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[Lexx]

Mine go until the fort meets its end. Its fun rebuilding from the brink of total destruction.

[MasterMorality]

Until it dies or some extreme FPS death kills me, which is fairly rare.
Genesis mod, and my own race that I'm sporadically working on, makes things a little more interesting, what with the multiple opponents.

Also I flat refuse to use Adamantine or Danger rooms - easy win buttons are pointless in this game - so I tend to lose far more military than those who do, but the exploits of my champions feels so much more worth it. I tend to keep track of one or two of them who naturally catch my eye in the course of things, so over time a small story builds up around them, like the Warrior Priest Veshoth, from a few forts ago.

[King DZA]

I'm actually a bit jealous. So many people abandon forts because it seems they no longer have any large threats to worry about.

I can't even begin to imagine all the amazing projects i would start, if i didn't have to worry about , snatchers, megabeasts, moods, the impending goblin siege, and those motherfucking capybaras. someday, i'll get it all under control though.


Someday...

[Mickey Blue]

I don't generally track the number of years unless its a particular interesting fort.  Normally, to repeat what others have already said time and again, I go until one of three things happens:

1) I get bored and/or decide I want to have a different setup (maybe I get a hankering to live in a swamp or a glacier or something, or whatever).

2) I am crushed by the enemy (semi-common given the amount of self-imposed challenges I use in my games).

3) FPS death (not so often these days, a huge amount of self-challenge and having your default FPS limited to sixty will do that).

I guess a fourth would be if an interesting new version comes out but those are fairly infrequent.  How long (in real time or game time) it takes is highly variable.

[Xen0n]

I'm actually a bit jealous. So many people abandon forts because it seems they no longer have any large threats to0 worry about.

I can't even begin to imagine all the amazing projects i would start, if i didn't have to worry about , snatchers, megabeasts, moods, the impending goblin siege, and those motherfucking capybaras. someday, i'll get it all under control though.


Someday...

Heh, I'd kind of want to trade situations with you; My first fort, ever, is still going strong at 16 years in with no signs of slowing down.  I eventually started a second one just to use all these changes I'd been planning.  I kept waiting like an eager puppy, "Okay, this will be the year that a siege/Titan/tantrum spiral goes nuts and wipes out Obscurelens!  It'll be awesome!"   Nope, just boring stability and success.  Where's the fun in that?

Grass is always greener and all that.

[elf-fondling human]

I usually go until
a) I get my first siege and realize that I haven't even started trying to set up a militia, or
b) I breach the caverns and realize that I haven't even started trying to set up a militia.
Sometimes it's
c) I dig through to the HFS and realize that I haven't even started trying to set up a militia.

[ohgoditburns]

I'm actually a bit jealous. So many people abandon forts because it seems they no longer have any large threats to0 worry about.

I can't even begin to imagine all the amazing projects i would start, if i didn't have to worry about , snatchers, megabeasts, moods, the impending goblin siege, and those motherfucking capybaras. someday, i'll get it all under control though.


Someday...

Heh, I'd kind of want to trade situations with you; My first fort, ever, is still going strong at 16 years in with no signs of slowing down.  I eventually started a second one just to use all these changes I'd been planning.  I kept waiting like an eager puppy, "Okay, this will be the year that a siege/Titan/tantrum spiral goes nuts and wipes out Obscurelens!  It'll be awesome!"   Nope, just boring stability and success.  Where's the fun in that?

Grass is always greener and all that.

Is your fortress trapped to hell and back? Do you have it walled off?

My most successful fort yet was wiped out by goblin siege, despite the fact that I had 60 adult cave crocodiles helping my 40 soldiers.

... granted, they were all using imported weaponry and armor since I didn't have any local metal.

[Xen0n]

I'm actually a bit jealous. So many people abandon forts because it seems they no longer have any large threats to0 worry about.

I can't even begin to imagine all the amazing projects i would start, if i didn't have to worry about , snatchers, megabeasts, moods, the impending goblin siege, and those motherfucking capybaras. someday, i'll get it all under control though.


Someday...

Heh, I'd kind of want to trade situations with you; My first fort, ever, is still going strong at 16 years in with no signs of slowing down.  I eventually started a second one just to use all these changes I'd been planning.  I kept waiting like an eager puppy, "Okay, this will be the year that a siege/Titan/tantrum spiral goes nuts and wipes out Obscurelens!  It'll be awesome!"   Nope, just boring stability and success.  Where's the fun in that?

