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[Aqizzar]

Seem to be a lot of flooding related stories.  I've certainly done it myself a few times.  The one time I tried to pump my way through an aquifer resulted in no aquifer access, and a half-flooded map when I thought it'd be neat to make an artificial lake.

The stupid moment I can never forgive myself for was like my second or third fortress.  I read on the wiki about how prepared meals never rot, and figured it'd be smart to cook everything right then.  I had embarked on a glacier.  I didn't know about the kitchen screen.  I rapidly took the wiki's advice and tried to collapse some ice to make water, but everyone dehydrated first, still ecstatic from their lovely meals.

[bigmcstrongmuscle]

In my first season, had a craftsdwarf charge off after a dead monster in a chasm exit without my knowing. He got chased and cornered by around six trogs. Pause. Cue a lot of swearing and  mass-forbid everything in the area. Unpause. Dwarf dies. Get back to work.

Two minutes later, my only grower is killed. I got everything else, then forgot to forbid the craftsdwarf's clothes.

[Eater of Vermin]

Domas Purplerobes decided to build a Stairway to Heaven, to help bring any captured gobbo's closer to their God.

Basically a tower as tall as it would go (about 16 z-levels) with a 3x5 drawbridge on top, surrounded by floor tiles.  The idea was to retract the drawbridge & designate it as a pit, while the floor tiles round the pit were to be designated as an animal stockpile spec'd as a prison, so the Haulers would automagically carry any prisoners up there without further orders.

For the grand opening it was decided that instead of sending the gobs off on their pilgrimmage one by one, a whole bus-load should be sent for the first trip.  So, the drawbridge was filled to capacity with caged gobs and with great fanfare the Duke pulled the lever.

It was spectacular! 

More spectacular than expected as a matter of fact.  Urist McArchitect overlooked one teensy-weensy detail...  You see, he'd built the tower directly right over the farms & underground trade depot.     (I tend to build my fortresses around central stairwells that go all the way down, before the buildings start spreading out horizontally.  Can you see what's coming?)

15 gobbo-laden cages hit the ground with a THUMP! ...and then keep on going, just like a bunker-buster bomb.  Down, down, straight through the farms and trade depot, straight through finished goods storage, down, down, through the workshops, raw materials storage, legendary dining room, several levels of bedrooms...  down, down some 16 z-levels into the ground until they reach the centre of the earth.

Several pages of purple "Urist Everybody has collided with an object" related msgs later and the real fun started.  No more happy thoughts from a Legendary Dining Hall, although they were still admiring the waterfalls.  Which were now unstoppably turning this dwarf-made chasm into a swimming pool.  This was gonna be one well that wouldn't make for a good meeting hall!

And it really isn't a good idea to have a dwarf dual-skilled as Legendary Miner and Legendary Engraver.  Especially when several of their masterworks are taken out in one fell swoop.  It's an even worse idea to have 3 dorfs trained that way.

The fortress had to be abandoned before the end of that season. 

Sheesh, the gods can be fickle.  

[VeryBadThingsDownHere]

Thinking an obsidian door counted as a 'construction' that would prevent magma flow.

[RavingManiac]

Thinking an obsidian door counted as a 'construction' that would prevent magma flow.

IT DOESN'T?

RavingManiac cancels, build magma channel: Interrupted by sudden revelation.

[Shades]

While smoothing the outside of my mountain fortress I decided to cut away an overhang that ruined it's look. Realising nothing was supporting it from below I thought 'Oh I can save some time here' and just channeled away the side.

I forget to check what was the ground there and it cut through farms, dinning rooms and down to my workshops, exposing it all to the open air and giant eagles.

[sorbius]

Pumping magma through a wooden screw pump...

yeah...

I started a forest fire...

Pumping magma through a wooden screw pump is perfectly acceptable. You would only cause a fire is your magma went somewhere.................careless.


And my biggest mistake was digging out a pit in front of my base(to keep away those pesky goblins), forgot I had put a water channel under it to power my water wheel and flooded the whole fortress.

