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[Haven]

My very first fort was in a zone with an aquifer. Simple enough, I thought, people said it wasn't so bad. So I dug into the side, made a lil' farm, some rooms, workshops (Watching out for nonexistant collapses), and all the amenaties of life. Well, up until I realized that I had no stone. I sent my miners off on a frantic expedition for some solid rock, and far to the north they finally found a pocket of Microcline. Hooray, I said. Everything was blue, but I finally had tables and chairs and doors! Hooray!

And so, years passed in my little fortress, before I suddenly had a brew crisis on my hands! No beer! Surely my dwarves would die! But they weren't even thirsty. Odd, I thought. Then I realised that they were running off from time to time, all the way off the end of the map... But they came back with their thirst quenched! Amazing. But no, I thought, (for I had read Boatmurdered!) this simply would not do! It was not safe! But there was only one thing left to do. So, with my trusty miner and his pick, I set off to carve out a large room in the far north, on the other side of the microcline pocket. After making several doors to create an airlock of sorts, I sent my intrepid miner to do the unthinkable... He would breach... THE AQUIFER!

And so, I designated the spot, watched him mine tentatively, and watched the water rush in as he fled behind the safety of the doors, with the torrents... Kinda sloshing and stopping. That was strange, I thought. So I found another aquifer. And another. All the same way. Confused, I decided to hunt for a wiki I could learn from... And then I knew.

They had, in fact, come out with the z-axis some time ago. There were no collapses, that was not the edge of the map, and those were not aquifers, but ponds.

[Lalandrathon]

My most recent mistake appears to have been hitting the embark button.

I wanted to start a glacier fort so I found a nice magma vent in the middle of a flat field of ice, so I loaded up on booze and wood and set out.

First message I get when I arrive is that there's a cave. A cave full of nice friendly monsters. But that's ok since its pretty far away. Then I look at the unit list, and realize there's polar bears. Skeletal polar bears. Then go to dig a defensive moat around the wagon only to realize that rock patch it's on, that's the top of the magma vent. So easy defense... not going to happen.

Yeah.. it didn't end very well.

[Overdose]

That's not supposed to happen; magma is unaffected by pressure, and so you can safely tap it well below the surface.

It wasn't pressure, it was above the rest of my fortress. i tapped it on the highest level and it just slowly crawled out. I channeled it into another part of my fort iirc, which was the same level as the opening, so it just slowly poured out near my top floors, and cut off the stairways leading through the entire fort.

[Bromor Neckbeard]

Well, like many of the others here, I had to learn the hard way that collapsing floors tend to punch through to the lower levels.  When I finally pulled the switch to collapse my outer keep's top level and create a giant moat around my inner keep, giving a half-dozen goblin invaders the surprise of their life, I also managed to kill half of my dwarves, every one of my farmers, brewers, butchers, and cooks, as well as crush 99% of my food and booze.  To add insult to injury, the goblins were only shaken up, maybe bruised a bit, but in far better shape than the dwarves around them, whom they gleefully started slaughtering.

In second place, the time that I diverted a mighty river (or at least as much as you CAN divert a river in DF) to place a giant waterfall in my dining hall, but without considering that all that water would eventually fill up the cistern and would need a place to go.  Since I didn't provide that place, the water provided its own place:  My poor dwarves' living quarters.  I had deliberately built the living quarters cut off from the rest of the fortress by a low point in the dining hall, so that the dwarves would have to pass through the dining hall on a daily basis and thus see the waterfall and get all kinds of happy thoughts.  I assume that their final thoughts were anything but happy, probably more along the lines of "whoever designed this fortress is a moron", "there's no escape, we're all doomed", and "how do they expect us to breathe water?"

[Tiler]

My stupid mistake is the same stupid mistake I make all the damn time.

*Orders dwarves to install floodgates/grates/walls in half-mined area/alcove/ledge/whatever*
*Busies himself ordering other dwarves around*
Lokum Genericdwarf has died of dehydration

Why can't they build things in a manner that doesn't trap them and lead to their slow and agonizing demise?

[Reasonableman]

Okay, just made this mother of a mistake:

I'm mining out the mountain, strip-mine style, to create a gorge for my latest fort design. In doing so, I go from the top down, 'ramping' through the mountain layer by layer in an expanding concentric pattern. To make it a little easier to designate, I do a little criss-cross pattern, rows down of ramps, followed by sideways rows cutting through the original rows, then just designate the entire area to get the lone blocks. But just recently, in the last step, I kept getting collapses. Why? Because on the sideways pass I had accidentally designated the area to be mined, rather than ramped, and floors were left hanging between the blocks.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The entire reason I went with this whole crazy setup was because I was getting weird collapses when I just designated an area for ramping.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Nesoo]

My most stupid mistake?

Removing a door.

It was back in the 2D version, and this was one of my first forts. I had realized that to survive, I needed to learn how to farm, which meant that I needed to learn how irrigation worked. So, I check the in game manual on how flood gates work about 20 times until I finally think I understand them. I build a channel from the outside river to a room I had in the cliff face, put in floodgates, and a lever. It looked something like this:


~~~........███████
~~~........███ò███
~~~........┼.....█
~~~........█.....█
~~~X_______X.....█
~~~........█.....█
~~~........█.....█
~~~........███████


So, I get the floodgates connected to the lever, then pull it... I can pull it right away to stop the flood, right? No. The dwarf who pulled it ran off and the room flooded before he could get back in. So, thinking that my dwarves could swim to pull the lever, I remove the door so they can get in...

Hello flooded world!

After I finally stopped laughing, I fell in love with the game.

