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[Internet Kraken]

Oh yeah, I can't believe I forgot my biggest mistake. Thinking that floor grates functioned similarly to floor tiles.

See I build my forts over the ocean. Due to the way I design them, the entire fort is supported by 3 floor tiles. If these floor tiles were to be removed, nothing would be connecting the fort to the mainland, causing it to plunge into the ocean. This really isn't a problem though since they can't be destroyed unless I order it. And early into one of my forts I did. I thought it would be cool if the ocean mist was able to rise up through the floor of my fort. Being a genius, I figured that floor grates would make this possible. So I removed two of the 3 floor tiles and replaced them with grates. I assumed that they would serve as a connection to the mainland just like regular floor tiles. So once they were built, I removed the final tile.

I then learned that grates don't serve as connectors. My entire fortress plummeted into the ocean due to this simple mistake. Everything was gone in the blink of an eye, including most of the dwarves.

[Tale]

Assuming I'd just find water.
Picking places that have water that freezes over in winter without preparing my farms beforehand.

[melomel]

First mistakes...  deciding to embark with only one miner/woodcutter.  Only one dwarf who was supposed to do both things.

Not knowing how to grow food...  I finally figured out how to grow the damn mushrooms, and the idiots were just running around catching vermin for food as the crops rotted in the fields:  no stockpiles!

And then there was My First Hunter.

"Oh, goody!  Migrants, finally!"  (Back when I *rejoiced* at the seasonal flood of soapmongers...)
*five seconds later*
"Important Starter Seven Dwarf Cancels Breathe:  Mauled to death by pack of wolves only slightly injured (but greatly annoyed!) by stray (wooden bolt)s.

Also took me forever to figure out how to even pick up bones for industry...  (Okay, FIRST you unforbid it, then you make the stockpile, and it has to be inside, and also dwarfs ignore refuse outside by default.  The kobold poofed with seasonal change before I figured it out. :[  Also related, first dead thing inside the fortress...  Mmm, miasma!)

[Eric Blank]

I almost forgot the worst part of my first fort; the carp. I decided that it was only logical that i need running water and lots of trees, so i decided to plop down in a swampy area with a river nearby. Within minutes my fisherman was dead. I of course had no idea what the controls were or how to do anything so they eventually withered and died from starvation/survived on vermin while i was reading the wiki. (which i was only directed to after several minutes of pestering my friends about what to do)

I despise people who used the tutorials and such to learn the game, but maybe that's just jealousy stemming from the fact that they were more successful earlier on and didn't feel like they were trying to swim the English Channel just to avoid their workers drowning in an artificial version because you had no idea the game HAD such a thing as a floodgate or drawbridge or that doors were acceptable replacements for such things, much less realize that the game implemented pressure. (really a surprise, it's the only game I've ever found that makes even a small attempt to mimic fluid dynamics.)

[rat_pack40]

I only started playing around with water and irrigation in df2010, because in 40d, when i started, you didn't need it to make a farm plot.
I seem to always generate worlds where the goblin civ is extinct, even in year 20, so no forces of darkness.
I've managed to deforest an entire 4x4 forest embark, without an elven war machine, still got the trade caravan and everything. it had to have been roughly 500 trees murdered liberated from the ground, they complained, and i confiscated their caravan, everything on it, and they brought another the next year.
I try my best to end a fort through violence and tantrums, but the only way that has ever ended any of my forts, from the first to the most recent, was through sheer negligence.
honestly, it's like this game doesn't want me to have fun.

[beanbrew]

Goblin ambushes tend to ruin me.  I always forget to use traps in time.  Or start a military in time.  Or something.  It's how my first and fourth forts ended.  (Second fort was successful until I got bored and flooded the place myself and third fort I started in a glacier without preparing...  And since I figured everyone was dying of thirst, I might as well pierce the HFS and become an unholy location of evil-ness.)

[Jayce]

Building my first windmill out of stone.

[Elt]

Digging out my initial area, I set up a nice drawbridge defense, planning on locking myself in at first sign of trouble.  Feeling secure, I then proceeded with digging everyone their own room, smoothing tons of stone, etc...   then a triple-ambush happens, and I realize, far too late, that the task to link the lever to my wonderful drawbridge had been suspended.   No linky?  CRAP!

Oh, the carnage.  With all the blood you'd think I'd dug my entrance out of kaolite.

So I learned an Important Safety Tip:  When you link a lever to something, ALWAYS TEST IT IMMEDIATELY.


Then there was that Forgotten Beast that somehow ended up in my dining hall, but who HASN'T had that happen, amirite?

[Urist Imiknorris]

Me. My dining room has forever been free of primal horrors and sports of nature. There is the matter of the savanna titan, but it's outside and I'm waiting until the dwarven caravan comes to unseal the fort. In the meantime, however, I can recall my earliest failures.

