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[Ottofar]

Just a few minutes ago, I noticed  that my legendary woodcutter/carpenter had dehydrated somewhere. I found him dead with other dehydrating/starving dwarf, who was legendary miner/mason/mechanic. He was still alive.  I caved in the floor they were on. The M/M/M dwarf survived the fall without injuries, or being knocked unconscious. He managed to crawl to my food stockpiles and started eating. Then: Urist McMinerMasonAndMechanic has died from thirst. That annoyed me.

Where is the worst deaths-thread, by the way?

[Wblueskylives]

I'm still learning the game so I've had plenty of facepalms just from being a nub, but: I was digging out a moat that I planned on draining and reflooding continually, the idea being that I would trap invaders in there, flood it and drown them.
So one of my miners decided to get stuck, so I had him mine a tunnel back towards the fort figuring I could use it as a base for floodgates and levers for said floods.

Well, I didn't realize that enemies could move diagonally around things. Nor did I realize water could. And to top it off I forgot to lock the door I put down there. So the first ambush comes, I raise my drawbridge, they all run into the pit, I flood it.

Long story short: First ambush got around every trap I set up and basically destroyed everything. What they didn't destroy, the water did.

[h3lblad3]

I just set up an area to be channeled.

Both of my miners are now sitting right next to each other on these nice little islands.
You... IDIOTS!

[kurisukun]

I'm going with very large and uneccessary, but surprisngly efficient rooms in my current fortress.  So I design my floor which will be dedicated to smithing.  I mentioned large/uneccessary.  That floor can probably fit about 10-20 workshops per row.  And there are 9 rows.  So I run magma through the whole lot, and wait for it to get a steady 4 underneath it (to prevent a mood claiming it only to have it unactivate.  Had 2 metalcrafting moods during the time while it was filling too, glad I did)

I then try to build, only to realize that the very CENTER tile of every forge building cannot be over lava.  Guess where I'd run my chasms?


So I have to build floors over every single hole (30-60 tiles times 9) and then channel out another section row (this time in the right spot)  WITHOUT flooding the other infrastructure underneath it, and then I have to wait for it to fill.  Again.

My Glass mega-project is never getting done.....

[jokuvaan]

making mega deathtrap and on test run accidentally wipe out half my fortress population...

[doctorspoof]

Most facepalming moment for me:

Had a nice fortress set up, fairly large, 100+ dwarves. Strong military. I decided my defences needed more, and began expanding my magma moat to consist of two seperate moats connected by a passage to share the magma. I channel it all out, and channel the final square to allow the magma to begin moving into the new moat.
Little did i realise that i had channeled through the roof of my food stockpile, the same stockpile that had 400+ Dwarven Wine stored in it.


There was fire. Lots and lots of fire. And the worst part? Everytime someone over the other side of the fortress got thirsty, they'd rather try and get a drink of boiling hot burning alcohol, than drink  from the stream outside. Typical dwarves.

[Lymojo]

I'm going with very large and uneccessary, but surprisngly efficient rooms in my current fortress.  So I design my floor which will be dedicated to smithing.  I mentioned large/uneccessary.  That floor can probably fit about 10-20 workshops per row.  And there are 9 rows.  So I run magma through the whole lot, and wait for it to get a steady 4 underneath it (to prevent a mood claiming it only to have it unactivate.  Had 2 metalcrafting moods during the time while it was filling too, glad I did)

I then try to build, only to realize that the very CENTER tile of every forge building cannot be over lava.  Guess where I'd run my chasms?


So I have to build floors over every single hole (30-60 tiles times 9) and then channel out another section row (this time in the right spot)  WITHOUT flooding the other infrastructure underneath it, and then I have to wait for it to fill.  Again.

My Glass mega-project is never getting done.....

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem fully but why do you need to completely fill in the tiles and then completely build a new channel for that? Wouldn't it be easier to just build floor tiles over the few empty gaps that will be supporting the center workshop tiles? You should only have to build one tile for each workshop and no additional channeling should be needed.