[Dr. Melon]

I wanted to make a carp pool. I did.

I also wanted to make a waterfall. Lucky me decided to have the carp pool go INTO my waterfall; the pool was above the rooms, you see. I then forgot something vital. A grate. Nothing prevented fish coming out of the ceiling, bouncing off the grate in the meeting hall and messily devouring any Dwarf who came near.

[arkenphant]

I was just starting to play and I dug out this hill that wasn't connected to anything else... it collapsed and killed my only miner

[arkenphant]

also made a waterfall that ended up flooding an entire floor with busy dwarves at a workshop O_o

[FluffyToast J]

Well, it was the second siege ever, in the second year. I had removed [BABYSNATCHER] from goblins, so there would be more action. First year, there was a swordsgoblin squad. Second, a hammergobbo squad, a bowgob squad, and another swordgob squad. I had a bridge stopping them getting in, so I thought I'd be safe.

The refuse pile was outside the bridge, however, and for some reason, I designated a hole straight to it. The miner obeyed, and suddenly:

Urist McMiner has been struck down!

Oh no! The idiot mustve finished mining and went over the bridge. It was a few seconds later:

Stray Puppy (Tame) Has been struck down! X3

Um. What?

Urist McEngraver has been struck down!
Urist McWoodworker has been struck down!
Urist McEverybody else has been struck down!

Everybody but the hunter. He was in the dining room eating some nice *Plump Helmet Roast*. I then activated him, and he went to go get his sword. He then fended off the enter hammergoblin squad, and the other squads left. I then set Urist McSurvivor (who had NO WOUNDS!) to engraving only, and had him engrave every single wall.

And then I abandoned.

I later came back with Urist McSurvivor Jr, and read all the engravings. Most of them were "The dwarves are travelling." or "The dwarves are labouring." But it was worth it. My first fort to get a siege, too!

Note to self: Never mine anything during a siege.

Did I mention I had [SPEED:1] dwarves? 

[iskurthi]

Ignoring a chasm and cave full of giant cave swallows and giant bats for too long.

Giant Cave Swallow has given birth to Giant Cave Swallow Hatchlings x5

The Great Cave Swallow War took six game years before they were finally all wiped out, and cost the lives of many dwarves. On the other hand, it also created a massive stockpile of roast giant cave swallow...

[Asheron]

Setting the max temp of a new world to 1000.
I started an adventure, without suspecting anything. The mayor is on fire, the childs out on the streets are on fire, the guards are on fire...
I quickly throw away my burning cow meat ( hehe ) and backpack. I leave my iron armour on. I am still blistering however, it seems the temperature around my starting village is so high it can kill you on a slow agonizing way.
I blister my way towards what I think is a pond ( I was blind ). In a last attempt to save myself, I throw myself in the cool water...
That had evaporated years ago. I break my feet and burn to death, just like the other villagers.
The end.

[Robsoie]

On my current fortress i made a terrible mistake.

Originally, my underground farm was rather small, but it was enough for most time.

Unfortunately with the drinking issues (that most likely is a bug) that made the dwarves totally ignoring the water source of a river i designed (adding even part of groud as it was suggested), and even made them ignoring the well i built near the fortress, i had to produce massively alcohol to prevent them running to the other end of the same exact river, in which they could be easily killed one by one by goblins ambushes.

Additionally, with the rabbit level of reproduction of my dwarves, after slaughternig most of my current animals dwarves were needing food a very lot more, i was left finally with too few plants for the size of my population.

So i decided to add a second farm room.
As the ground was not good for farming, i opened with a lever the door to the underground part of the river, getting the ground wet enough for growing plants.

To avoid a stupid dwarf going to his death in water, i blocked the entrance.

Once the ground was wet enough, i closed the river door and dug several room under my farms , dug a staircase, so the water could be drained.

So far so good, but ... i totally forgot to made the entrance door passable again... during a whole season, as i was busy making some walls and channel and bridge outside to improve my surface defense and build some nice paved roads inside my walls.

After a while, all i could notice was dwarves and their kids starving in each corner of my fortress without understanding why.

Then i finally remembered ... the farm door !!

I lost because of starving lots of dwarves and kids and lot of furnitures due to tantrum thrown, but the worse part was the mayor that suddenly went berzerk.
The problem is that the mayor after all those years was a very strong dwarf, he went straight to the bedroom complex that house each dwarf individual sleeping bed, and killed at least 2 dwarves and a kid , along with an unfortunate pet donkey, before my wrestling squad finally manage to come and the wrestler high master broke the berzerker mayor in two.

Since that it took a season to stabilize the dwarves mood, as the farm took lot of time to begin to produce enough to feed them, so i lost some more of the population.
But finally all seems good now.

That's exactly when a baron, his wife, a tax collector and a hammerer decided to pay a visit and begin to ask for more crazy things to be build.

I begin to believe the tantrum spiral will then soon start again.

The new mayor elected to replace the crazy berzerk dead one seems to be a really cold hearted mother , she lost a kid, observed his body decay, lost friends

.... but she is happy

[Wild Goose]

Probably when I was tapping my magma pipe.  I was getting irritated with all the "Dig Cancelled: Warm Stone" messages, so when I just kept redesignating and unpausing, until I got "Urist McMiner has died in the heat" and I was like, "Oh, crap.".  Turns out I misdesignated a square, and magma came pouring out.  I managed to wall it off in time, but I just keep thinking of that one poor miner who was digging "Tap, tap, WHOOSH!" and then was obliterated, save for his steel pick.  Heh, kinda like Repo Man, I suppose.