I was unhappy with my close to the surface fort, the layout was adhoc and I was feeling penned in, so I decided to focus on carving out a new fort in the first cavern layer. It’s very gentle, only edge accessible on two sides and flooded save for some wide beaches. I set up a small group of workers to take care of the construction and put a military squad down there to explore the other levels. Found the perfect spot for a fort, in the middle of the underground cove carved out of a wide column of rock.
Flash forward a month or so in game time, and I’ve been pretty fixated on marching my hammer lords around killing troglodytes and the minutiae of every little thing I need in fort 2.0 when I start getting depression alerts. I had barely checked in on my fort, I set foot and drink production on repeat and just kind of left it. I thought it’d be fine, it wasn’t.
See my burrow in the underground had been generating a lot of job cancellation reports, so I turned off the notices and forgot to turn them back on. So I missed my brewer running out of barrels. And I missed a tantrumming dwarf closing my floodgate and draining my well. So all my cave adapted dwarves had been marching out to the river to drink water. They carved a 2 screen wide road of vomit from my fort a entrance to the river, and were literally drinking the flowing vomit from the river. On top of that, this journey brought them past my corpse dumping ground, so for a month they were enduring this terrible combination of tragedies.
This has had the effect you would imagine. My deluxe cavern fort is all done and everyone’s moved in, it’s a palace, but the 30 inhabitants of the fort who were there for vomit corpse sunlight dirty water road can’t handle the pressure. Suicides and insanity are an epidemic. The mayor and two of my barons are in prison for fist fighting, the other barons catatonic. The last two captains of the guard drowned themselves. An administrator turned my legendary metal smith into a pair of pants. I have my palace but without strict measures it’s going to be a madhouse soon, no one can get past having to drink vomit. With expulsions, judicial murders and suicides I’ve lost 2/3ds of my original fort population.