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[RPharazon]

I had this amazing waterfall system set up, and it was going to work fine. I triple-checked everything, and even build a 7-floor pit leading into a chasm to make sure it wouldn't flood.

The problem was that I didn't want any of the batmen in the chasm to invade my fortress through the meeting room waterfall, so I decided to not mine all the way through to it until I started the pumps.

So, I started the pumps, and forgot that dwarves are stupid and won't mine in 4/7 water.

My entire fortress flooded.

[Alfador]

quote:Originally posted by SirPenguin:
<STRONG>I had been utterly pissed off at a fort of mine recently. They dwarves acted like complete dumbasses almost the entire time, and it was laggy and a mess. So I recruited everyone but a single miner, stationed them in front of the magma vent I built my fort next to, and ordered the miner to punch a hole through the wall.

There were no survivors...

...or so I thought.
http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/6283/hmmek0.jpg

To my horror, I realized that one Dwarf was still alive! Seems like she was injured in battle and brought to the bed to rest. It must have happened before I recruited everyone.

So even though I had just killed off my entire fort in cold blood, my heart utterly broke at this tragedy. Here was a poor dwarf, widowed, starving, thirsty, both legs broken and a bruised arm, and trapped in her little 2x2 room. The door kept the lava at bay, but in reality, it just kept her trapped like an animal. She threw many tantrums in her sleep, but could do nothing about it. Eventually she died of thirst.

Poor dwarf...

So 'avenge' her, I mad an adventurer and found a passage that lead to my great hall. It was surrounded by lava, but doors held it back. I smashed one of them down, and let the lava claim me and the remainder of my fort.

Who knew ASCII symbols could evoke such emotions.</STRONG>

...I don't think you can call it "in cold blood" when you use magma.  

[Ryo]

In my current fort, I decided to make a waterfall in the middle of my main 3x3 stairway. I built the all the floor grates and began building the pumps. The top two would be powered by windmill and all the rest by water wheels.

Unfortunately, I soon realised that I had built my pumps in stupid places and the waterwheels didn't work at all, so I just scrapped the whole idea. No problem really, I can just build floors over a few channels and it will be back to normal.

But...instead of carefully removing the constructions safely, I just told my dwarves to get rid of everything at once. There was soon a cave-in which crushed my chef, knocked out about 15 other dwarves and created a huge cloud of dust on every level of my fortress. One child had to go to bed to rest and died of thirst because no-one would give them water for some reason... I noticed that every single floor grate was gone, then saw the 15 floor grates (And for some reason, 1 strawberry seed) at the very bottom of the stairway.

[Strife26]

I'll go with what is probably the most common DF oopsie, adding more moats to my fort's defenses, then not realizing till several seasons later that I flooded my fort. THEN not telling my soilders to drop their masterwork steel plate before abandoning. All my adventurer found was a -obsidian sword-
. . .and carp. . .

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I keep trying to avoid Cave Adaptation by channeling out the roof above my communal bedroom and covering it over with floors. That way, the dwarves will be aboveground but inside and safe, right?

Except that "dwarves stay inside" actually means "dwarves stay underground" and they won't sleep during a seige. Which kinda sucks since I get seiged all the time.

Also one time I was building a tower right out front of my entrance. I was building it between seiges over the course of many seasons, and I had my timing for when I could send out the masons and when I had to bring them in pretty down.
It was 20 z-levels high, and had fortifications and a roof at the top. So it was completely safe, and my marksdwarves would get a 20-tile fortification bonus from it compared to creatures on the ground.
I left one wall space open for masons to scuttle from my entrance to the tower, then up the internal stairs.
Problem was, building fortifications doesn't build a floor above them. So I had to build an exterior staircase like a scaffold, from the uppermost level, to build my roof. Then I would get rid of the stairs, build that last fortification, build the wall, and the dwarf on the inside would then dig a staircase going down into my farms. It would be perfect.

Well when I collapsed the scaffolding, it dropped 20 z levels and crushed five dwarves. Two were haulers/berry pickers so I wasn't too heartbroken about them. But three were children who were quite skilled masons, who for some crazy reason decided to start working masonry even though they were just kids. All five dwarves had either been hanging right at the open wall at the base of the tower, or had somehow gotten sucked into the vortex.

