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[Lalandrathon]

What is this "planning" you all speak of?

[Lord Dullard]

For me, it's glowing stone like microcline, orthroclase, and realgar.  Everything goes from a nice grey or brown to a OH GOD IT'S YELLOW.

Doesn't mess up the layout, per se, but messes up the look.

This is precisely why I use a different color scheme than the default (specifically, I use 'Another theme' from here).

It dulls the colors down from an array of stab-the-eyes neons to much more mild versions.

[LordBucket]

Other than the occassional legendary dining hall, and maybe noble quarters if I'm feeling generous, I mostly completely dig out mistakes and then rewall where needed. I find "smoothed" more visually appealing than engraved, and it's really not necessary to engrave to get any desired room quality.

When I build underground, I generally put the bulk of my fortress just a couple z-levels below the bottomost soil layer. Say, -5 to -8 would be typical. I've never found anything at that depth that I couldn't simply dig out and rewall.

[The Doctor]

Damn soil always ruins my plans grand halls.

[Weev]

The inability to think ahead of time to account for z-levels.  So far, I've had many a fort lost to channeling water to and from sources.   It always sucks when your dining hall has a hole appear in it's ceiling, with the sound of rushing water not far off.

[jp.mech]

Oddly shaped aquifers. Had an ocean map where the ocean wasn't aquifer and the land had 3+ layers of aquifer marked on the embark screen. I started above the aquifer, then as I dug deeper, I kept having to edge closer to the ocean, so I ended up having skinny work areas.

Bad planning on my part.  I need to expand a hallway, add rooms, or add another staircase, only to find I have a huge stockpile in the way. Or I'm about to make a moat, only to find a corridor has found itself in the layer under the moat's planned route.

While colored stone doesn't bother me usually, it does piss me off when I'm trying to find ore and all I run into are colored stone clusters. I'm about to abandon/'have fun' with a fort because I can't find any bituminous coal in the sedimentary layers, since all I run into is colored (read: different shades of gray) stone.  Also because my tower cap farm took a whole year before I could wet the ground.

[Blucher]

I've had difficulties with just about everything others have mentioned, but I have the most problems with stockpiles.  I plan my forts out beforehand and when I find that I need more space than I thought, things get ugly.

I have a hard time just letting a fort grow.  I go in wanting a particular shape and feel to a fort.  The more a fort strays from the plan, the more I grow dissatisfied with it.

[deadlycairn]

My current fort has massive layout issues (everything is about as inconveniently placed as dwarvenly possible), with dwarves travelling WAY too far to get the resources they need, also I have yet to find the magma pipe promised by the site finder, and am currently digging out an entire Z-level to try and find it ( I've got an uber-dwarf with nothing better to do)

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Well, I have been lucky about underground features thus far (no chasm or magma), so these are not really on my list.

Which does get me are aquifers or other underground water tiles. I mean, you can't predict where they are (unlike surface water), and they will cancel only the mining jobs touching them, so you will end up with rooms half dug-out already while the other half is impossible to finish.

Getting a bit over-enthusiastic with farming does not really kill my fortresses, but slows down their development significantly (^_^;;

Finally, any new release of the game destroys all currently active fortresses, so the high release rate in the past month actually was the worst show-stopper for me.

Deathworks

[Proteus]

I've had difficulties with just about everything others have mentioned, but I have the most problems with stockpiles.  I plan my forts out beforehand and when I find that I need more space than I thought, things get ugly.

Thatīs why I make almost all of my rooms with a modulary 11*11 tiles design (which is the distance you get when you use shift + arrow to move the cursor).
In case of stockpiles initially I only dig out a 5*5 portion of the whole room (which  is enough for initial needs) and spare the remainder of the 11*11 room for further expansion of the stockpile that will be dug out if need arises.
Same thing I do with the stockpile for food and drinks as well as for my great dining hall, with the only exception that each of them consists of 4 11*11 rooms spaced at one tile apart (i.e. the whole area is 23*23) and of which initially I only dig out an 11*11 portion of the room.
(many of the 11*11 rooms btw. have a central strairway in the mid part in the middle tile that leads to stockpiles one z level below or above the room and normally they also contain pillars [although you donīt need them in DF to prevent caveins I use it as some kind of house rule, to have no dug out tile that is more than 6 tiles away from a wall or pillar])

[dyze]

last time it was the work of one berserk dwarf. he started off by killing most of the cats and dogs, then went on to beating up dwarves.
he pushed a miner off a bridge into the water of my indoor canal. this was right in the center of my main hallway right between the bedrooms and the dining room.
the miner drowned right there and started spreading miasma all over the main hallway, and all the other dwarves started to go berserk and crazy, destroying each others rooms and beating each other up.

i checked the thoughts of some dwarf, there it said "..was forced to endure the slow decay of a friend".

destroyed my plans yeah, but it was pretty fun to watch. 

