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[DeathOfRats]

IIRC, Nist Akath has been going on for over 40 years, and I seem to recall someone mentioning they liked to do extra-long fortresses (although with less people, i.e., at a higher framerate) that lasted for 80-100 years.

Me, I usually get bored after 6 or 7 Or I'll get interrupted by RL, and then instead of continuing the one I had lying around once I get some free time I'll come up with a new one.

[Funk]

as long as you care to have them last i.e. till you get bored

[Dakk]

I tend to recycle my forts as adventurer mode attractions. When I reach that pretty light blue stuff, I get careful to not breach anything and just take some pieces of it, smelt some wafers and get the legendary smiths to work on some nice stuff, then I store them somewhere, release the fun stuff, and try to capture some of them. If the fort survives that, I trap the ones i capture in fun stuff proof rooms and link the menachisms that release them to some pressure plate or level that is also used to open the chamber in which all the pretty blue items and artifacts are, so the adventurer has to get through that fun stuff to get the pretty stuff.
If the fort doesn't survive, I come back as an adventurer and attempt to vanquish every single one of them. After that I take the pretty items and use them on my quest for universal genocide. Fun stuff.

[RandomNumberGenerator]

My current fort is on year 8, and I'm just about ready to abandon it...

Population is hovering around 95 dwarves. Fortress Wealth over 24 million. Cleared out the HFS with only two casualites, and mined all the adamantine. While I activated the economy for the first time I didn't notice much of an effect other than my dwarves being kicked out of their rooms, though they still remain Ecstatic. The only unhappy dwarf is my king, who is running around traumatized because a lesser dwarf has better accommodations(Well, the same accommodations actually. All my nobles are in the same room, sharing the same furniture). I can't even work on my Black Bronze megaproject anymore because I already mined out all the metal on the map and trade caravans are no longer sending liasons.

[Nidokoenig]

Mine tend to last about five to ten years, usually because they get too disorganised with too many dwarves having too many labours so nothing ever gets done, and I come up with an idea that would make the whole thing run much more efficiently if only I'd built the fortress around it, or more often I just decide that with the frame rate of my current fort it'd be quicker to start over from scratch than to rearrange the current one.
 So, I just leave the old fort rotting in a save file and start a new one. Never tried adventure mode, so I've never bothered to officially abandon them. My forts tend to be farm forts, though, so most of them would just be  a few farm plots around a field of traps with a staircase in the middle with miasma from thirty thousand rotten dwarven syrup roasts billowing out. The most interesting thing anyone could find inside would probably be an exceptional rock salt earring decorated with seventeen types of bone.

[Untelligent]

My current fort is 20-ish years and by far the longest fort I've bothered with.

I have over 190 population and once the king comes I'll crack open the HFS and release my 20-ish champions on the poor, unsuspecting... er, fluffy wamblers. Right.


I'd be more specific about those numbers, but I accidentally passed over the "stones" section of my stocks screen on the way back up and now I've been waiting for it to unsnag for about five minutes or so. Tracking down the type and location of all of 160,000 rocks or so on this map isn't all that easy to do.

[Samyotix]

I'm in Winter 2008/2009, 180 dwarves, some 70 of them military, and that in moderate surroundings with lots of groundhogs and cameld. I number my savescum folders ... 145 so far. Unhappy king, because someone else's tomb got engraved first; my first ever soap industry; too many finished goods; just annihilated another siege with my way-too-large army, ... In a couple of seasons probably someone will snap, or I'll get bored, and restart in a new location.

I'll keep the save though in order to start adventure mode: Sometimes when you walk your adventurer into a town close to an old fort, lots of stuff you sold to the caravan will be strewn around the floor. Last time my human found lots of stone amulets and stuff ... this time I plan to export tons of steel armor and weapons.

[martinuzz]

My oldest fort was, I think, 52 years old, bred and raised enough dwarves to get a King, having set population cap at 50 dwarves, and child cap at 100:50. It was a LONG wait for children to grow up. At 140 or so dwarves, and an incoming King, I decided that I had accomplished my goal for that fort and abandoned.
I should have killed a few related dwarves instead. A magnificent tantrum spiral would have ensued.
...
<hurries off to see if there still is a pre-abandon save>

[Samyotix]

Update: King threw a Tantrum, she decided to start a fistfight. Queen Consort wound up on a bed in the prison room with mangled (red) arm and leg. Advisor unhappy, and Dwarves all busy hauling stuff from the trade depot for most of the season ... Currently regenning. I usually do when it reaches this point (I think it was Autumn 08)

[Kietharr]

As has been said, it's really up to how good you are and how easy your start is, but once you get established you'll last almost forever, especially in vanilla. Lag or boredom will end your fort before anything else usually. Eventually though, probably after decades if not a century or two depending on the site, you'll start running out of nonrenewable resources. First metals, then stones. When this happens noble fueled tantrum spirals are almost inevitable.

If you set your standard to be pure survival you'll find DF an easy game. No, if you want a challenge you have to survive in style with magma holocaust pumps and thermonuclear lignite bin pressure cannons.

[DeathOfRats]

You've got a point with metals, but if you've got unlimited magma and water you've got unlimited stones, too. As long as obsidian is the only stone you want, obviously 

[Volatar]

You've got a point with metals, but if you've got unlimited magma and water you've got unlimited stones, too. As long as obsidian is the only stone you want, obviously 

One of the most awesome forts I ever encountered on the DF map archive was a huge castle with a city inside. All the buildings were built with obsidian. Its "roads" paved with obsidian (those roads are, in fact, floors). Each of its (several) megaprojects was built with pure obsidian.

I think its the most awesome fort ever. Only Boatmurdered beats it in my book, and not for construction, just for its story. This one wins the construction category hands down http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-5642-roofdwelling

[DeathOfRats]

Oh, I know. My current fortress is going to be made entirely of cast obsidian and green glass, and I'm going to engrave every single surface (except floors submerged either in water or magma). Just because

[Rakonas]

Oh, I know. My current fortress is going to be made entirely of cast obsidian and green glass, and I'm going to engrave every single surface (except floors submerged either in water or magma). Just because

So undorfy.

[DeathOfRats]

Oh, I know. My current fortress is going to be made entirely of cast obsidian and green glass, and I'm going to engrave every single surface (except floors submerged either in water or magma). Just because

So undorfy.

Not really. Magma will just destroy the floor engravings, anyway. I'm not sure about water, I'll have to test it.