol.

When I was looking around the lower levels of my base, making a new tomb, I noticed 6 dwarves, surrounded by blood and vomit, lying in the spiked pit. Damnit.

I opened the doors, and all but two scampered/limped out. One's legs were broken and his lower body was severely mangled. He was unconscious, starving, and dehydrated. Another, with a broken leg and damaged spine, actually carried this guy out. He was my best axedwarf.

Of course, I am building a bridge over every pit hole, so if nobody can accidentally fall in.

I also made a very nice tomb for my heroic axedwarf, since I can't give him an award.

All the dwarves are fine now. The worst two guys are resting in bed, and may possibly never recover. Not one has died yet, and I am quite amazed at this.

Post yours!

Oh shit. I was checking in on the majorly wounded swordsdwarven, and apparently she was pregnant when she fell on the spike. She is very sad now because she had a miscarriage...

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Slappy Moose ]

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Slappy Moose ]

[Wiles]

My first fatal accident was a pretty common one. I flooded the first fort I ever made.

On another occasion I had a caged titan and accidently assigned him to another cage. A dwarf happily went over and let the titan out who had a great time stomping on dwarves until he stepped on another cage trap. I've also had several falling related injuries.

"Ooo! Lets build a channel under Urist! "

"I'm going to stand on a ramp and remove it!"

[Markham]

Attempting to make a waterwheel power generator that works underwater.  Current only works on the same Z-layer as the river, but I finally got it to work by using an underwater screw pump.  Unfortunately it brought the FPS down to 6.  I closed it off from the river and designated the 20 waterwheels for disassembling.  It took three hours to accomplish from the lag, and from all the peasants going to dismantle waterwheels but instead chasing after swept away babies getting sucked into the waterwheel channel filled entirely of water.  I was incredibly lucky to even get my legendary miner and mechanic to survive when they got swept under and into the tile that the pumps were sucking dry.

Then in another fort I had a pressure plate linked to floodgates controlling the water flow out of my artificial cave river.  The pressure plate was put too close to the edge of the waterfall, and I ended up with water going in but none going out.  Somehow I only lost two when I had everyone evacuate the tunnel, and almost lost the entire fort waiting for someone to remove the stone from the door leading to the hallway along the river.  Then winter came and froze the source.  I lost my miner attempting to clear a hole for the water to drain.  Legendary Dwarfsicle.

[AlanL]

I was playing a hermit game, and made a perpetual motion waterwheel. Then I experimented with lakes. Then I experimented with caveins, over the lake, which was over the waterwheel. The cave in plowed through the bottom of the artificial lake and made my powerplant explode. Took a while to rebuild it too.

[BurnedToast]

I was trying to drop part of a glacier into a cistern to make water for a wounded solider, and I forgot that cave-ins punch through floors if there is no support below them.

I managed to drop most of a 10x10 hunk of ice through a few z-levels into my living quarters, crushing a number of dwarves in their sleep (7 or 8 or so) including both my legendary miners, my mayor (who happened to have all the other noble positions too) and the dwarf I had been trying to make water for. To make everything worse, the ice promptly melted and created a big mess of water, though thankfully there was not enough water to permaflood anything and it dried up eventually without drowning anyone.

Another time I managed to get most of a lake to drain into an aquifer (they suck up unlimited water it seems) which is not so much a mistaken on it's own, however the constant water pouring in from the sides (and instantly being forced by pressure and gravity into the aquifer) slowed my system from ~100 fps to around... 2. Having forgotten to make a way to shut it off, I was forced to abandon.

[Hypcso]

I was digging out an indoor skyscraper project, 3 stories up with nothing beneath but the hall that had all my housing on it. My miners decided it would be funny to channel out the wrong floor tile first. About 200 rocks fell 3 stories, crashed through 4 floors of housing and killed both of my miners + 10 randoms who were on their way to work or sleep. The entire bottom hallway was smeared with blood and corpses. My fortress were all close friends and this caused widespread tantruming, melancholy berserking and insanity. I had about 4 left out of 120 at the end.

[Cajoes]

Oh man, where to begin.

I'll skip the ones that blew up during the learning phase.

And the guy who tripped into a lake when trying to cut down a tree and drowned.

And my mechanic, who learned the hard way that lava, for some reason, flows a lot faster than water. Initial magma facilities. Gonna move them later. - I expect two (out of 61) dwarves to survive.

Well when we were excavating the feeder tank/primary power generation for the giant aquarium night-club one of my dwarves did a move somewhat similar to sawing off a branch while sitting on it. Causing a small cave in and some personal injury. His lower back put itself together after a year of rehab thou.

After that we tried to wall in the bridge connecting the fortress under construction (it's pretty bloody massive) to the work-force's current living quarters and food production facilities. Unfortunately bridge tiles object to carrying walls of any type so the thing simply slipped into the brook below,

The bad part is that it punched a gaping hole through the river bed and into the kitchen/still complex, which I had not separated from the rest of the complex for some ungodly absent minded reason, resulting in everything below the near surface farms rapidly filling with water. - This included two tiers of worker barracks, several which carried wounded, and the manager's and sheriff's office. Plus prisons. Needless to say, I had to start a earlier save.

Another water related accident involved a experimental fish farm on the surface. having constructed several watertight, well, warehouses. (I keep logs in them.) Filling them up was easy, and I noticed salmon thrived in the darn things, so I ordered some of the roof shingles to be removed.

bad move.

By the time we gave up on breaking down the wall to let the water out three dwarves had drowned. Including a child who decided to take a swim in the new outdoor pool.

Not even lemmings are this reckless. Need to expand my crypts by two levels, methinks.