Grass is always greener and all that.

Is your fortress trapped to hell and back? Do you have it walled off?

My most successful fort yet was wiped out by goblin siege, despite the fact that I had 60 adult cave crocodiles helping my 40 soldiers.

... granted, they were all using imported weaponry and armor since I didn't have any local metal.

Tough break on the siege    . 

That's the thing, I'm a big opponent of the "Perfectly Safe Fortress," but my main thrill in games comes from taking a situation and optimising the schist out of it.  I like a game to be made so difficult that I can just barely win if I do everything absolutely perfectly.  That said, DF has a bunch of exploits that I just have to avoid (i.e. no danger room, no selling food/discs, modded crops and forging to be much more difficult etc.).  I'm continually looking for mods/tweaks to up the ante.

In that fort, I intentionally gave myself two surface fort entrances for double the weakness.  I had around a dzoen or so cage traps, but cut that down to 8 or so after a few years since they are uber (wish there was a way to add a 20% failure rate to them... preferally tied to the mechanism / cage quality...).  I had another 8 or so weapon traps at each entrance, with varying amounts and types of weapons.  Recently I added drawbridge functionality to the entrances, but in practice never actually used them (half the time gobbos would come and then just mill around my outer walls anyway).  I did eventually wall off the caverns, but that was after I breached HFS and the clowns got loose and it was my last ditch attempt to seal them away for a while. I think all the cave critters are extinct now anyways thanks to the clowns (setting POPULATION_NUMBER:9001 in my subsequent worlds to try to prevent that.) A bad experience with a FB syndrome that doesn't kill or make battles difficult, but just makes all production slow also turned me off of FBs in general and contributed to me sealing the caves.  I could kill them fine, but they made my fort run in slow-mo mode 

For the first decade any skirmish with my militia killed about half of them, but still, I survived.  I had sieges reduce me to 20% of my population, I had accidental fort-wide flooding, I had trolls in the dungeon, I had vomit hummingbirds sneak in through plumbing and spew frozen extract all over my furniture, I had clowns unexpectedly ransack my miners.  ...but... I survived it all. 



...BORING!

[ohgoditburns]

This was an aboveground fort, and the dwarves frustratingly all rushed out the gates after killing the first squad.

[Xen0n]

This was an aboveground fort, and the dwarves frustratingly all rushed out the gates after killing the first squad.

That stinks.  That reaction (by my militia) is largely responsible for the siege that knocked me down to just 21 dwarves.  Now, any time a vile force of darkness shows up, first thing I do is activate my "Stay off the surface" burrow for the civvies, and I have standing orders to forbid all dead and death items (to prevent my marksdwarves from deciding that the -leather cap- out on the battlefield is better than their current one, and rush out with a "Pickup Equipment" task to their death), then mass reclaim the surface after each battle.  Seems to be pretty effective at preventing 'suicide by cap' in my fort. 

If the problem was your militiadwarves breaking rank and rushing too far into enemy territory, I've considered temporarily deactivating their squad to get them to act like civvies, get scared of gobbos, and run back.  Not sure how well it'd work.

[Tibbz2]

When i get my 2nd migration wave.

The downside of a single core laptop.

[Tevish Szat]

Multiple cores don't help Dwarf Fortress (much: they let you run other programs without taking cycles from DF).  However, they've been industry standard for so long that your single core is probably still the problem.

With DF and computing, quality beats quantity.

[Tharwen]

I usually either get bored after a few days/in-game years (I don't think I've ever lasted longer than a decade!), or do something stupid like mining the adamantine or connecting a well directly to the river.

[AWdeV]

Hello Locke, you seem familiar. Are you the same Locke from TW?

Probably not, mostly because I don't know what TW stands for.

Ah no, then probably not. TW is simply a different forum and the Locke there is a jolly decent fellow. (are you? )

[KtosoX]

First, I do a series of embarks in various location until I find a spot the interests me.
Once I pick the location of my new fort I can go on for years.
Usually I end once my FPS drop below 40 or I get bored and start messing with DFMode or DFusion(which 95% of the time leads to massive FUN).