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[NoirRaven]

Hey all, I post this because i have a really bad habit i want to correct.

I tend to play a fort until its "stable" with all the industries working full time, then abandon and create a new one somewhere else. It's because i get bored of nothing really happening other than churning out goods. I tend to get bored sometimes and go off and do something else with games. I love dwarf fortress, but i keep doing this. The initial setup and startup of a fortress is a lot more interesting to me than when the fort is all ready to start trading, which is when my fort starts stagnating and getting boring.

I do know exactly what i need to keep my interest. I need a project to work on.

So I am looking for a Project or series of projects the occupy my time. Something to hold my interest until the fort goes boom. Not really megaprojects, just general random things to do.

Thanks for any help.

[AutomataKittay]

Oh oh! Have you done all of the industries, every last one of them?

You sounds like you enjoys setting things up, so what if you follow liasion's 'in demand' list that they leaves you with annually? Become the mountainhome's factory house!

I've done it before and it's pretty demanding and good for practical organization.

I doesn't really do much other than shifting my fortress over to full block construction for everyone and patterning things up to look good, I tend to like to put in red cross for hospital area and things like that, little touches

[Shoruke]

This is a good place to look for ideas.

-You could work up to puncturing the land of spoilers the fun way: with a magma piston. Then dig too deep on purpose.
-You could start ALL the wars! Humans and Goblins and Kobolds oh my! Iron Christmas every friggin' month!
-Make a farm. Not for mushrooms and turnips and lame crap, I mean like Old MacDonald's farm but with Rutherers and Trolls instead of cows and pigs. For bonus points, name your animal tamer Urist McDonald.
-Perform science. Remember, the difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.
-Create an immortality room. Even after you "abandon" your fort, that vampire will still be locked behind his non-deconstructable walls without a pickaxe, stuck with no clothes, no food, no booze, and nothing to do but admire his really friggin' nice chair and stuff. When you give up on your fort, take comfort in the fact that even without your sage guidance, the Dwarves totally would have been able to avoid the Your Fort Has Crumbled screen.
-Find a way to make everyone in your fort weird. Make them all vampires, make them all werenouns, I don't know. Make them all footless by making them stand in 1/7 magma near stairs or something.
-If your fort has one entrance, make a labyrinth. If your fort has more than one entrance, make several. Fill them with fun/creative traps... like pressure activated skeletal carp cages.
-Pick a Dwarf, and do the Most Interesting Dwarf In The World thing. Lock them in a series of rooms and force them to do a certain type of labour continuously until they master it. (start with siege operation and butchering, everything else will go Rusty in the time it takes you to train those at all) Then hand them a crossbow or an axe or something and watch the world's baddest badass beat the stuffing out of absolutely everything with his/her insane metalsmithing skills.
-Make an unnecessarily awesome defense system. I'm currently building an obsidian magma-killsat tower. Why? Because... magma killsat tower.
-Replace every single wall in your fortress with a window. Glass is pretty cheap to produce, right...?
-Hold a battle royale. Save up caged invaders from several different spheres, put all the caged douchemonkeys in a room, attach all of the cages to one lever, stand waaaaaay back, and pull the lever. Record a video. For bonus points, put all of them in a room adjacent to spoilerland first, seal it off, have someone puncture the circus, and let the infinite demons into the mix. Humans vs. Goblins. vs. the underground wildlife vs. the aboveground wildlife vs. the undead vs. the circus.

[Loud Whispers]

The most interesting for me; above ground fort. EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING has to happen in an outdoor tile. Have fun with storage.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Introduce social class:
Build shacks out of mud for the poor dwarves, and elaborate cavern-lake-pagoda style rooms for your legendary dwarves, military and valued craftsmen.

Mine-cart everything, streamline labor so hauling is completely done by minecarts. Make your fort into a rollercoaster accident in the process

Experimenting with magma is always fun, setting up magma landmines, an obsidinator and the like. On the flip-side experiment with ice aquifer+frozen area=great potential for a variety of interesting freezer designs. Obviously going this direction will let you avoid having a military entirely. See how well that goes.

Cavern fort: all cavern all the time, dwarves must never tread the surface, grow food, mingle with crundles and jabberers, inhabit stalagmites, die from organ necrosis-inducing dust. Bonus points if you find an animal-people tribe, do not wipe it out, but somehow forge a lasting peace (perhaps by letting them kill things? as per old bug)

[moki]

My current project is an above-ground fortress. So far, the magma forges, some storage rooms and the farms are still underground, but I'm still working on it. Having 170 dwarves living in a city with walls and houses is very interesting. You'll get a somewhat stable situation after a few years, but the challenges never stop. The current projects are:
- bringing magma up from the very bottom of the map
- giving everyone their own bedroom in  a single tower
- building a circular temple to Armok, complete with blood, iron and magma
- ... many more.

Doing the same inside a cavern is even better. Don't just dig out rooms but go straight for the caverns and build everything with floors, walls and roofs while defending against crundles and forgotten beasts.

[goblolo]

try this. Not a project really, but a small piece of !science!. I was too busy last time to do it by myself.

[eharper256]

I tend to play a fort until its "stable" with all the industries working full time, then abandon and create a new one somewhere else. It's because i get bored of nothing really happening other than churning out goods. I tend to get bored sometimes and go off and do something else with games. I love dwarf fortress, but i keep doing this. The initial setup and startup of a fortress is a lot more interesting to me than when the fort is all ready to start trading, which is when my fort starts stagnating and getting boring.

I hear ya, buddy, this is exactly my problem as well. Part of me can't fathom the idea of deliberate sabotage just to move the game along.

