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[Skorpion]

Diverted brook, didn't account for pressure, flooded landscape.

Building curtain wall, floor constructed in mid-air fell through the fort, trashing a harvest of plump helmets.

[(name here)]

Same as marlowe, but in a community fort so 9 times as embarrassing. though i did manage to seal off the breach with doors. turns out that dwarves don't cancel due to flooded site until they've actually done a little work, so with patience i got them installed in 2-3 dwarf weeks.

[Marlowe]

Today. Not an engineering blunder, but it counts.

Embarking with Faerie on a joyous wilds tundra (hey, it has a volcano and dolomite) not realising that although you can farm outside in freezing conditions, you can't do so on a tundra.

Because it's got no plants or trees to start out you see. Faerie, I don't need to mention, don't have [INDOOR_FARMING].

Fortunately there's plenty of elk around, so I turn hunting on a few people to see us through. All my seven have some mining experience and a pick, and can outrun and outfight an elk easy. Should be straightforward.

Of course they all went for the fire imps. I lost my leader out of that.

Mind you, the sight of  fire imps scattering in panic from pick-wielding miner-elves screaming "LOOKS LIKE MEAT'S BACK ON THE MENU BOYS!" was worth it. The Fire Man poked his head out to see what was going on, but didn't seem to want no aggro. And Fire imp leather has a certain style. We bent their bones into bows, as is fitting.

Between hunting and trading, we've made it through to the end of the second year, and got some plump helmets off the dwarves. Meaning we can finally farm and brew some booze.

 Thank god we had an aquifer and aren't alcoholics. Now I'm worrying about the orcs. They're late for their second showing and my boneworkers are hungry.

 So, yeah. No farming for the first two years (after having carted all these seeds) plus orcs to worry about equals FUN.

[Asehujiko]

My fort was mostly located under the cave river, with channels reaching out to various places for farming(i split all my food and clothing farms) with stockpiles below, workshops below that, then more stockpiles for finished goods, then trading areas, then communual rooms, then nobles and workers on the bottom. While restructuring my entrace, i collapse a useless piece of mountain to make mining it easier. Doing so however sprung a leak in the farming system, which then flooded the entire fort, dorms first.

[Gork]

This one happened a few months ago.

1) I needed lots of obsidian. There's a volcano so I decided to make a factory. \o/
2) I link the obsidian factory to a pool of water, located below the magma pipeline.
3) Not only do I not have enough water to make obsidian, but the magma also flooded about 1/5 of the map. This wasn't that bad, though, only lost a couple of trees and gained protection from that flank.
4) A human and a dwarf caravan got partially destroyed by the raging fire.

[Jack_Bread]

I was playing my first fortress and chose a cold map near a brook and it was going well. I dug directly underground since it was a flat map and made some decent rooms. Then I started on a huge underground river. My only miner went and started digging out the huge room. Took him two years to finish. The migrants came twice and I wasn't about farming at that time so my only booze came from trade. We ran out of booze and my dwarves started running on water. I started to fill the underground river. There was a hole in the main hall where the mist would spray and the dwarves would be happy. I finished and furnished the meager bedroom 1 level below the river hall. Then, a goblin siege came and I took all of the peasants and recruited them. Most of them were injured and were taken down to their rooms. I build a moat around the entrance which filled quickly. I put a well there for the dwarves. Winter came almost immediately after the moat and well were finished. The river froze and so did the moat. A cat got stuck under the ice and I dug it out. Then I kept getting job cancellations. "Dwarf cancels give water: No water source." I checked the injured dwarves and they were all thirsty and the underground river dried up. Then everyone was thirsty. I knew that they would never last the winter... so I abandoned... Now I always take seeds with me.

[Neoskel]

I had one that happened on my first fort. It was on a desert with a wicked double-aquifer. It was overflowing with saguaros and highwoods, so i could use wood for most things stone is usually used for, but dang gum, i wanted to start mining. So i started to try and beat the aquifer. I dug a pit, waited until winter and then tried to build walls and then repeat right under that. It was going so well, i was about to get the walls put in, when spring came. Lost my best miner. I wound up abandoning a little later and tried reclaiming just to see what it was like.

I was able to actually get past the aquifer on reclaim and started mining in earnest. I then decided to build a castle with the stone above ground. My population got to a certain limit and it said i had enough to have a sheriff. I thought, heck why not, and appointed my woodcutter. Big mistake. I didn't know he would want such luxurious appointments. All my dwarves were living in rooms carved out of sand with wooden furniture. I just couldn't build his rooms fast enough and then he started a tantrum spiral...

