Bay 12 Games Forum

Spring arrives, and I'm annoyed at the elves to start with because they brought only a dozen logs and several bins of cloth.  Then I notice some funny things going on with my prices.  Masterfully decorated pieces of stone craft are being valued at roughly 40☼!  I've got fine Diorite mug here with exceptional Purple spinel spikes and a basic value of 1030☼ that the elves will only give me 31☼ for!  YOU POINTY-EARED BASTARDS.  I'm going through and checking, and every item that menaces with spikes of anything seems to be severely reduced in price.  If it's encrusted, encircled in bands, or adorned with hanging rings it seems to be fine.

Just for this I'm not buying any of their damn cloth.

If it's relevant, I'm using a random conscript instead of my actual broker, because the lazy bastard has been on break for like a week.  He got dabbling appraiser instantly, though.

The question here is, has this happened to anyone else?  Any ideas why spikes would reduce an item's worth to 3% of its base value?  Could this be the elves' elaborate revenge for when their legless diplomat stumpled into my traps?

This was a very special DF experience for me.  
This is the tale of Dastotsedil, called Swordangels.
I was getting sick of my current fort not getting any sieges, so I loaded up an older fortress that I'd left sidelined for a while.  The old fort had experienced the broken sieges of bygone days, so I figured the goblins would know where it was.  
Sure enough, a vile force of darkness popped up as soon as the season changed.
I thought the battle went well.  One or two goblins lived to flee the map, leaving behind thirty-two corpses, including the civ leader.  I lost probably seven or eight of my dwarves, mostly to ranged weapons.  I queued up some coffins, ordered a new section of the catacombs engraved, and figured that was the end of the excitement.
It was only the beginning.  Misery and tantrums everywhere.  The lucky ones died quickly beneath the maddened blows of a berserk dwarf, while the unlucky wounded slowly dehydrated in their beds(The buckets had all been broken or thrown, and thus forbidden).  Those crawling around babbling or deep in depression outnumbered the healthy by a heavy margin.  The Dungeon Master turned on his pack of wardogs in a berserk rage, which quickly proved to be his last mistake.  I anticipated blood and destruction when the game informed me that a champion had gone berserk, but somehow a well-trained professional fighter was felled by the blows of some random child.  The jail quickly filled, but with no one to tend the prisoners it soon became a miasma-choked grave.  They made random demands right up until the end, but one-by-one the nobles succumbed to madness, and then to thirst.   My hunter, paralyzed from the waist down and berserk, rained bolts down the main hallway.
Corpses filled the original graveyard stockpile, and then they filled the new one, and then they filled the big one that turned the old one and the new one into one huge graveyard.
Through it all, my all-purpose mayor/broker/manager/Captain of the Guard managed to stay sane.  Well, he was apparently ecstatic most of the time, so myabe not quite sane, but close enough.  I had him engraving and making coffins non-stop, and the dead are still piled up in the halls.
It's mostly stable now, though he couldn't leave his duty alone and beat the crap out of one survivor and chained another in the Hell-pit that used to be the jail.  It is now my manager, a planter, a weaponsmith, an animal dissector, a severely injured engraver, a chained miner, eight children and a baby.  The children still tantrum now and then, and some of the others are occasionally miserable, but it's mostly stabilized.  
I have gone from a population of over 150 to fifteen in three dwarven months.  The fortress's worth has decreased by over 100,000*.
Losing is fun, but I haven't given up.  Dastotsedil will bury her dead.  I had a stupidly large store of food even for 150 dwarves, fifteen won't need to plant a seed for years.  I'll put masterwork engravings one every flat surface in the whole damn fort, and those bastards will cheer the Hell up.

This may not have interested anyone else, but I don't dick around with complex magma systems, my megabeasts have all been killed without much fuss, the most dangerous wildlife I get is wolves, and I haven't installed a single pump as yet, so this is a big first for my for one of my forts.
This game is so much fun.

I've had a Countess Consort and a Tax Collector both get bad thoughts from being unable to punish someone for a failure, but I haven't failed them.  The Tax Collector was so distraught over this that, despite this being the only bad thought in his profile, he has fallen into melancholy.  They both had made export mandates, and I'm almost 100% sure I did not violate them when trading with the humans.  
The Tax Collector had banned the export of iron and the only iron I have is in the form of weapons and armor, which I'm sure not trading to the humans.  I forget what the Countess had banned, but as long as prohibited trades still show up in purple I didn't trade any violations.
My Mayor has been making export mandates fine, and hasn't gotten any bad thoughts that I've seen.