So I finally finish the tower. I station my marksdwarves up there to rain hell down on the goblins, right?
First seige: the most awesome goblin marksmen ever and a bunch of stupid mace goblins. While my dwarves were pouring bolts down on the mace goblins, the bow goblins were blasting the hearts and ears off my squad 20 stories up.

I quickly decided fortifications and hence military was useless, and now I focus on traps until I can outfit about 8 dwarves in full masterwork plate so they can start wrestling, then hammering, then marksmanship to legendary. Once I get that, then they see their first combat.

[Dadamh]

quote:Originally posted by SirPenguin:
<STRONG>Who knew ASCII symbols could evoke such emotions.</STRONG>

I, at one point, decided that I would just take a desert/badland 2x2 plot and dig all the soil and rock out down to the bottom.  So I had my seven miners, seven picks, and hundreds of beers.  Fast forward long enough for me to get about six z-levels of completely dug out (no channels, just d->d sort of digging).  I decide "screw this, I'm bored" so I start a channel at the top to collapse everything.

Of course I know this will end the fort and probably kill everyone.  I figure hey, whatever, they are just bits of data, right?

Anyway, take out that last tile, comp works overtime, into freezing, for about a minute or two.  Finally the dust settles and I have three living dwarves.  Two are immobile, broken legs and mangled arms and whatnot.  The remaining one has mangled head and spinal injuries.

It was the saddest thing ever to see the mobile dwarf wake up, get the bucket next to him, walk a few steps and realize that there was no water anywhere to help his friends, and collapse unconscious again.  He did this two or three times before the gut-wrenching sadness made me abandon.  

I feel depressed writing this.  

[Gorjo MacGrymm]

quote:Originally posted by Dadamh:
<STRONG>Anyway, take out that last tile, comp works overtime, into freezing, for about a minute or two.  Finally the dust settles and I have three living dwarves.  Two are immobile, broken legs and mangled arms and whatnot.  The remaining one has mangled head and spinal injuries.

It was the saddest thing ever to see the mobile dwarf wake up, get the bucket next to him, walk a few steps and realize that there was no water anywhere to help his friends, and collapse unconscious again.  He did this two or three times before the gut-wrenching sadness made me abandon.  

I feel depressed writing this.    </STRONG>

MAJOR WIN, i am crying for him......no...wait....those are tears of laughter

[Armok]

That's just sad and awesome.    

[AlanL]

One of the dumbest things I did in the 3D version was just as i was learning to experiment with large scale construction in it. I built a nice new perpetual motion machine just a bit before, and decided to make a nice new artificial lake next to my fort. So, I dig out the lake... this was small for a lake, more just to see if it would work. If my memory serves me, I decided it would me a lot quicker to get rid of those leftover floor tiles if I just caved them in. I did... they went through the floor, down to the floor below, and demolished a lot of my perpetual motion machine, which I ended up spending a bit repairing afterwards. Nobody died, but it did end up with repair costs and the lake didn't work.

[Jamuk]

Ok, on a map with a large mountain that had a river run down it and then went down a waterfall and into a canyon.  I had a master plan to create a massive water system made of a grid of rooms which had channels in between them.  I wanted to make all of those channel with water so I could access water from anywhere in the fortress.  I dug a massive channel from the river at the bottom of the canyon and had it run down several levels and into my water network.  

However, I overestimated how fast water would flow, and it actually evaporated before it got through much of my fort.  I therefore decided to make a new channel from the top of river at the top of the mountain, and then have it come straight down through a long staircase into the grid, hoping that the water pressure of 10 or so levels would force it to go through the fortress faster.  It didn't.  So, in my massive brilliance, I decided to instead of using 1 tile widen hole down to my fortress, to make it 5 times the thickness and have it pour out of the ceiling of my fortress, into one of the channels of the network.  

However, I didn't put any safeguards in place to stop the new flow of water... It began to spill over over everything and block off entire sections of my fortress.  So, I frantically begun work on a giant reservoir underground below my fort to give me time to prepare, and to lower the water level in my fort.  I dug a 3 tile wide opening to the flooded area, and as my miners broke open the last tile, they got washed back into the reservoir.  

My legendary miner arrived at the scene to save the day! He pushed through the torrents of water and opened up the last 2 tiles of the reservior tunnel.  "Yay!" I thought, I'll have time to wall off the sections of the fortress and recover from the disaster!  