There was one fort I had, the first time I used magma. I somehow managed to find a magma pipe in a sedimentary biome, and I, being an idiot, had not read up on magma safe materials. Thus I found myself in a situation where, once I had mined out an entire bauxite cluster thinking I could smelt it (hurr), dumped it all into the magma when I found it useless. There it sat until I realized that it never melted and made plans to try to get it out. That day I learned that pumping magma into my river was a bad idea. My fort died of fire and thirst (I think I was in a grassland, although it may have been a forest).

[Africa]

My first fort never died, it just stopped being played when we (I learned to play with a more computer savvy friend...although he never got into DF other than when I'm around) moved onto another. We fended off goblin attacks and everything. I think it was in 38c. Anyway, the biggest mistake was listening to some tutorial that said having stone stockpiles was a good idea. Not a whole lot got done around that fort, as stone hauling became 90% of the economy.

[puke]

my biggest preventable mistakes were back in the 2D version.  i mean, there are plenty of "oops, that didnt work" or "i could have designed that better" moments, whenever I play.  but there were two major screwups on two different forts that really stand out in my memory.

first, I built the most pathing optomized fort i could.  farming in the center, food storage and processing radiating out in nested squares around it.  it worked so well that after the first couple years of successfull farming, I took a break from re-designating farms (back when mud dried every winter) and let dwarfs party for a few years, focusing more of crafts and metalworking.  Migrants came.  The population soared.  Food stocks ran out, and I never noticed.  Then came the deaths.  I called it "kittenwinter" and looked up the dwarf name for it -- but have long since forgotten what it was.  I had every non-insane dwarf busy planting crops and brewing and cooking whatever we could, while we butchered every butcherable animal in the fortress.  I executed pet owners so we could butcher their pets and feed more dwarfs.

over 100 dwarfs died in the kittenwinter.  mostly, theyre burried here: http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-642-themausoleum



second, Morulingtak.  or should I say, all three predecessors to Morulingtak.  the final fort was pretty sweet, grinding up dozzens of elephants a year.  but the three before it ended in disaster.  horrible, horrible disaster.  the one with the cage traps was the worst failure ever.

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-875-morulingtak

there are pretty detailed descriptions of the failings of Morulingtak's predecessors in my comments in this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=15751.0

[Dahenk]

Warning: Long boring rant ahead

This turned out to be a huge rant instead of a 'simple preventable mistake'.
I guess i just wanted to share the story of my fortress somewhere but i think it ended up a rather boring read =/

My first fort after the major patch in april was in the .12 version (last week). I always tend to want my starting areas to have extremly high cliffs + mountains on one side, and a big flat grass/wood area on the other side. Found a perfect place! It even had a smaller mountain right infront of the cliffs of the big mountain and i realized i wanted my entrance inside that mountain with stairs up about 10 levels and then a bridge into the main mountain.

PICTURE:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

But I knew it would take too much time to dig all of this out before i could start my food production etc. and I should probably do a 'workers hall' where my dwarves can live while i dig out the main fortress.
This turned out to take alot of time aswell and suddenly i had 25 new immigrants to take care of in a small mini-fortress designed for less than 10 dwarves. I always panic when i get 25 new dwarves and i tried getting an army going and all of this took my focus away from the soon to be epic main fortress.
I finally started digging out the entrance but the design ended up rather bad imo beacuse i was stressed a little and wanted the main fortress up and running so i could start exploring the new features of the patch.

Then BAM. 20+ more immigrants.. holy hell what do they all come from? and why are they even coming here?
Anyway I had gotten some parts of the main fortress up and running and the bridge between the mountain was built so the dwarves were running between the worker's area and the main fort all the time right out in the open.
This is when the first goblin ambush appears... DAMNIT IM SCREWED. I had like 4 dwarves with training weapons.
Being new to the military system and having only 2 cage traps i sent my tiny squad straight into battle. They decided to do the "one-at-a-time" strategy where three of them wait in the fortress while the first run to take on the assault alone. "They'll never expect that!"
He actually got legendary fighter.. seconds before dying..

Managed to fend of the ambush with the usual emergency-tactic.. swarming them with the whole fortress... (I've killed dragons with it =P. which is a rather cool story itself)
about 10 dwarves died, aparently good friends to some people, who thought that clearly the only way to deal with the situation was to go insane, destroy the chairs and tables in my dining room and beating other dwarves to death before getting killed themselves, leaving their children depressed, who then dies of thirst...
You know... the classic Tantrum Spiral™ has begun.
After some time i had only the last migration wave was alive, with a few of the old dwarves unconcious in the hospital beds.
Aparently the newest dwarves didn't care about the rest of the fortress dwarves since they were just 'content' with the whole thing. I guess they hadn't made any real friends yet.

