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[Girlinhat]

We've generally come to the decision that the player is Armok.  Now, what happens if Armok goes missing?  The challenge is to make a fort that can sustain itself for some elaborate length of time with no player interaction.  At all.  Perhaps play up to year 5, and then let it run as it will.  Best done if your computer stays on at night or while you're out of the house, as the low FPS won't bother you since you're not playing.  Remember that announcements like pausing on birth and caravan arrival, can all be deactivated, so perpetual run is very possible.

Discuss.

[Supercharazad]

Single dwarf, sealed in, a farm plot growing plump helmets, a dining room and a well.

Easy.

[Girlinhat]

Perhaps we should re-define this, as a population over, say, 20.  No toying with the gender assignments or other lame wins.  You know what I meant with the challenge, don't get smart-alec

[Ace_Warbringer]

medium to difficult. All walls would have to be engraved, production automation via repeat comand, and even then you have to make shure you stocks are something like %50 over what you need at all times, total seal off as well. probably best for 10-20 dwarves all set to farming skills. the difficulty is farming/booze/cook cycle. if you dont set the prioritys straight, you'll loose your repeat command, youll need a ton of barrles to keep your soon lengendary brewers suplied. long and short no balance and you wont last any longer than your boose holds out. 

[ISGC]

to be honest, I usually end up doing this anyway
I'll let DF run for 30 minutes to an hour (checking in to unpause it for silly things) and when it gets paused for something serious (siege, titan, FB) I'll let it run for 10 more minutes before going in to clean up the mess
it's basically all the fun that I can get out of that low point between a barony and self sufficiency

[Sphalerite]

I've done it.  It's easy, if all you care about is survival.  What you want is:

A large farm, ideally divided into lots of small plots, each set to produce plump helmets year-round.

A large stockpile that accepts only plump helmets

A stockpile that accepts only plump helmet spawn

A legendary dining room

A few dozen wells over a constant zero-maintenance water source

A large room full of constructed but unassigned beds

Optionally, an automatic immigrant airlock, consisting of a meeting zone on a retracting bridge triggered by a pressure plate just before the bridge, reachable only reachable from the outside.

So long as you have any farmers in your population, the farms will be planted and harvested often enough to keep plump helmets in the stockpile.  Your dwarves will be living off cold plump helmet and water, but the legendary dining room will keep them happy.  If you build an immigrant airlock, immigrants will automatically be dumped inside without exposing your fort to invaders.  Strange moods are guarenteed to fail, of course.

[Di]

Um... Twenty dwarves, sealed in, a farm plot growing plump helmets, a dinning room and a well and various stuff for moods? 
(damned ninjas)

So lets make it difficult then, fortress shouldn't be hermetic. Bonus points if you make up something more interesting than simple grinder there.

It's currently on my megaproject list right after yellow sub.

P.s. Probably fort should be over 80 dwarves.

[Brandstone]

Bonus points for each industry that remains active too.

[Encased in burning magma]

Bonus points for each industry that remains active too.

Sand, hunting, and... ?

[Lamphare]

well if enough work order is assigned through manager screen, and we seal the fort from out side harassment, including cavern and FB
very plausible

just need to make water supply automatic, which is quite simple
kill all animal before leaving the fort autonomous, perhas cats too.
chop enough wood down and set the farm to produce plants like plump helmets.
make huge stockpile of everything, essentially food that can go bad.
above ground enclosed legendary meeting hall/dining, and personally quarters as good as possile, with mist generator and fancy zoos etc. basically all things that make a dwarf happy.

[Girlinhat]

No manager mass-orders, that's cheating.  The idea is "The player was struck down at the keyboard, and the game was left running.  The dwarves were smart enough, barely, to assign a few tasks, such as Brew Drink /R but not smart enough to dig or build."

Perhaps we should require this to have booze available, and keep at least one industry active.  Fishing is now possible, because fish reproduce now.  So is sand and clay as long as you've got magma.  Possibly yarn as well...  Definitely prepared meals, thanks to eggs.

[Igfig]

Well, what can't be automated?  Trade, construction, butchery, mining, woodcutting... anything else?

Military probably can be made automatic, through careful use of patrols and stationing.  Attrition might be a problem after a while, unless you focus on marksdwarves.  Of course, then you'll have to worry about your bolt stockpiles... and with mining and woodcutting out of the picture, you'll have to rely on hunting (for the bones) and plunder.

Most furniture will be all but useless, what with the lack of construction.  The exception is bins and barrels, so it's a good thing you can make containers out of clay now.  Clay and sand are the only renewable, reliable resources for furniture and hard crafts, assuming you have magma.  (Bones are renewable for crafts, but they aren't reliable and in any case you'll probably be using them for bolts.)

The textile industry is also a fair investment, although you'll need to maintain a serious backlog of raw and intermediate materials to keep everyone working at maximum capacity.

[EveryZig]

With a bridge (or grates) and a pressure plate, you could get a pretty good automatic death trap. If you also combine it to a floodgate/water pressure plate, you could probably make it reliably auto-reset, too.

[Brandstone]

Well, what can't be automated?  Trade, construction, butchery, mining, woodcutting... anything else?

Military probably can be made automatic, through careful use of patrols and stationing.  Attrition might be a problem after a while, unless you focus on marksdwarves.  Of course, then you'll have to worry about your bolt stockpiles... and with mining and woodcutting out of the picture, you'll have to rely on hunting (for the bones) and plunder.

Most furniture will be all but useless, what with the lack of construction.  The exception is bins and barrels, so it's a good thing you can make containers out of clay now.  Clay and sand are the only renewable, reliable resources for furniture and hard crafts, assuming you have magma.  (Bones are renewable for crafts, but they aren't reliable and in any case you'll probably be using them for bolts.)

The textile industry is also a fair investment, although you'll need to maintain a serious backlog of raw and intermediate materials to keep everyone working at maximum capacity.

The glass industry can feed gem cutting, and gem cutting feeds decorators. Make clay furniture so the decorators always have more to decorate. With enough farms, threshers, and millers you can keep brewing, weaving, and cooking going. Weaving will feed the clothiers to make bags for the millers. As for military, a dodge bridge would allow dwarves to claim all death items without fear of danger. Does hoarding count as an industry? Although the traders wouldn't like it if their depot is on the other side of the dodge bridge. If you have a river or something bisecting the map, then another dodge bridge going under the river could provide some animal meat to spice up the cook's lavish meals. With the right mineral composition mining, smelting, and smithing could be kept active for a relatively long time.

[Eric Blank]

I could probably run a massive fortress for the year without input if I have a big enough farm growing enough different foods to keep their tongues occupied, several meeting areas centered around various high-value art pieces, and a legendary dining room, along with rooms assigned and a public dorm. With just a small weapon traps-over pit trap (3 weapon traps in the middle of a 1x5 bridge across a deep pit on a secondary entrance should deal with enough of the siegers to make it safe for my military) and a large, highly-trained military with a schedule involving patrolling the two entryways, nothing too horrible should go wrong too quickly.

If there's a big enough stock of prepared meals and empty booze barrels I could even keep booze production going part of the year and check in annually.

Biggest concern is that DF spontaneously crashes every once in a while, especially if it runs in the background. I'd probably not get even 1 season.