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[Lord Shonus]

If you're referring to the cave-ins caused by digging out the obsidian, ramps will allieviate the problem.

[Fishbulb]

Oh, bloody hell. I just had another one.

I have this open-air drydock sort of thing next to a little stream. See, the stream is carp-infested, and carp are deadly, but they're also tasty. Fortunately, oxygen is their one weakness. So I have a system of levers and floodgates and grates. Pull one lever, river-water (and carp, hopefully) rush in. Pull the other, everything drains out, leaving the carp gasping on the grates until their little fishy icons go all red and delicious. It's much simpler than shooting fish in a barrel, since there's no shooting.

Anyway, a goose (I'm playing with Dig Deeper, so there are geese) managed to get into my drowning pit. It just sort of swam around there minding its own business, seemingly invisible to the schools of carp swimming just tiles away. It stayed there for a LONG time, too, and when I finally v'd over it, I saw why: it had a broken wing. I guess it wasn't so invisible after all; just lucky.

Anyway, I forgot about it for a while. But then I went to clean out the pit after the annual carp genocide, and I found him — the goose — down on the bottom level, under the grates. I'd forgotten to set the door to the stairs to tightly-closed, so he got down there during the draining. A little goose, flopping around in a drained water tank with a broken wing, unable to fly out.

Poor thing.

So I went to a HELL of a lot of trouble to rig a cage trap down there. My mechanic is apparently deathly afraid of geese specifically or waterfowl in general or something, I don't know, because every time I sent him into the tank with a cage and a mechanism, he came out screaming. Anyway, what with one thing and another, I finally got the cage set up, and watched with a big grin as the goose flopped over to it and popped it.

I haul the caged goose outside, a nice distance from my outer wall, near a flock of other geese that was milling about close to the stream. Rigged a lever to it — which was another pain in the ass; see above re: ornithophobic mechanics — and gave it a good yank. Ta da! The goose was, at last, free!

All this took me the better part of two seasons, mostly 'cause my mechanic is a pussy, and I had to get all the dogs caged up so they wouldn't run into the tank and tear it to gobbets, and just all the folderol of it. But the rescue mission was a success!

And wouldn't you know the goddamn goose flopped right over to the river and got eaten by the first carp to come along. While I watched.

"Yay, you're free! Go be with those other … hey. The geese are over there. No, not the river! Not the—oh god, the blood!"

Seriously. The riverbank went red all the way to the edge of the map. Who knew geese had so much blood in them.

Shoulda just flooded the tank and drowned the damn thing. Would have been more merciful. And hey, free meat.

[quinnr]

I love how carp getting one dwarf manage to turn the entire river red with blood...the first dwarf I lost was to a carp, and it traumatized me for life.

[zchris13]

My last doomsday trap did require two separate levers to unleash tho.

ALWAYS double lever your doomsday devices WMDs.

[Fishbulb]

I love how carp getting one dwarf manage to turn the entire river red with blood.

I shamefully but willingly admit that I savescummed probably five times while trying to connect my drowning pit to the river. Carp. Carp. Sea lamprey. Carp. Goose. (Scared my woodcutter into the river where she drowned.) It was ridiculous.

Then I had a brilliant revelation. I just opened the drain beneath the grates (a 9x9 retracting bridge over a big room that connects to fortifications at the map edge), opened the inlet gates and sent in my miners to tunnel to the river horizontally instead of channeling out those last tiles on the surface. As soon as the river was breached water came flooding in, and dropped right through the grates and down the drain. My miners barely got their ankles wet.

The best part was watching the carp lunge for my miners as they dug out the last two tiles. They skidded right into the pit, where the water went from 7/7 down to an unsteady 2/7 on the grates. They gasped and air-drowned while my miners finished the job.

The fish haul was so epic I had to press five more butchers into messy, complicated, amateurish service to keep the carp, gar and lampreys from spoiling in my garbage room before they could be processed.

[JoystickHero]

I love how carp getting one dwarf manage to turn the entire river red with blood.

I shamefully but willingly admit that I savescummed probably five times while trying to connect my drowning pit to the river. Carp. Carp. Sea lamprey. Carp. Goose. (Scared my woodcutter into the river where she drowned.) It was ridiculous.

