I found out that dead elephants can be much more troublesome than live ones.
My current fort is a savannah volcanic island - lots of elephants, rhinoceri, and so on. Nothing but salt water around, and I'd put a water purification plant on the back burner when the farms began pumping out enough plump helmets to keep booze plentiful. I'd laid out a line of cage traps near one of the borders so I could start building a zoo of death for my own amusement, and caught a whole herd of elephants. I'd been nearly starved at that point due to migrants and forgetting to update the new farms as the season changed, and discovered that my elephants were too heavy for the merchants to accept, and would starve to death if I tamed them, so I butchered something like six of them. I thought my extensive new food stockpile could handle it.
I thought wrong.
I blithely went off to supervise the massive gem-mining project I had going, and wasn't paying attention until I started receiving the "Urist McImportantWorker has dropped dead of thirst!" messages.
"Bwuh?" I responded intelligently. "But I've got Urist McBrewer queued up to the gills with jobs! Did he cancel them for some stupid reason? Oh yeah, I turned off job cancel spam because people kept trying to haul missing items for some reason. He probably just ran out of barrels. I'll just queue up another full batch of barrels, and requeue up the brewing, and things should be fine!"
Another dead dwarf later, and I went back. "I know those barrels were made! The wood stockpile is being refilled as I speak. Why isn't McBrewer Brewing? Maybe a dwarf just drank all the booze? I'll check the stockpile for empty barr- Oh. My. Armok."
It was a veritable explosion of Elephant Tallow. They were hip deep in the stuff. All the barrels were being repurposed to store Elephant Tallow, and my dwarves were snatching them away before McBrewer could claim one, so he'd cancel all of the jobs in a huff. I tried another full queue of barrels, but it didn't even make a dent. I decided to clear some room by queueing the kitchen with umpteen lavish meal requests, figuring that'd open up some stockpile space. It was only when I saw the masterpiece roast announcement that I checked the kitchen, noticed that the stockpile was still full, and looked
in the kitchen. It was cluttered with about three pages of Elephant Tallow that had never made it to the full-up stockpile after the fat-rendering process! The cook wasn't even bothering to look at the stockpile, because he was blithely just cooking Elephant Tallow Roasts all day long with the stuff slathered liberally over the kitchen.
By the time I got a new stockpile dug out, an additional carpenter workshop online, and the carpenters and brewer to stop chasing evaporating puddles for drinkable moisture, a third of the fortress had died.
At least Babar can rest easy, knowing he got his revenge.
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Topic: Face Palm moments you had in Dwarf Fortress (Read 2210781 times)