Pumping magma through a wooden pump causes the pump to be destroyed and the magma to spill out all over the place and also kill the pump operator, Luckily he could walk while he was on fire and dragged himself to bed I shudder to think what would have happened if someone had tried to carry the !!dwarf!! to bed.  it was a bad idea and I do not recommend it unless you want to set all the brush on fire followed by a handful of your dwarfs.

[KoE]

Uncanny how most of these mishaps are either the domain of gravity or water. I suppose people are generally more cautious when they start playing with fire.

Perhaps the dumbest thing I've done was when I found magma on the wiki - Desperate for such a precious resource, I embarked in the first place Regional Prospector told me there was both magma and a cave river, thinking growing would be a simple thing once I hit the river. My dwarves died of thirst not a season after striking the earth. (I also forgot to bring plenty of booze, apparently. That was a stupid trip.) As a note, this was my second fortress ever.

As another side note, I abandoned my first because it was built near a goblin tower, though it surprisingly survived quite well. The main reason I had abandoned it was because I was generally dissatisfied with it, and in particular I hadn't found the stone management article on the wiki at that point. The semi-consistent interruptions of goblins also irritated me.

Anyway, my second and somewhat more entertaining story takes place in a little fortress I was getting rather tired of. The area had a nice symmetrical rock formation on the western side, and having a mind to keep things pretty, I picked it as my fortresses entrance. Unfortunately, it was right on the edge of the map and three or four years in I had a rather nasty vertical (y-axis) sprawl of workshops on the top floor and things were just generally disorganized and somewhat chaotic, as I'm sure most third-or-fourth-try fortresses are.

My dwarves had just managed to develop cave adaptation, and my fledgling fortress guard had saluted the incoming traders by spewing out the contents of their stomachs. I also checked on the fortifications I was building to allow my marksdwarves to fire on invaders, and the walls were also covered in vomit. Great. So I began operation build a god damn skylight, which ultimately ended in tragedy.

I should note that I had already set up a couple of those lovely quantum stockpiles on the 'roof' of the fortress (where I was building the marksdwarf structure). I designated a nice line of channel. Right through the dumping zone of the rocks. Though I didn't notice it, my haulers were dropping rocks into my meeting hall. There was also a kobold corpse stinking up the place. I think my refuse stockpile had filled up and nobody had bothered to move him, so I set him to dump.

So basically, there was a loop of:

Unforbid -> Dump Kobold corpse
::player turns his attention elsewhere::
::hauler grabs corpse, walks up stairs, throws corpse back in hole to land where he'd just picked it up from::
::player comes back, curses his lazy dwarves, repeats::

I was somewhat new to the concept of dumping and forbidding so the fact that I had to unforbid it didn't clue me in for some time.

Of course, this wasn't so bad; sure, my dwarves had a stinky meeting hall, but it was well engraved so they were still ecstatic, dead skulker and all. It was when I extended this skylight that things went awry. I designated it to be generally larger, and somehow managed to cause a cave-in. I don't remember the specifics; I just remember reading.

"A cave-in has occurred!
Urist Crushskulled, Child, has died."

That's right; my ceiling of doom fell into a meeting hall, and only killed a kid.

Well, actually, it also fell through the meeting hall into my barracks (which I hadn't realized were under there), wounding two sparring militiadwarves and a fortress guard who was observing them. It was at that point I decided to say screw the fortress and proceeded to introduce my dwarves to the Hidden Fun Stuff I'd found via exploratory mining just for grins. The fortress succeeding this one has gone much better, and has a fully functional skylight with no dead babies attributed to its construction.

[ShadowDragon8685]

My stupid moment?

My magma pipe (Volcano, technically, but it's not actually open to the sky, there's ground above it, and only one diagonal square lets it be accessed from the outside at all) is right next to my Chasm. Like, ten squares.

I built a channel to the right of the magma pipe, to pipe in liquid hot magma to fuel my smelters. Then I realized, I'd used Bridges instead of solid floor tiles to make the overhanging magma chute to allow the industry to extend above the chasm. Predictably, the bridges (made of nice microcline) gave in and fell, leaving two spectacular magma-chutes falling out into the Chasm.