Then I had a brilliant revelation. I just opened the drain beneath the grates (a 9x9 retracting bridge over a big room that connects to fortifications at the map edge), opened the inlet gates and sent in my miners to tunnel to the river horizontally instead of channeling out those last tiles on the surface. As soon as the river was breached water came flooding in, and dropped right through the grates and down the drain. My miners barely got their ankles wet.

The best part was watching the carp lunge for my miners as they dug out the last two tiles. They skidded right into the pit, where the water went from 7/7 down to an unsteady 2/7 on the grates. They gasped and air-drowned while my miners finished the job.

The fish haul was so epic I had to press five more butchers into messy, complicated, amateurish service to keep the carp, gar and lampreys from spoiling in my garbage room before they could be processed.

I think this may be the first time ever that a carp's last thoughts were "Damn you, Urist..."

[Ravenplucker]

I just realised how to detect aquifers without embarking and getting a warning >=l

[S.K. Ren]

This is my greatest facepalm moment ever:

I embarked on a great location. It was a volcano and it had a undertground lake and river. The Lake was positioned just behind and above the magma pipe. I decided I would drain the lake into the caldera and have an easy to reach pool and some extra obsidian. I had already tapped into the magma much lower so I figured, 'What the hell'.

So just before the big drain, the set up looked something like this (Note: objects in example are much larger than they appear):

Code: [Select]

     ^^^  -Lake
   ^^^^^
  ^^^^^^
  ^^^^^
   ^^^
    #  - Depressurizing region, the lake is 4 z-levels high, and we're on the bottom
  .......
..vvvvv..# - The entrance to my fort, can you see where this is going?
.vvvvvv...
..vvvvv.. -The caldera
 .........

So I popped the cork and then within 1 second, I found my entire fortress sealed by Ice. Yes, I had forgotten I was in an freezing temperature map. SO my entire for was sealed and flooded. To make things worse, all my picks were sealed inside too.

[GrafZeppelin]

My greatest facepalm moment has to be when

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I forgot that my military wasn't active during a siege and I puzzled over why they weren't doing anything

[Magick]

-Everything is hooked up to magma. Everything. Dining room? magma. Bedrooms? magma. Stockpile? magma. King's throne room? Definitely magma.

So one day, a goblin siege was overtaking the fortress. I locked them into their particular section and PULLED THE LEVER.


Nothing happened.

A few minutes later, i get this message:
Urist Mcking has died in the heat
I look over, and the king's room is completely flooded with magma.

I then ordered my lever-pulling hermit to pull every lever, including the one that controlled the magma flow to the lever room. Got rid of those damn goblins.

[Furtuka]

5 minutes ago I posted a topic asking what something in my fortress was only to find out it was the artifact that I was so exited this morning but I didn't reconize it.

[TrueAnkh]

I was trying to build a well from a river by building a 4x4 area that would be channeled through.

It took me half a season to realize why my miners were doing absolutely nothing: I built a 2-tile wide channel all the way to the river and they dug out the first 2 tiles and didn't have a way to dig out the rest.

I end up mining out the sides of that and it took me another half a season to figure out how to install a floodgate properly. The dwarf that ended up building the floodgate ended up on the WRONG side (surprise) and it took about 2 days for whoever was going to pull the lever to actually PULL it.

At this point, I was putting up walls in all the entry points so it wouldn't flood my fortress. I was confident that I would have a functioning well so I opened up the passageway.

Did I mention that the river was on the same level as my well?

[Omegastick]

When after years of playing the game I finally realised that you herbalists can gather plants. So many fortresses lost to starvation because I couldn't find the underground river.

[Kyronea]

"Oh, hey, look, there's a caravan to test my drowning chamber on!"

"...why are the corpses in the drowning chamber dwarves? ...ah, crap."

[puke]

okay, this particular face palm was when i was just beginning to post a new bug report.  it went like this:

40d16 -- up/down stairs become down stairs.

new embark, carved out a small room and some up/down stairs.  im sure it was successfull, because i mistook my yellow X cursor as an extra set of othoclase up/down stairs.

a short time later while the walls of that room were being smoothed and the ramps leading up the outside of the hill were being removed...  shit.  nevermind.

lesson:  becareful when block-designating stair and ramp removal - unlike other designations it does not highlight the target objects.