[WCG]

For me, it's glowing stone like microcline, orthroclase, and realgar.  Everything goes from a nice grey or brown to a OH GOD IT'S YELLOW.

Doesn't mess up the layout, per se, but messes up the look.

But you can lay floor over mined rock surfaces, can't you? And I know you can, if necessary, remove walls and rebuild with another color stone.

In fact, one of the neat things about Dwarf Fortress is how fluid your fortress really can be. If you need to dig a moat, but your farms are there, just build a farm somewhere else and put walls as necessary to contain the moat. In fact, I just had a similar problem, so I made a short dog-leg in a distant corridor to avoid a new moat (and if I'd really wanted a nice, straight corridor, I could easily have redone the whole thing).

Chasm, river, Adamantine, Magma... Anything underground, really.
Why is it that it always happens right in the biggest and most time-consuming-to-build part of the fort?

OK, I happen to think this would be great! Not a disadvantage at all. I love working my fort into the existing world. If I didn't have to do that, all my forts would look alike. And let's face it, there are worse things than discovering a convenient source of magma - or a chasm or underground river - right off the bat! An inconvenient aquifer might be a pain, but the rest of these?

#3 is using a bad design. 1-wide hallways don't cut it, and the beds need to be further away.... the basics you don't learn until you've had a couple kings show up. also, not leaving enough room for traps, or whatever else is vital to survive.

Again, the game is fluid enough to overcome a lot of these problems. I've widened corridors before. Yes, I lose some space from the rooms alongside (unless I want to move everything a space), but it's certainly possible. And it's not all that impractical, either, since I always seem to have tons of dwarves who are unnecessary for serious work.

Admittedly, I'm still a newbie at this. And although I planned out my first fortress, I'm taking a more casual approach with this one. That will probably come back to bite me in the ass, but without knowing where in the world the magma pipe or underground rivers lie... well, it's hard to plan out everything.

But I like unexpected discoveries. And I keep learning just how flexible Dwarf Fortress can be. If I really want to do something, I can usually do it - no matter if I'd already dug or built in the area or not.

Don't you think?

Bill

[dyze]

beyond that.... it comes down to simple things. like the nearest water being WAY over there, and the magma in the far corner of the map... now thats a long walk, and the miners spend half their time walking back for food/beer/sleep.

umm, channels? 

[Captain Xenon]

beyond that.... it comes down to simple things. like the nearest water being WAY over there, and the magma in the far corner of the map... now thats a long walk, and the miners spend half their time walking back for food/beer/sleep.

umm, channels? 

sure channels... which dont flow uphill. im uphill in a mountain, waters down in a valley. topography of the map is important.
but water tunnels, which need to be floored/road paved, lest they clog with tower caps. when your priority is 'i need water now so they dont walk that far outside all the time' you need the water quickly. and it still took me a year to get it up and running.

now, im sure ill put in an aqueduct later, for the classic dwarf-wash system and closer water supplies. and i know i want a floodgate for that when i get that far. but thats an 'eventualy' plan, for after the fortress can kill all the goblins bloodily. but the aqueducts require more planning, cause sometimes you go and find a chasm the hard way while your digging it, and of course you want all that ore, economic stone, and gems, right?

as for magma channels... i havent played with magma enough yet to plan ahead as far as i want with that. the magma is on the other side of the brook, i CANNOT trade for bauxite so no fancy toys with magma, and the magma is level with the brook. i want to get some nice savegames before i use experimental magma pipes, with nothing but walls and floors to stop the flow of doom.

[Bryan Derksen]

as for magma channels... i havent played with magma enough yet to plan ahead as far as i want with that. the magma is on the other side of the brook, i CANNOT trade for bauxite so no fancy toys with magma, and the magma is level with the brook. i want to get some nice savegames before i use experimental magma pipes, with nothing but walls and floors to stop the flow of doom.

If you lack any magma-safe materials you can still use water to build an 'emergency shutoff' system. Build a 1-tile cistern one level above the lava channel (assuming the channel is one tile wide) with a hatch cover for a floor, hooked up to a lever. When you want to close the lava channel just open the hatch and the channel will be blocked by a tile of obsidian. To open the channel again, remove the hatch and channel out the obsidian from above. No need to make lots of fancy waterworks for this, either; you'll only need a very small amount of water in the tank so you could fill it with a bucket brigade via ponding. I haven't tried building this exact system but a previous fort of mine had an obsidian factory where the magma inlet was controlled in this manner as a side effect of obsidian production.

You could also use a pump as a lava "gatekeeper", moving the magma over an otherwise impassible obstruction in the channel (non-magma-safe materials can currently be used in pumps moving magma). I haven't tried that either but I can't think of any flaws, aside from the usual hassle of pumping. It has the added benefit of being fail-safe.