However, it wasn't enough.  The reservoir soon filled up and had almost no effect on my fortress.  So, after having dug out a massive fortress across a large portion of the map, my dwarves were forced to sadly drag all of their soaked belongings out of the lost areas before they were lost to the unstoppable water.  

Out of a giant fortress I was left with about a 40x40 tile area filled with furniture that had escaped the disaster, and many, many homeless dwarves.  I had to quit and abandon the fortress, as there was nothing that could be done to save it. I blocked off the doors from our entry area full of furniture into the rest of the fortress and abandoned.

[SirPenguin]

quote:Originally posted by Dadamh:
<STRONG>
I feel depressed writing this.     </STRONG>

Heh...yeah...I actually wrote up a story for another forum about a guy I got depressed about, by the name of Urvad. I actually name all my RPG characters after him when possible.

I must now tell the mighty tale of Urvad Ilromoltar, so that he may live forever, at least in text.

Warning: Obnoxiously long story.

He and Inod Brushpaints were my only two soldiers in my 27 dwarf fortress. They didn't mind that much. Inod was a loner, barely any friends, and felt glad to have a role. Urvad, however, had two children and a wife to think of, but was doing it out of duty. He was the leader of their two person squad.

I mostly kept out of external affairs. I was surrounded by various "______men", all of which were either killing themselves or stalking the mountains. My traps had already stopped a number of goblin thieves and antmen, so I knew that they were aware of my existence.

The two soldiers were wrestlers, and sparred every day, bringing up their skill levels quite high. Their armor was poor, as at that time I had only just struck ore that would turn into nickel, but as I said, there was no REAL need to have a standing army. I also assigned a wardog to Urvad, who was always the first to take care of the numerous kobold thieves.

I grew attached to both of them, but Urvad in particular. He was always fast to defend, and the amount of kills under his squad's belt was impressive. He once took on two frogmen that jumped out of the underground river, entirely by himself, and only sustained minor scratches on his huge arms.

Only two dwarves ever dared to venture outside: My woodworker, to get trees, and my fisherdwarf, to add variety to my diet. The brook was close to my fort, so I never expected trouble.

Well, I found it. An antman struck while she was fishing, chasing her down. Not wanting to lose her, I rallied my squad, and sent them after her. The men charged forward, Urvad in the lead, followed by the bitch. It took awhile for them to catch up to the fleeing fisherdwarf, and when they did, bodies collided. Two more antmen had joined the chase, as well as a cave swallowman. Urvad was the first there, and took all 4 of them on.

He smote the 3 antmen quickly, ripping one of them limb from limb and throwing them into the river. The cave swallowman was a different story...

He sustained some of the worst injures I've seen. His chest cavity caved in, he and sustained severe gut wounds. Even his legs had deep gashes in them. However, worst of all were his arms, his two "weapons" of war. They were utterly mangled, hanging by the sinew. The bones of his arms were LITERALLY scattered about the ground.

He fell, and suddenly at his side were his wardog and comrade, finishing the last remaining cave swallowman. But they were all too late.

The fisherdwarf had run straight into a nest of Trogs. Not wanting to risk losing more men, I told my squad to stand down. She was mauled, but they didn't actually finish her off. She laid they bleeding, until finally she bled to death.

Urvad was unconscious and winded. After what seemed like forever, my woodworker came and dragged him to the barracks.

What followed were many months of waiting for him to come out of his coma. He never did. He got thirsty, then hungry, and soon turned dehydrated. The dwarves couldn't very well feed and give him water if he couldn't open his mouth. Soon, he passed away, surrounded by his wardog and second in command.

It was only then did I realize, after looking at his relationships, that the fisherdwarf was his wife. Worse still, his children, now orphans, had grown up to be peasants while their father was in the coma, were the ones commissioned to fetch the arm bones of their father for his coffin. They were assaulted by antmen where the battle took place, probably looking to extact vengeance, but the kids were smarter than their mother, and ran back inside, luring the antmen into my numerous stone traps.

Urvad now lays in a nickel sarcophagus, which I put in a room adjacent to the barracks. It's surrounded by various armor pieces I couldn't get out in time, but would have probably saved his life.

I salute you, Urvad.