On the other hand, recently I've got better by introducing little things and trying out new concepts, and my current fort is now 6 years in and I'm still vaguely interested (had a side diversion getting people killed in adventurer mode in a different crapsack world for awhile, but now I'm back).

Those things were:
+ Getting a multi-z-level channel going to let a waterfall into the main hall then move the wastewater along into the first cavern layer to prevent any chance of floods. That took about a year of planning and work in the current fort. Hilariously enough it was apparently really inspirational for the dwarves too; they ended up making two artifact floodgates afterwards which I installed into the system, which was nice.
+ Designing a new throne-room for my Countess
+ Building a danger-zone to mince invaders, complete with two unavoidable ballistae, three tame giant cave spiders and about 10 menacing glass spike traps. That took a couple of years.
+ Designing the run-up to the fortress to force caravans to only come from one direction and use the blasted road. Hilariously, Migrants always come from another direction, and every time they do, they have to wander through the gore splattered danger-zone.
+ Just designed a nice granite catacomb for the dead rather than having them all uncermoniously being put in coffins in what was effectively a hole in the wall.

Next Goal: Upgrade the danger-zone with archery pillboxes.
Next Goal: Steel weapons for all despite no flux
Next Goal: Create a new underground army base ready for breaking into the first cavern layer properly. Two forgotten beasts have spawned down there already, but since the only route to my fort is the single channeled hole with roaring 7/7 water falling 15 Z-Levels, they've just been content to sit around. Preparing, and taking them on ought to be !FUN! but I'm going to make sure I do it on my terms rather than sabotaging my chances. This will probably take a few years.

[Vharuck]

The most interesting for me; above ground fort. EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING has to happen in an outdoor tile. Have fun with storage.

I tried this before but with a twist.  I embarked in a marshland next to a river and built a stilt town.  Every building/room had to be off the ground, in case of floods, and there had to be a path between any two buildings/rooms that did not touch the ground.  After shooting myself in the foot thusly, I dug my other heel into the wound by making everything but the defensive wall out of wood.  A marsh quarry?  That's unsightly, illogical, and would definitely become infested with virulent mosquitoes.

[Aspgren]

Think of your favourite building.

Now build a megaproject based on it. Make it ... 100 times larger than it actually is.

[AutomataKittay]

The most interesting for me; above ground fort. EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING has to happen in an outdoor tile. Have fun with storage.

I tried this before but with a twist.  I embarked in a marshland next to a river and built a stilt town.  Every building/room had to be off the ground, in case of floods, and there had to be a path between any two buildings/rooms that did not touch the ground.  After shooting myself in the foot thusly, I dug my other heel into the wound by making everything but the defensive wall out of wood.  A marsh quarry?  That's unsightly, illogical, and would definitely become infested with virulent mosquitoes.

That sounds surprisingly like a lot of my aboveground engineering, except that I does quarries or have underground mining happening

Though I've done it all up with raw clay a couple times, before I remembered that deconstructing stair of those kills dwarves half the time.

[NoirRaven]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!

I have now got plans to start a new fort, all above ground. I'll see where that gets me. I will use stone, but only because I like to, lol.

[Cobbler89]

I'm beginning to preemptively advocate a new breed of Succession Game using the soon-to-come fortress retirement mechanic. The idea is that you play... like you're playing now: build a stable fort and then leave it. Only you pass the world around and take turns building fortresses for the various civilizations. You can cooperate to build a series of defenses for one civilization. You can play as an adventurer and try to sack all the player-made forts singlehandedly. In time, when the army arc arrives, you can take turns building a fort and waging war on the other forts for so many in-game months/years (sort of like Risk). Players who are good at building stable forts and don't feel like trying anything too wild in the way of megaprojects or !!fun!! are going to be really happy with the mere existence of retirement mechanics because they open up reasons to complete a fort and move on, and they'll be happier still as more things can be done in the world besides building a fort (meaning more things to move on to that building any fort has to take into account -- which itself leads to more concrete goals beyond mere "stability" when working on any particular fort).

[Samoorai]

Try making this. The fortress itself is a megaproject. I'm currently making it again in the current version, though I have no sand and thus magmafall construction has stalled

[DS]

I'm beginning to preemptively advocate a new breed of Succession Game using the soon-to-come fortress retirement mechanic. The idea is that you play... like you're playing now: build a stable fort and then leave it. Only you pass the world around and take turns building fortresses for the various civilizations. You can cooperate to build a series of defenses for one civilization. You can play as an adventurer and try to sack all the player-made forts singlehandedly. In time, when the army arc arrives, you can take turns building a fort and waging war on the other forts for so many in-game months/years (sort of like Risk). Players who are good at building stable forts and don't feel like trying anything too wild in the way of megaprojects or !!fun!! are going to be really happy with the mere existence of retirement mechanics because they open up reasons to complete a fort and move on, and they'll be happier still as more things can be done in the world besides building a fort (meaning more things to move on to that building any fort has to take into account -- which itself leads to more concrete goals beyond mere "stability" when working on any particular fort).

Indeed, such a thing has been tried before. Although it has since fallen into inactivity, there was at least one prior attempt at a succession game like the one you describe. I suspect that one of the major reasons why the project came to a halt was the upcoming release, which, as you've correctly pointed out, will make such an endeavor much more feasible. Fortress retirement, in particular, being something we previously attempted with DFhack with varying degrees of success, will now be a coded feature. In addition, improved politics and 'living-worldness' will make such a project much more fruitful.

So, yes. While not definitively 'new,' I think you are right in anticipating that these sorts of succession games will become more popular with the new release.