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[muldrake]

For some reason my dwarves have chosen to include great axes in their standard embark equipment instead of regular battle axes. Of course nobody can weild them. Not sure why, the game is unmodded.

You could keep them for humans but they're really not of very good quality.

[comfyBruh]

This morning I lost 25 dwarves from a ten goblin siege. They had superior armor. I told my units to become active. I designated a large burrow with plenty of supplies. as soon as the first dwarf went down they all fled outside to collect body parts and armor and random refuse.

I later realized that activating a unit does not activate the burrows. You must do those separately.................................. Now I know.

[muldrake]

This morning I lost 25 dwarves from a ten goblin siege. They had superior armor. I told my units to become active. I designated a large burrow with plenty of supplies. as soon as the first dwarf went down they all fled outside to collect body parts and armor and random refuse.

I later realized that activating a unit does not activate the burrows. You must do those separately.................................. Now I know.

I'd also make a guess you should also bring up the standing orders with O and check for refuse/body parts collection options and turn those off during a siege.  The default setting is, I believe, that they don't collect refuse from outdoors.  If you have to, manually forbid the offending objects.  I think the default for body parts is they do collect them.

I generally only rely on burrows to get civilians to safety.  They're too confusing and unpredictable to use for much else, at least imo.  I also use them sometimes for very specialized purposes.  For instance, I'll burrow a strand extractor in a complex with their palatial suite of rooms, the craftsdwarf's workshop, and stockpiles for raw adamantine and the resulting threads.  Or similarly a particularly important lever puller.

Another problem with burrows (even if you activate them) is the dwarves will still engage in the dumb behavior when body parts and other crap gets into the burrow area itself.

Trying to control dwarves in combat is one of the more frustrating things in the game.  You can have one where 10 dwarves in crappy armor and junk weapons take on 100 goblins and beak dogs and trolls and smash them, then have another where 5 goblins somehow wreck your elite squad.  The latter is usually due to some facepalm moment of course (gee maybe I should have actually hooked up that bridge to the lever).

[RLS0812]

My grand library is now filled with over 160 'borrowed' artifact books. All of my dorks have suddenly taken a keen interest in reading.
 At any given time, my workforce is 15% to 20% of the population and none of the important jobs are getting done.

[TheFlame52]

My grand library is now filled with over 160 'borrowed' artifact books. All of my dorks have suddenly taken a keen interest in reading.
 At any given time, my workforce is 15% to 20% of the population and none of the important jobs are getting done.

They'll read until each of them has read every book in the library once.

[spinnylights]

I nearly lost a fort the other day to one of the silliest possible mistakes—I accidentally pressed "A" for "retract" instead of "X" for "raise to the south" when building a drawbridge for a cavern entrance, and foolishly didn't bother to test the bridge (never again!), so I only found out my mistake when a fire-breathing lobster beast turned up. This was quite early still and none of the dwarves had particularly strong combat skills or kit, especially for penetrating the thick chitin exoskeleton of the lobster. I drafted everyone who knew anything about fighting into a few hasty squads and sent them to fight it, and when things started looking grim for them I threw the rest of the adults into the militia to help out. At the eleventh hour a human swordsman somehow managed to show up and petition for residency amidst the chaos, and he turned out to have legendary skill, so he was able to valiantly slay the abominable lobster. Unfortunately, this was after all the adults were dead, leaving only two children on the top floor who managed to escape the flames. The swordsman decided his petition for residency had been rejected even though I'd accepted it (I guess since all the administrators died around the same time? there was no mayor yet), but although he was very cross about being turned down he continued to stick around the fort. I read this as him taking pity on the two poor dwarven orphans and deciding to care for them in the burnt-out ruins of the fortress.

Several months passed with the miasma of rotting flesh filling the halls and the ghosts of slain dwarves moaning about as the children and human swordsman lived off of the stockpiled food and drink and wandered around. At one point the outpost liason came and then left in a huff because no one would meet with him, and the accompanying merchants set up like normal in the trade depot surrounded by gore and ashes and waited as if nothing was wrong. Finally in the dead of winter a party of migrants arrived to find a Moria-esque house of horrors waiting for them, and being the dogged creatures they are they immediately set to giving all the dead a proper burial and cleaning all the blood off the walls. If only we could all have such fortitude.

Years have passed in-game since then and the fortress is thriving. The swordsman has since left for other climes, so I suppose he felt he had done all that was called for. The kids haven't taken their experiences too hard so hopefully they'll make it to adulthood with their sanity intact, as they're the only ones that can keep the memory alive of life before the lobster.

[Haggoroth]

I built a new fort this week.  Outside I had a few standing pools of water that I wanted to remove, plus I wanted to get some fresh water down below my Hospital to create some wells for ease of access once things started going poorly.  So I dug some tunnels to each of the 3 pools and to the nearby river, then I hollowed out everywhere I wanted the water to go along with the final cache of water under the Hospital.  Finally, I went up to the top and channeled in the 4 spots needed to drain the standing ponds and connect the river.  Finally, I floored over the the pools.  This is where I messed up, because I only floored over 2 of the 3 pools.

