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[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Quite often in a big old fortress, there are places no-one's been for decades. Sometimes it's an ore vein, a mausoleum or a dead dwarf's house. Hell, sometimes it's even a whole walled-off network of rooms.
Now, if you leave a room alone for a few years, it doesn't stay pristine. Dust gathers, moulds and fungi spread, worms eat wood, moths eat fabric, and spiders spin webs upon webs upon webs. Old fittings will eventually crumble and crack and tarnish.
For things outside, roofs should leak, mosses and lichens should flourish, perhaps even small trees. Eventually, there might be nothing but a stony shell of a once-fine mansion, perhaps only a heap of worn masonry.

My basic points are:

Add dust. Coatings of dust should eventually gather on things, slowly vanishing when trampled by dwarves or cleaned up by a cleaner.

Allow the generation of woodworm and spiders and such in long-empty chambers, perhaps damaging wooden furniture and making accretions of old webs into an almost solid cloth.

Damp and Mould should spread on furniture or even ancient food.

If left long enough, fittings might simply collapse into dust, depending on quality and the vermin in the room

Outside roofs should eventually leak, mosses and lichens should spread like very slow grass.
Very old and long abandoned buildings should crumble. We're talking several decades or even a few centuries here.

[Vattic]

I think this idea has potential. Adventure mode would benefit from this at times. I can imagine the first dwarf into a long abandoned area of the fortress might kick up a lot of dust in clouds a little like miasma, might give bad thoughts?

[Creamcorn]

This sounds like much fun, especially with the thought of simulated moisture eating away at metal items or at least torrents of dusty windy eating away at everything. Course when you do abandon a fort only a year goes by, and personally if I were a dwarf I would decide to take all of that nice expensive stuff with me on a sturdy wagon but that's a different discussion altogether.

Anyway dust would be neat and would maybe the wear and tear of time would even cause a number of cave ins to occur.

[Craftling]

Another thing for the military to do."Carrying out maintenance on equipment"
Can dwarves get tetanus?
In adventurer mode if you encountered an old fortress, would the wooden furniture be rotten?

[RavingManiac]

I can imagine that wooden object would be damaged to some degree.

X-wooden table-X

[Scruga]

And then each time a dwarf stands next to a floor tile/wall/furniture it resets a timer that would create all kinds of vermin/dust/rot when it runs out?

[HM4A1]

Dust and cobwebs would be a grouse effect! Imaging having to slice your way through thick cobwebs riddled with the bones of old meals and ancient weapons.. or having to order an axedwarf to fight his way through the thick silk traps set by a hidden spider megabeast! Of which could be hiding anywhere..

Awesome idea.
-HM

[Footkerchief]

Great suggestions.

Dust is the sine qua non of sinister abandoned places, and very much lends itself to the new system for spatterings/coverings/puddles/clouds/etc. of arbitrary materials.  Creatures walking on dusty floors could not only remove some dust from the floor, but kick up small clouds of it (this goes for soil dust in dry outdoor areas, too).  The game already knows how to deposit snow coverings on outdoor areas over time, so depositing dust coverings on indoor areas should be very simple.

Decay -- and rust, and other types of corrosion -- should probably be determined by material properties.  This already happens in a basic way via tags like [WOOD] and [THREAD_PLANT] that signify organic matter, but there should be more specificity about what causes decay/corrosion, how fast it happens, what it results in (a separate material, or maybe just an augmentation of the base material?), etc.

Mold could maybe be implemented as a plant, with biomes etc.  That goes for lichen and moss too.

[Pilsu]

Don't underestimate the durability of materials like wood though

[Deimos56]

Now, imagine if you could skip through history by 100 years or so and revisit your fortress long after it crumbled to its ruin...

Dust, long left undisturbed by wind or mortal, is caught by a draft and blows through the newly reopened doors. Wiping away some of the dust on the wall reveals an ancient engraving identifying this ruined place as...

I doubt there'd actually be a message... although it would be cool if there were. It could, perhaps, even give hints as to the source of the once mighty fortress's downfall.

A pair of skeletons lie just within the entrance way, what remains of their bony hands wrapped around each other's necks.

^-- For a tantrum spiral, perhaps.

...I really need some sleep, but you get the idea.

[Vincent]

Of course, This should be affected by the new occupants of the fort if it was taken over. If goblins take over the fortress, old dorf furniture should be strewn across the landscape, old wooden walls should rot, et cetera, but workshops et cetera should still be operational- Goblins use tanneries and forges, too.

If it's a megabeast moving in, They should only inhabit a "Lair", where the dust and whatnot shouldn't accumlate. The old food storage could be ravaged by the beast's diet and the old bedrooms and whatnot could be left alone. Damage done by the beast should be there, too- Toppled statues, rubble from collapsed walls, destroyed furniture, etc.

[Footkerchief]

A pair of skeletons lie just within the entrance way, what remains of their bony hands wrapped around each other's necks.

Preserving grapples after death.  I like it.

[sonerohi]

This sounds like much fun, especially with the thought of simulated moisture eating away at metal items or at least torrents of dusty windy eating away at everything. Course when you do abandon a fort only a year goes by, and personally if I were a dwarf I would decide to take all of that nice expensive stuff with me on a sturdy wagon but that's a different discussion altogether.

Anyway dust would be neat and would maybe the wear and tear of time would even cause a number of cave ins to occur.

Maybe a cave in per year abandoned? But only once Adventurer skills are in. Like hell if a cave in stops me from traipsing around in the artifact armor I groomed out of a fort.

[Vattic]

If it's a megabeast moving in, They should only inhabit a "Lair", where the dust and whatnot shouldn't accumlate...
...Damage done by the beast should be there, too- Toppled statues, rubble from collapsed walls, destroyed furniture, etc.

Singed tapestries, ashes of furniture, blackened walls, charred skeletons and all the other possible burning damage to the fortress and surrounding land when a dragon moves in.

[Aldaris]

Maybe a few random structures simply wearing down? Imagine that one particular floodgate or door breaking open while you are away, flooding the entire fort. Maybe a traffic-like designation system that allows you to designate what areas are in use, with some sort of light penalty if you go over a certain number multiplied by the amount of dwarves you have.
That would als give rise to interesting situations if most of your population dies off, imagine the entire fort being abbandoned except either the core areas or for example the cave river area, which would be deep in the fort and would be able to produce food, while the access to the rest of the fort is bricked up. And then the adventurer or reclaim party coming in decades later, knocking down those final lines of defence to find what remained of the fortress had abbandoned that area and decided to descend the river by boat or something. Awesome.