Ok, this next story is one that I can tell my friend anytime and he will laugh uncontrollably. I don't think it's quite as funny, but here goes.
It's my first fort, and things are (shock!) going rather well; aside from the common newbie mishaps, of course. My fort had two entrances...one near each murky pool that my fisherdwarves were frequenting. One of these entrances was a 2x2 set of floor hatches set into the roof of my fort.
Unfortunatelly, the roof of my fort was a popular grazing area for the packs of horses that liked to roam around. Every now and then, a fisherdwarf would flip out because he saw one of these horses, but in general they avoided us and we avoided them. I thought nothing of it until one day I got a HUGE slew of messages: "Urist McEquiniphobe cancels job: interrupted by Horse". *Pause*. *Zoom to location*.
Ohhhhh crap, one of the horses decided to take a shortcut THROUGH my fortress. Turns out, my hunter (who I had been allowing to hunt at will) pegged one of the bastards in the leg, which sent it into a frenzy. THE CHASE WAS ON. THROUGH MY FORTRESS.
This horse ran in one entrance, past one of the main workshop areas, along the main hallway (FULL of nobles and children) past all of my indoor farmers, and out the front door again. Actually, that's a lie. He didn't use the front door, he jumped into my well and escaped via the aqueduct. Oh, did I mention it was GUSHING BLOOD THE ENTIRE TIME? My main hallway (smoothed walls, engravings, etc.) was now covered in horse blood, as were all the dwarves that happened to be walking along it at the time. Oh yeah, and my water supply was forever red with blood. After the initial ruckus had died down, people got back to work, but I learned my lesson: KEEP THE HATCHES TIGHTLY SEALED.
So everything was fine after that, right? Wrong.
Turns out the fisherdwarves had pets. These pets would often be found begging to be let through one of the floor hatches, and I would pause the game, allow animals through the doors, unpause, wait for Mr. Scruffles to open the hatch (don't ask me how animals can open those things...), pause the game again, set the door to be "tightly sealed", and then get on with whatever it was I was doing. Needless to say, this bugged the hell out of me; I wanted to leave the doors open.
I did what I SHOULD have done from the start: built some traps. I made it impossible to use the hatches without passing at least 3 sawblades large, serrated discs.
I think you can see where this is going...horses are stupid, and not even 4 BUTCHERIES WORKING IN PARALLEL could keep up with the amount of dead horse carcass that piled up on my doorstep. *Shudders*. The entire hillside was red with blood. I swear, if blood behaved like a liquid and not a contaminant, my fort would have had a minor flood every time someone opened one of the hatches.
Another unfortunate side effect was that my dwarves got blood all over them after having used that entrance. They'd go to the well to clean off. The well soon became saturated with the blood of every living creature that ever bled. I dunno, maybe it's kind of badass that my fort's premier meeting area was a place where everyone sat around and chatted while standing knee-deep in blood. Or maybe it's just gross.
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Topic: Face Palm moments you had in Dwarf Fortress (Read 2213565 times)