Oh and goblins invade us regularly. So I'm gonna try and shingle a cliff-face with murder holes and rig the plateaus with catapults. Do they have a maximum range? - Not that it matters, I just KNOW some dwarf will slip and fall six levels into the brook...

My current project, aside from getting this reckless waste of dwarven tax payer's monies. Is to wall off the surface breaching lava went and douse the entire thing with 7+ft of water. Bloody fire imps.

Obsidian: Beats cement mix anytime.

EDIT: What I'm gently alluding here is that my fortress is just one giant accident waiting to happen. But hey, six casualties in seven years. That must be a record, no?

[ November 28, 2007: Message edited by: Cajoes ]

[THLawrence]

Hmm, nothing that extreme yet. I guess my worst accident was removing some floors shortly after the z-axis came out. I noticed that they stood on the floors and fell through when they were removed. They only fell one story so I was just have a laugh out of it. I watch my glass maker fall through, then SEVERAL seconds later I get the message that my glassmaker has collided with an obstacle and died. He fell through my main staircase down 16 floors. I was laughing about the fact that his head only fell 14 floors.

[Khosan]

Hoo boy.  My best fortress is probably the one I've ended up scumming the most due to stupid crap on my part.

Accident #1:  Not thinking of a better way to accessing magma then digging straight into the tube.  Goodbye legendary Miner/Engraver.

Accident #2: Pumping water out of a random lake, since I hadn't used pumps before, into the surface of the magma tube.  For some reason, magma moves up a couple levels and makes two Obsidian plateaus with the water.  Send scummed up legendary Miner/Engraver to dig them down.  The first one falls down and knocks out the miner for minor injuries.  I don't bother to check the other one and tell the poor bastard to knock out the second one.  It also falls, but this time it launches my miner into the distance.  And by "the distance," I mean the nearby magma tube.

Accident #3: Tell poor legendary Miner/Engraver to dig channel between a dried up murky pool and a brook one tile away because it was bothering me.  He falls in and drowns.

Accident #4: Aforementioned Miner/Engraver has a mining buddy, who is significantly slower as a miner and has duties elsewhere most of the time.  They're digging a moat around my entrance.  Miner/Engraver finishes digging an area underneath where there will one day be a bridge.  Slowbuddy McAssHat for some reason decided right then would be a good time to breach the remaining wall between the moat and the brook.  Miner/Engraver drowns.  Again.

I am pretty sure he hates me by now, and would murder me if not for the fact that it is by my will the poor bastard still lives.

[Xether]

I had a lava channel combine with a water moat just outside my Fort. The whole moat eventually turned into obsidian and the lava consumed the whole level. I thought the lava would just make a steam effect. That was my best fort i ever made too >.<

[sidew]

My worst accident is over 30 dwarves drowned by ice melting on the river...

[kuribo]

I had a fire imp harassing my magma smelter, so I sent my 3-dwarf military (out of 7 dwarves) to dispatch with him. I told them to patrol around the magma vent.

They walked over to the magma vent....

and jumped in.

As the fire imp laughed, I recruited another dwarf, and sent him over there. The dwarf killed the fire imp with his bare hands.... and then took a nap next to the magma vent with the fire imp's corpse about 10 feet away . That was the most hardcore dwarf I ever saw... beat a monster to death and sleep next to a big firey hole in the earth.

Anyway, the loss of nearly half my workforce was too much for me, and I abandoned the fort.

[Jreengus]

i thought i could get away with a farm on the opposite side of a chasm from my fort, all my dwarves starved to death because they were too scared to cross the chasm.

[Shadowlord]

I haven't really had any major accidents with mechanics or construction in the new version, since I save and test anything iffy that I make to make sure it'll work (For instance, my first attempt to make a noble-disposer out a line of retracting bridges over empty space didn't work - all but the first bridge broke  apart as soon as they were retracted).

I did lose one dwarf who got stuck on the roof of the wood-holding building after we built bridges on it. Apparently bridges overlapping stairs prevent them from being used, and for who knows what reason, he couldn't use the down ramps all around the bridges to go down a level... Side view of roof (^ up ramp, V down ramp, = bridge, - floor, X stairs, | wall on ground floor :

code:

 V^------XXX-----^V
V^================^V
^--------XXX-------^
|                  |

He was stuck on the level with the bridges. There were stairs on that level (between the stairs on the upper and lower levels), but the bridges seemed to block them from being used. (Note: The floors are only one tile wide, not the full width of the building, since I was only using them to get access to where the ramps needed to be built. Also, the building was much larger than depicted - 21x21.)

I think my worst accident with the new version was after we captured our first Hydra in a cage trap (after killing two dwarves, since we had no cage traps up when he arrived). Our dungeon master was tasked to tame the hydra, and once he had finished, we ordered the newly tame hydra put on a rope to guard the entrance. The instant the tame hydra was let out of the cage, he immediately killed the dwarf who was letting him out. He then murdered another dwarf before I finally just conscripted every dwarf and ordered them to zerg him. The zerg worked quite well - The hydra died in a matter of seconds, and none of the zergers died in the battle. Unfortunately, several were injured, and two or three lost limbs and eventually went insane.

[Devastator]

After digging out an extensive underground fortress, deciding to explore in a section underneath an aquifer.  Then deciding to dig up, for some reason.

Amazingly, everyone lived, and I was able to get a few doors in front of the long, long water-filled tunnel.  The miner actually managed to dig steps straight through two levels of aquifer, and breaking through the surface.  I lost a lot of ore and gems because of the flood.  Fortunately, I always buy swimming on my initial miner..