[ June 10, 2008: Message edited by: SirPenguin ]

[Ubersoldat]

quote:Originally posted by SirPenguin:
<STRONG>Epic story</STRONG>

Reminds me of some of my earlier forts, and the numerous military mishaps that stem from not having any iron on the map. Although, said mishaps were a lot less dramatic than this.

[Deon]

This was really sad...
And this is just another example why I always try to set only lonely dwarves as woodcutters/fisherdwarves.

[Yami]

So far my worst mistake has been relying on a few elite soldiers.  When I tell them to use water skins, they always go refill them as the siege comes.

When I don't?  Well, they spend the entire fight drinking while my crafters have to rush the goblin hordes.

I'm beginning to think I should just pave the edge of the map with cage traps...

[Cthulhu]

I rarely grow attached to Dwarf Fortress characters.  In the Black and White 2 demo I became attached to soldiers and watched them in battles though.  Anyway, the only dwarf I can think of right now that I followed around was a recruit named Shorast.  When my legendary miner, attempting to dig out the tomb complex, hit an underground lake and was torn apart by cave creatures; the two military squads I had charged in.  Shorast was the leader of one, and I believe the leader of the other was named Bomrek or Ral.  I'll just call him Bomrek.  Bomrek's squad reached the pool first(My miner dug a Z-level below the walkable area, directly into the pond, I had a different miner dig a second tunnel into the bubble of air above it).  I stationed them at the southern end of the pond and waited for Shorast's superior squad.  Shorast herself was a Great Wrestler and had a steel battleaxe that apparently fell from the sky, I have no idea where it came from, and her second-in-command was also a Great Wrestler.  Metal production hadn't begun at this point, and they were unarmored except for one dwarf's cat bone helmet.  I'm going to speed things up, this is going into a stream of consciousness-esque ramble.  The frog- and olm-men swam up to the bank at the southern end and began pulling in dwarves from the secondary squad, and once in the water the dwarves had no chance.  There had to have been at least 15 cave creatures in there, and they were all over there.  The entire southern half of the pond was red.  It had all cleared up by the time Shorast arrived, and the cave was eerily silent, with no sign that the first squad had been there at all.  They moved to the southern end, and were set upon by the beasts.  This time, there were no casualties.  Shorast's axe tore through them like they were made of styrofoam, and she clove the olm-man who killed half of the other squad in two.  Their victory was so great that Shorast was later elected mayor.  I planned on giving her and the rest of the squad a magnificent tomb, but sadly, six goblin archers attacked the fortress shortly after the arrival of the largest trading caravan the fortress had ever seen.  Dozens of haulers were carrying trade goods back and forth, and when the hunter who spotted the ambush went down, they rushed to him.  Remember that movie Hamburger Hill?  I never saw it.  Was it good?  I'm not really a fan of war movies.  Anyway, the archers killed four or five dwarves before they(The dwarves) realized this wasn't a good idea, and started running.  The lieutenant I mentioned earlier in the story ran to protect Mayor Shorast, but was pincushioned by the archers, and died next to his commander.  Shorast herself survived unscathed, but was no longer drafted, and therefore ran back inside.  These archers were so epic even the caravan guards couldn't stand up against them, and after massacring the traders, they moved for the main fortress.  I thought most of my population would survive, no one of any particular importance was killed, most of the deaths being haulers.  We turtled up behind our traps, and waited for the goblins to die by them or get bored.  Of course, they forgot that I was the creator.  I screw things up a lot.  When digging out our massive storehouse I left a diagonal through which a second ambush squad crept.  There were no survivors.  I'm starting to wonder if this story is on topic, as I can't for the life of me remember how Shorast died, and she was supposed to be the hero.  I tend to lose myself in things like this and start rambling.  I know I saw her die, I'm pretty sure it was a goblin axeman.  I can almost see it.

Several years later, an adventurer traveled to the fortress.  This was two or three real-world months later, and I had completely forgotten about Shorast.  That is, until my adventurer stumbled upon her severed arm in the entrance hall.  It's truly awful to see something like this.  Shorast was my pet character for the fortress, and I like my pet characters to survive, or die spectacularly in the face of immense odds.  My other favorite death is the lieutenant's death, an easy death with friends nearby.  She got neither of those.  They hunted her down like an animal and she didn't even put up a fight.  That made me sad.

Edited for clarification and spelling/grammar.

[ June 12, 2008: Message edited by: Cthulhu ]