A couple years later a Cyclops shows up.  Now, the way I usually build my forts is I have a wide open 3 wide entrance with a drawbridge over it that leads right to my Trade Depot so merchants don't have to travel far.  When enemies show up, I pull a lever and the drawbridge closes into a wall revealing a tunnel that leads into traps and after the traps, my training rooms full of battle ready dwarven warriors.  Problem is, there was a dwarf that didn't make it into the fort in time and met the Cyclops on the field of battle near the drained pond.  The dwarf fled from Cyclops down into the dry pond and into my fortress, the Cyclops chased the dwarf into my fortress and was coming out essentially straight on top of my hospital and farms.

This was my face palm moment.

Luck smiled on me however because I activated my oldest squad and sent them to deal with the Cyclops and the fight went very very well.  The first dwarf that got to the beast was wielding a silver war hammer and the first swing was from the Cyclops, the dwarf dodged back away from the blow.  Upon closing the distance, the war hammer connected with the Cyclops' knee and brought the beast to the ground.  The dwarf proceeded to cave in the Cyclops' head with repeated blows and the great foe was slain before the 2nd dwarf even arrived on site to help.

[Urist McShire]

Normally, I am very good whenever a siege shows up, especially when I want to make sure that the enemy runs straight through my trap corridor and gets obliterated by all of my clear glass large serrated disks that also break as they run through them, but they're clear glass, a totally renewable resource from all the wood and sand on my map, so who cares?

I had everything forbidden so nobody would try to fetch Goblin body parts, corpses, or dropped items. I had the traps forbidden so nobody would try to unjam them or pick up any discarded broken pieces and mechanisms when the trap falls apart. I had all the logs on the surface that my dwarves had been quantum stockpiling through the wonders of minecarts and single-tile stockpiles forbidden so nobody would try to grab any and bring them back.

What I did not do was make a burrow that encompassed everywhere "inside" that excluded the outdoors and the trap corridor, and I forgot to disable autochop. So there's my Great glassmaker, who is also a woodcutter, running past my trap corridor and down the tunnel straight into the path of the gobbos on his way to cut down a tree that just grew tall enough to become a tree and become eligible for cutting down, since I have no limits on my stored logs. Every tree must be cut down!

He was just fulfilling his duty necessary to keep those prissy elves we were already at war with since embarkation mad, but he ran straight into the goblins while doing so.

Fortunately, after quickly realizing my mistake and burrowing the entire underground, he managed to survive by turning back, but he did get his stomach cut open and some bones broken, and there's still a silver bolt stuck in his chest, but he didn't lose any limbs and managed to lead the goblins back through the trap corridor where all but one died, and the one spearman that didn't was killed by a swordsdwarf as he tried to retreat.

[Schmaven]

I pulled some levers in the wrong order and now the obsidian farm has water where the magma should be.  Building an auxiliary drain for that now...

[voidOctopus]

I didn't understand why none of my dwarves were making charcoal for a good chunk of time, before I realized that I had only enabled the furnace operator labor, not the wood burner one.... to be fair, I hadn't played in a while 

[Schmaven]

Having a central lever room to control everything is nice and convenient until a very fast dragon sprints directly to it and melts half of them...

I also just found this:

You can actually modify the pause behaviour by modifying the announcement.txt(just remove the :R from Cave Collapse)

smh.  Soo many forest fires dealt with manually unpausing way too many times

[muldrake]

Having a central lever room to control everything is nice and convenient until a very fast dragon sprints directly to it and melts half of them...

Or a pissed off dwarf tantrums and starts randomly pulling them (maybe it wasn't a great idea to put them all in the tavern).  Or a troll wrecks them.  Building destroyers will do a number on these things.

[Ziusudra]

I also just found this:

You can actually modify the pause behaviour by modifying the announcement.txt(just remove the :R from Cave Collapse)

smh.  Soo many forest fires dealt with manually unpausing way too many times

DFHack's nopause is easier to toggle.

[BelligerentlyLiterate]

One day a Bronze Colossus showed up to one of my longest-running forts and I panicked. I threw squad after squad at it with steel gear hoping to chip away at it before it made it inside and completely mulched my civilians, but it just pulverized all my veteran squads, then all my regulars, then my recruits...

Finally after like 90% of my military had been slain, it finally made it in the front door... and immediately stepped in a cage trap I forgot I set and got stuck. I literally could have done nothing and the problem would have solved itself. Instead I just mulched my entire army for no reason.

[muldrake]

I did something similar with a dragon except I decided to let it in the front gate because it was fairly tight quarters with areas going off to the sides where I could place squads and attack it from multiple directions.  This was fairly brutal and deadly but killed it quickly.

But the front gate was where I'd built most of my early workshops.  Out of what I had at the beginning.  Which was wood.  In addition to the wood stockpiles.  At least I'd moved most of the booze underground but the rest of this stuff burned for over a month and there's still something on fire somewhere generating smoke about two years later.

This was also the third time that the entire map above ground got set on fire and burned to the ground (other than one corner across a brook).  But I have gotten used to that.  Last two times was magma crabs escaping the volcano.