[Vidalis]

I'm going with very large and uneccessary, but surprisngly efficient rooms in my current fortress.  So I design my floor which will be dedicated to smithing.  I mentioned large/uneccessary.  That floor can probably fit about 10-20 workshops per row.  And there are 9 rows.  So I run magma through the whole lot, and wait for it to get a steady 4 underneath it (to prevent a mood claiming it only to have it unactivate.  Had 2 metalcrafting moods during the time while it was filling too, glad I did)

I then try to build, only to realize that the very CENTER tile of every forge building cannot be over lava.  Guess where I'd run my chasms?


So I have to build floors over every single hole (30-60 tiles times 9) and then channel out another section row (this time in the right spot)  WITHOUT flooding the other infrastructure underneath it, and then I have to wait for it to fill.  Again.

My Glass mega-project is never getting done.....

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem fully but why do you need to completely fill in the tiles and then completely build a new channel for that? Wouldn't it be easier to just build floor tiles over the few empty gaps that will be supporting the center workshop tiles? You should only have to build one tile for each workshop and no additional channeling should be needed.

The minute he is going to read this will be a bigger face palm moment than that he just described. 

[Sphalerite]

I built an elaborate mechanical system whereby my fortress's surplus tame animal population could be channeled onto a retracting drawbridge over a deep drop with a refuse stockpile and a butcher's shop at the bottom.  I was hoping to be able to butcher large numbers of animals in a short period of time by automatically dropping their corpses right next to the butcher.  It was only after the first use of the device dropped dozens of baby animals to their doom that I discovered that tame animals which die by falling can't be butchered.

[Jim Groovester]

...I discovered that tame animals which die by falling can't be butchered.

The cause of death is irrelevant. Dead tame animals can't be butchered.

[Hyndis]

I built an elaborate mechanical system whereby my fortress's surplus tame animal population could be channeled onto a retracting drawbridge over a deep drop with a refuse stockpile and a butcher's shop at the bottom.  I was hoping to be able to butcher large numbers of animals in a short period of time by automatically dropping their corpses right next to the butcher.  It was only after the first use of the device dropped dozens of baby animals to their doom that I discovered that tame animals which die by falling can't be butchered.

Nope. But when they fall and explode they will produce far more bones than usual, which means you can decorate even more things with bone.

[Dakk]

...I discovered that tame animals which die by falling can't be butchered.

The cause of death is irrelevant. Dead tame animals can't be butchered.

Unless they're slaughtered by a butcher, so yea.

[Quantum Toast]

Ordering the roof over my entrance channeled out for the benefit of the "dwarves don't go outside" order, only to watch the digger cheerfully collapse the floor under his feet and land on a cage trap.

Fortunately his bedroom has really smooth walls, so he didn't mind.

[Puzzlemaker]

Old one but good one:  I had found a site with a giant waterfall, and made my fortress built into the cliff with the waterfall re-routed through my fortress, through my dining hall, living areas, etc.  It all worked nicely, and drained well, and all that.

The only way into the fort was across the giant canyon carved by the second river.  I had set up a trap where any goblins that tried to make it across where flushed out of my entrance, and then dumped into a gladiator game (Or if they missed the net into a bunch of fish down below), where I would watch amused as they tried to make it out of my deathmaze alive.

Anyway, one goblin attack, everything was going as planned.  It was during the winter, and...
Oh wait, the water that was supposed to flush them out froze.  Now my entire entrance is frozen over, and my fort is flooding.
Crap.

Same map, different winter, a group of goblins suddenly ended up in my dining hall!  After an immediate WTF moment, I figured out what happened.  See, my draining system empties out into the river, and it froze during the winter.  While normally nobody can get up my maintenance shafts from the outside, the water had frozen over, giving them a nice, straight route straight into the very center of my fortress.  That was an epic facepalm moment.

[skaltum]

mhhhm heres a recent one. becoming fed up of the siege outside i decided to bridge my magma moat so the traps could finish them off. the dwarves were under ground but one of the enterance doors was jammed by a rock and so was a door in the meeting room. with impending doom so close i was forced to lock my 7 dwarves in the magma forges and during that one thought it was cool to grad a drink from the granery. sufice to say the granery and forges were safely locked but the onther 6 needed food and water so now i have an emergency tunnel and lost all but 1 dog to the menace while rhesus and raccoons ravaged my already tiny stocks of goods and my farms and nearly pulled the fateful lava flood lever.