I didn't want that. So I went and extended another bridge (this time of floor tiles) out to the sides of the overhanging magma chutes, and broke through the walls. I built another bridge in the space, then it was a race against the clock to demolish the floor tile and replace the wall faster than the magma would reach the worker. I did it! It was tricky, especially when one dumb dwarf-humper decided to do his demolition of the floor tile from the WRONG SIDE of the tile (IE, in the magma's path) but I did it.

[Doppel]

Eater of Vermin: Tell me you made a vid of it please.

[LumenPlacidum]

I just tried a fortress in the mountains with a few goblin towers under the Legendary Lands mod (those goblins are DENSE in that).  I started off in a fantastic position on a shelf on the mountainside, with one tiny area by which goblins could attack me.  I set up my axedwarf to patrol there and started walling off that area.

Well, the axedwarf was killed by a buffalo, although he killed the goblins that were chasing the buffalo (I should have taken a hint from the fact that all those goblins had broken limbs).  Eventually the ruminant ran off.  A guard attacked just before the wall was finished.  My miners dispatched him with ease.  Finally, I completed the wall and resigned to my peaceful corner of this unforgiving map.  I'll be fine so long as there aren't any very aggressive flying creatures.  Heh, well, how likely is that?

Ast Ukermistem, Farmer cancels Store Item in Stockpile: Interrupted by nightmare.

Huh?  Nightmare?  he wasn't even asleep!  Then the horse falls on my dwarves, ripping them to pieces.  No one even touches the thing.  I only had three guys left and I recruited them to attack it, but it suddenly ran off.  It attacked a goblin tower and singlehoofedly killed 10 goblins before a guard cut it in half on account of its being exhausted.  Its only injury prior to being exhausted and killed was a bruised spleen.  This is even though there was a huge dogpile of goblins on it.

Lesson here?  Don't settle for a single wall... fully enclose your dwarves.

[Overdose]

Accidentally letting loose a magma flow into my fortress while trying to get my magma workshops up. Apparently, building my fort 5 z levels below the surface of the magma's top level wasn't a good idea, as it slowly flooded my fortress while i was working on a project for farming up on the surface.

I really shouldn't have had the magma workshops near my entrance tunnel, poor dwarfs could only wall off their own sections they were in, and wait for someone to dig around the flooded areas and make some more stairways on a new area. I lost about 75% of the whole fortress, including my weapons, armor, various finished goods, food stockpiles, bedrooms, and a zoo filled with tamed Tigers, Lions, and soon to be Bears (if the hippy elves would bring me some).

[grelphy]

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

My dumbest move was experimenting with pumping machinery. First my aquifer pumping setup (with no safety switch) worked fine, then it was inadequate, then it flooded my (admittedly shallow since I had yet to breach the aquifer) fort.

Then it flooded the rest of the map.

I had settled in something of a depression, so a tower was required to get the water high enough to make it off the map; I never finished the aqueduct, since it didn't seem to be too dangerous. Just a big waterfall over in the corner. By the time my few sealed-away dwarves finally starved, I had a fort under a giant lake that was spilling over its edges and had a terrific-looking spout sticking out of the middle pumping in more and more water.

In retrospect, I probably should have sent an adventurer there. Oh well.

[RPharazon]

I made an extremely complicated system of making a nice waterfall in the meeting room for my dwarves. It lifted water up two z-levels, dropped in the middle of the meeting area through a 2x2 area, went down 6 z-levels through the courtyard of a workshop area, through the dining room as well, and finally landed in a reservoir with a channel leading to a chasm to drain it.

Well, I revved up everything, but due to my experience of chasm creatures going through small holes to try to get out of the chasm, I didn't actually dig out the last tile leading to the chasm, thereby not being able to drain it.

Of course, I didn't realize that until the water came up to the workshop level.

So I did what any true-blooded Dorfer would do: I tried to dig another big channel to the chasm with ramps below the reservoir so everything would flow out.

And then I realized that the type of rock that I made the reservoir in was porous. I made a little aquifer of my own. There was no possible way that I could make an adequate outflow tunnel in time.

So I stuck around, locked the front doors, and waited for my dwarves to die.

[Areyar]

WAIT!

There already is porous rock?
That is great...unless you notice too late ofcourse.