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[jseah]

When pondering a challenge to do, I generally avoid a "making the game harder" mode because I dislike doing things the tough way. 

Bored with megaprojects, I thought of something:

Build a fortress, do whatever you like for however long, and then at a particular year start, simply "abandon" your fort by letting the game run without giving any orders.  Then see how long you can get it to last before things start going down the drain. 
(only controls allowed to touch are space-bar, V, K & T.  Dialog and meetings you can do whatever you want.  )

Do you think this is viable challenge?  Anything that makes it impossible or too easy?

[Sphalerite]

If you don't care about the quality of the fortress, this is fairly easy.  I created a zero-intervention fortress recently and ran it for about a decade before shutting it down out of boredom.

What I did was build a sealed-off fortress with no trade, with the only connection to the outside world being an automated pressure plate - trapdoor retracting bridge mechanism to allow immigrants to get in while keeping sieges and ambushes out.  I had a large farm set to grow plump helmets year-round, a large stockpile for holding plump helmets, and a large stockpile for holding plump helmet spawn.  I had ten wells dug into an aquifer-fed reservoir, a large communal dining room, a large common bedroom with about 100 beds, and most importantly a small meeting room/statue garden continually full of waterfall-generated mist.  And that's it.  The secret to keeping this working was the waterfall meeting room, the stacking good feelings from standing in mist all the time offset the penalty for living off nothing but raw plump helmet and water and nobody having their own bedroom or anything.

The only interventions I needed to do to keep the fort running were unpausing it after birth announcements (which there were a lot of, what with all the dwarves having nothing to do) and sieges (which would stand around outside for a while, then get bored and leave).  Strange moods inevitably failed, of course, resulting in dead dwarves, but the super happy-making powers of mist kept anyone from tantruming.  Production mandates also failed, but with no fortress guard there was no repercussion other than bad feelings for the mayor.  The only external noble I had show up was the dungeon master, who seemed pretty cool with the arrangements.  Never had a hammerer, or duke/baron/whatever - I suspect with no trade depot I didn't the export requirements.

I abandoned that fortress after a decade when it was obvious nothing would ever change or happen.  Too boring.  No tantrum spirals, just a hundred happy wet dwarves breeding in a hole in the ground.

[jseah]

How much more difficult would it be if I wanted it to do alcohol as well?

It's not like barrels get destroyed.  So if you can balance cooking alcohol and making it, then you can prevent the barrels from running out. 

Perhaps a designed inefficiency.  Being deliberately inefficient by placing the brewery further away from the farm than the kitchen and mill.  (you could use dwarven syrup to make sure you don't run out seeds)

Of course, there's the theoretical limit of all your farmers dying of old age but that's too long. 

[Sphalerite]

The challenge will be to ensure that the 'brew a drink' task on the still never gets canceled.  Which means not just somehow balancing things so you never run out of barrels or plants, but also somehow keeping the job from being canceled by your brewer having a strange mood or giving birth or something similarly random on the way to the still.  There are, unfortunately, very few jobs which will auto-trigger in workshops with no player intervention required.

[jseah]

The moods can be taken care of.  If you mine as little as possible, you can hit the artifact limit before the challenge starts. 

Make sure you have two or three male brewers with their rooms on opposite sides of the fortress.  (to prevent people from taking a break/eat/sleep and getting all the alcohol cooked up)

Anything else?

You'll probably also need a farm that produces more than your kitchen & still can handle, to ensure continuous supply through the year. 

[XSI]

This is actually not too hard, I've had a fort with 4 hunters, 2 butchers, and a social/everything else guy survive for 4 years with nothing but a single tile wooden wall, butcher shops, stockpiles and a bedroom/barracks for up to 20. (Edit, forgot the dining room, which was 5x4 or something)

I actually just got bored with it after a single hunter destroyed half a goblin siege, that's the power of a legendary axedwarf hunter, get them agile to make sure they can actually catch prey, or hope they chase it into a corner.

[darkflagrance]

The real problem is that eventually, meat food sources can be exhausted, and without intervention the children of peasants do not have the farming labor enabled, so eventually when the first generation dies off, the children will not farm and will eventually starve to death.

[Satarus]

I suppose artifacts could be turned off in init.txt if you wanted.  Then you don't get failed moods. 

[XSI]

The real problem is that eventually, meat food sources can be exhausted, and without intervention the children of peasants do not have the farming labor enabled, so eventually when the first generation dies off, the children will not farm and will eventually starve to death.

Just so you know, it takes 150 years or more for a dwarf to die of age, that's a lot longer then most fortresses are old. And without farming labour children, and everyone will still harvest when it's set like that, in the (o)rders menu

[2xMachina]

Problem, planting needs to be activated. Nothing to harvest if you don't plant.

[Copper]

The challenge will be to ensure that the 'brew a drink' task on the still never gets canceled. 

I think you could fix this by having multiple stills - your brewer can only work in one at a time so it won't do anything to production speed. I don't think it would work in the case of a lack of barrels or plants (in which case I assume he will rapid fire try all of them and get them all canceled instantly, unless he has to go to each one before realizing there aren't any materials, in which case you might have a bit of a buffer) but for one off things like giving birth it should be fine.

it's not an infinite solution but one could at least in theory provide enough stills for a lifetime's worth of incidents.

However you still have to slow the production since booze can get brewed way faster than they can drink it (and this guy is going to become legendary eventually, at which point he just looks at a plump helmet and it turns into ten gallons of wine).

I believe jseah's distance method will work - it would have to be quite the trek from the stockpile to the stills, and you'd probably want to err on the side of not having enough production since dwarves can go thirsty for a while but you can't restart production once you run out of barrels.

Question though: if a workshop becomes inaccessible, does the job get canceled in the workshop queue? I was thinking if you could make a reliable long term timer machine you could periodically seal off various industry sections to slow things down more elegantly.


EDIT: I've never actually used pressure plates so I don't know if this would work but what if you locked a dwarf in a room with a drink stockpile (yet perhaps through some kind of airlock were able to restock this) and had a pressure plate in front of it - then you could have a sort of dwarf clock - since he'll get thirsty on a regular basis you could hook the plate up to the doors that seal off the still - with the bonus that the timing is related to the consumption of alchohol in your fort.

[jseah]

I was thinking of controlling drink production with cooking. 

Never have more than two or three barrels of drink at any point.  Just cook everything and let it rot. 
Have three or four brewers so they don't take breaks at the same time.  Similarly, have two or three cooks to get rid of the booze. 
 - All brewers and cooks are male.  Artifact limit has been reached beforehand. 
Have like 10 planters and enough fields to keep them busy through the year.  Which will produce so much food that you can't possibly cook/brew them all and so never have their jobs canceled. 
 - Have all the people involved in the chain be children of the fort trained to legendary before starting the challenge should give you at least 100 years before anyone important dies of old age. 

Yeah, I think this is possible until dwarves start dying of old age. 
Unless you can somehow secure a large enough compound to feed the dwarves with vermin and an aquifer/river fed well. 
Perhaps with royal rooms for everybody, a very large highly decorated meeting hall (to prevent marriages from occurring while not eliminating them) and misters everywhere, you can keep them from throwing tantrums.  No cats allowed. 
 - Vermin attractors like {prepared food in barrels} can be scattered around the "feeding" area.  I'm not sure if these actually work though.