Now i thought i really had to move in to the main fortress and get some defenses up before...... another ambush occurs. GOT DAMNIT!
no military, no cage traps... screw it I'll swarm them right of the bat. I guess the 7-ish goblins really didn't see it coming when about 20 civilian dwarves ran out from the cave launching fearlessly at the ambush because NONE of my dwarves died and all except one goblin was slaughtered. The swarming tactic worked better than i expected.
Ok now it's REALLY time to move in to the main-fortress. destroyed all buildings and stockpiles in the old fortress and moved in everything, got about 7 military dwarves and some new cage traps in the new entrance...

Another immigration wave with 23 dwarves arrive and shortly after a new ambush. This time i thought i had enough military. Sent them all out and watched them get butchered and not killing any goblin... WTF?? ok so now there's only about 40 dwarves left in the fortress.. SWARM!! ... ..  BLOODBATH... i guess they learned my tactic. There was now about 60 dwarven corpses outside my entrance..
The goblins then gleefully entered the hospital in the old fortress and butchered the unconcious dwarves that barely survived the earlier attacks..
All i had left was 2 children and 102348 animals crowded into one single dining hall, waiting for a report from the surface.

Abandoned fortress when the whole goblin squad except 2 were caught in cage traps (i guess the leader got caught cause the other 2 just stood there, killing kittens who dared entered the fortress)


Sooooooo my mistake could have been prevented by alot of things:
-Alot more cage traps in the worker fortress entrance.
-Alot more anything in the worker fortress entrance
-Skipping the whole worker fortress all in all and just dig the main fortress right of the bat, ignoring the entrance-mountain (there were ramps everywhere so nothing stopped them from climbing the cliffside)
-Waiting for the goblins to get caught in cage traps instead of sending the whole fortress out to fight them...

It hurt to abandon the fortress cause i knew it would be so hard to find a similar area again.

[slink]

Thirst was my biggest hurdle, until I learned that water won't flow 1/2 level in DF.  That means the well can be one level below the level of the brook and a reservoir under the well will not flood the room.  As a part of that learning process, I experienced:

1.  Failure to notice that the surface water froze in winter until it was too late.
2.  Failure to distinguish between brooks and streams, followed by Dwarven Death By Carp as everyone rushed to drink.
3.  Failure to properly seal openings that were made to allow murky pools into the fortress so that Dwarves could drink from around the edges, followed by goblin and dragon attacks through said openings.

[KojaK]

1st fort, back in the days of boatmurdered, and 2D no z-level no construction dorf fort.

Urist McKojak cancels figure out channeling and floodgates: pulling hair out

(water can DO THAT?!?)

2nd fort, still in 2D

MAGMA CAN DO THAT?!?!

Long break. Come back. Dwarf fort is now 3D!

WATER CAN DO THAT!??!

Many forts later. Sweetness. One farm plot, bam. Done.

I had this awesome fort set up, where I would make a huge drowning chamber/mist waterfall curtain entrance. LOTS of work, little payoff (water didn't flow as evenly as I wanted), take another semi-long break.

Come back. Dwarf fort now has hospitals and awesome military setup! TRAINING SWORDS! YES! (I kinda liked the spartan military setup. I would even have an arena where 'conscripts' had to kill two or more fully armed goblin seigers to become a 'recruit'. Yes. My military ranking system was based on arena kills.)

My most recent fort was killed as such:

two blind cave ogres vs seven military dorfs outfitted with... training swords. Needless to say, the ogres were pretty bruised. And one soldier... pretty dead. The ogres were finally stopped by... cage traps. Then, two ambushes. I found out... training swords should only be used for just that... training. Now I start all maps with a good weaponsmith and armorsmith as one of my starting seven.

Also... I plan on a MUCH tougher training system for my military, based on this design http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63528.0

[Beardless]

The big mistake I made in my first fort was actually a bunch of stuff that led to every dwarf but one dying of dehydration. I clearly didn't bring enough booze with me since we ran out after the first wave of migrants. I wanted to do a "real" underground farm with irrigation, not just dump some mushrooms in some soil. It might not even have been a problem--had I not started working on it only when I noticed we were out of booze. I also started drilling a well as part of that irrigation project, and since my water source was 10 Z-levels down and halfway across a slightly-larger-than-normal map, I reached the brook just after (surprise!) it froze over. Oops.

It was really fun though! I've told the story elsewhere on the forum so I won't go through it again, but it was tense--a real cliffhanger. Overall, it was the most epic thing I've experienced in the game so far. (The fort recovered quite nicely, and is still running to this day. The only reason I'm not playing it now is the new version.)

My mistake with the second fort was bringing marksdwarves to a terrifying coastal savannah. The less said about that, the better. At least it was over quickly. (F'ing camels!)