[sneakey pete]

Well, falling objects tend to suck in things from the area around which they fall.
eg, someone removes a floor connecting some more floors, they collapse, guy gets sucked off the edge.

as well as that, brook tiles don't support their roof. combine this with one of those weird 40d projecting brooks that go off the edge of a hill, with a miner ramping it out, and you get the general idea
"oh no, the thing collapsed"
*designates everything*
*tile punches a hole 8 z levels down... but the miner is safe...*
*dust spreads to miner, recedes. miner is no longer there*
*look 8 z levels down, miner against a blue background*

[Cheshire Cat]

wanted four 1*1 vertical shafts that descended from a mountain crag all the way down near the bottom of the map into a huge common room. and this map had huge cliffs and a million z levels. was thinking mainly how having an outside tile present seems to allow you to see a long way in adventure mode when you are near it, giving an imitation of lighting. and having lit tiles in a main dining room to hamper cave adaptation. and there were wall grates at intermediate areas and drainage in the bottom to save from accidental flooding caused by future projects like tower cap plantations and irrigated underground farms.

so, i made massively tall up down staircases, and then started designating them for channeling out, from the bottom up. thinking that the dwarfs would stand on one staircase and do the one directly underneath him, allowing one dwarf per shaft to go all the way up to the surface, at which point i would open the grate and let him out.

turns out when they have nowhere to stand they dig the floor underneath them. my 2 embark miners got severe injuries, and i thought it was from the very fearsome wildlife.

then the two peasants who migrated in and were presented with their forbears bloodstained picks and mining hats died. and the next 2. and then the next 2. and i was always busy somewhere else, not noticing how these damned dwarfs were dying. i only figured it out when i lost my 2 picks into the ungrated drainage channel at the bottom of one of the shafts. i had some metal but there was no wood to use it and i couldn't mine coal without picks.

due to unrelated craziness (read: bears, cougars, one lone giant eagle, two berserk camels and some giant desert scorpions) it took 2 years to finally get a damned pick from a caravan and some wood to make more. and in that time i got an angry mayor, dungeon master and captain of the guard all wanting rooms, and had my entire fort sleeping in a barracks in the depot. thank goodness i had some save irrigated underground farms going before i lost my ability to dig. alcohol, prepared meals and engraved everything saved the fort. once i got going again i found its very simple and easy to excavate shafts like mine from the top down. miners only fall 1 z level at a time that way, rather then 15.

[Fist_Of_Armok]

I am inordinately fond of megaprojects, especially ones that have the possibility of having one fatal flaw.

Such happened in two of my fortresses: Mebiluz and Cugganmorul. Mebiluz was the finest Dwarven fort you could imagine, surrounded by good stone, lots of trees, and plentiful metal deposits underground.

But no water outside a few lakes.

D'OH.


Cugganmorul was not as bad. Aside from a lack of metal, it was in fact a fine fortress-until I got the bright idea of building a moat around a fortress built into the side of a mountain.

"Baaah, it'll work fine! I'll just leave whatever gets in the way hanging out in the air!"

Well, the moat has a bridge leading across, because my entrance tunnel in doesn't have so much as a set of menacing spikes atop it.

And my dorfs keep collapsing the floors underneath themselves when they channel.

It's a five-space-wide moat five Z-levels deep-or will be. Right now it's only 3 Z-levels deep.

I'll finish it one day, with luck, if I stop hitting valuable metal deposits.

Should I just give it up and make it 3 Z-levels deep?

[StrikeTheSand]

Digging the second z-level of a frozen pond, channeling the exposed part, having it rain, and getting a miner 'encased in a block of ice.' Though, it did give me inspiration for an awesome gobbo torture game. For that, one ice-encased miner is worthwhile.

[Koji]

I built a tower designed to make a waterfall in my central chamber that would flow down to a lower reservoir, then get pumped out and go back into the brook.

Somehow the outgoing pump didn't work and everyone drowned very quickly.

[Cheshire Cat]

i had a crazy big water system in my most complex ever fort. there was a tower 10 z levels high full of water which could be used for all sorts of interesting purposes, like flushing goblins into super deep channels along the sides of my entrance hallway.

there were links coming off it all throughout my fort, giving me super high pressure water, which i was going to use offensively against the HFS but never did.

anyways, my fort ended when i dug a channel in my magma smelting area which was very deep underground, and forgot to check where my super high pressure water lines were. at least half my habitation was below that point. it was super spectacular, didnt actualy kill that many dwarfs because my fort was so massive even a giant 10 z level tank of water didnt come near filling it up and the lever to shut down the tank refilling was high up in a tower on the surface, but it sure was spectacular, and turned most of my limited magma supply into obsidian.