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Lack Of Food?

13 (11.6%)

Lack Of Drink?

22 (19.6%)

Lack Of Mining Pick?

0 (0%)

Lack Of Wood?

0 (0%)

Lack Of Blood In Dwarfs?

13 (11.6%)

Too Much water?

19 (17%)

Too Much Lava?

1 (0.9%)

Too Much Necro Omnom?

1 (0.9%)

Carp-mageddon?

0 (0%)

Sponge Murder?

0 (0%)

Night Creatures?

3 (2.7%)

Curses?

0 (0%)

Clowns?

1 (0.9%)

Forgotten Beasts?

4 (3.6%)

GCS?

0 (0%)

Abandoned?

23 (20.5%)

something else?

12 (10.7%)

Total Members Voted: 110

Voting closed: October 09, 2013, 08:32:40 am

[Gruntathon]

Did a couple of practice runs before starting a proper fort.

First one I really played, I had picked a waterfall embark purely by accident.

I wanted to make a good waste disposal system, I figured having a chamber that was washed clean by pressurised water from the top and fell into the below river would be a good idea.
My problem was that I assumed the dwarves were intelligent enough to stay away from the pressurised water when I opened the floodgates to wash the rubbish disposal chamber. Ended up killing a third of the fortress, I got so depressed I rage-quit.
Waste was disposed of quite well though!

[fricy]

Hmmm, let me see.
First fortress lost due to hunger. Second to thirst. Third embark died to a nice necro ambush and a lack of military.
Forth embark? The rookies weren't up to the fire breathing forest titan, and a bit later I learned that drowning traps are not really effective against a beast that doesn't need to breathe, and can step across z-levels...ouch. Savescum: Titan taken care of, little bit later cat/dog/lama/alpacca/sheep/pig/goat/rabbit/cavy/hensplosion.

[zubb2]

I think pretty much all my early forts died with either water or abandonment.
I read one post that reminded me of miasma.
The first time I saw miasma I thought it was really bad and looked it up on google.
Google wasn't clear so I locked down the fort like it was plauge situation until I figured out miasma wasn't poisonus.
I had one fort that was screwed but it was taking too long, so I had my dorfs go to the edge of the caverns to escape when I abandoned.

[NineFourEightSeven]

I lost my first one to a FIRE TITAN.

It was literally MADE OF FIRE, anyone that tried to fight it would melt, and it burned all the surface grass away.
I couldn't see the darn thing through all the smoke.

[Kohmelo]

Flooding mass flooding...

There was a bug back in the times I started and for one i did not know that flooding a channel could flood the whole map... I remember it took ages to master the channels back in the 2d times....

[Apani]

My first forts were done following a guide step-by-step. I soon quit when I got bored/unsatisfied. My first proper fortress was already something ambitious: the entrance by a waterfall, and we were doing rather fine. Then a goblin ambush came and, since I was bored/unsatisfied, I lowered the drawbridge. Not the best attitude to play, I know.

[Drazinononda]

Long story short, the goblins got tired of being taunted monty python style while cows and pigs were hurled at them over the wall. (Slight exageration..) they showed up the next year with close to 30 trolls. 

It wasn't pretty. But then the bobbies showed up and arrested the squad leaders so my fort was saved.

Ending I was expecting.

I came into DF completely blind: no tutorials, no wiki, no forums. My only exposure to it before trying to play had been a couple minutes watching a friend, about three years before I picked it up. Needless to say my first fort died of thirst while I tried to figure out what the hell anything was...

[Ionizer]

My first fort was built step-by step according to the tutorial on the wiki.  When the tutorial ended, I decided I wanted a well.  A mined out a nice little room next to my dining room (which was also right next to my kitchen, still and food stockpile, and the main meeting hall).  I took precautions by digging the well in the winter when the river was frozen, and building floodgates as a safe guard.  I even had a final failsafe with a set of "airlock" doors controlled by lever into the well room in case I needed to seal the whole thing.

Spring comes, the river thaws and begins filling the cistern.  So far so good.  As the well is almost full, I give the order to throw the lever to stop the flow.  Mistake number 1: Floodgate lever was directly next to the well.  By time someone actually got around to throwing the lever, the well was overflowing, washing anyone who tried to pull the lever into the well and drowning them.  No biggie, I lost a few dwarfs and a cat or two, but the airlock will save the fortress.  Mistake 2:  Airlocks don't work if both doors are set to the same lever (I did not realize that levers work on a binary on/off thing, instead I thought they toggled everything connected to them as they were pulled.)  Also, the airlock level was inside the airlock itself (the idea was for a dwarf to go in, pull the lever to close the door behind them and open the door in front of them and vice versa).  The airlock is stuck open and before a sacrificial lamb can be called upon to seal himself and the water, the lever floods above dwarf head height.

So now my dining room is slowly flooding, but I'm optimistic because the dining room has doors that will trap the water and I'll just have to make a new dining room.  I hastily tell my people to deconstruct all the furniture in the dining hall and hollow out one of my mining tunnels for the new dining room.  I designate a new food stockpile and tell them to start making new kitchens and stills and start smoothing the room.  About the half the tables and chairs are deconstructed (but left where they stand) when I start to get mass job cancellations due to unpassable terrain.  Okay, well, I can always make new tables and chairs.  I lock the doors to the old dining room and continue on (a few more cats drown, but whatever).  Eventually I notice all the dwarves are moving very slowly and flashing with blue arrows.  Turns out that creating a new food/booze stockpile doesn't mean the old one ceases to exist, so no one bothered moving my 2000+ units of booze out of the flood zone, but they still counted as "in the fort" so the stock screen couldn't tell me everyone was dying of thirst (it was winter again by now, so no water to drink).  Also, everyone was getting really sad because they didn't have any booze, so the tantrums started.  Once half the fort was throwing tantrums, a Cyclops stomped onto the map and that was pretty much the end (a tantruming dwarf deconstructed my main drawbridge, so the cyclops had an unimpeded path to wreak havoc throughout the fort).

[stumpy]

Paintpaddles had everything a colony could want. More fish than could ever be eaten. Enough liquor to drown a titan.  Every room was littered with worn out clothing and misplaced bins. There, in the siltstone statue garden, sat a yak-bone throne of the highest craftdwarfship. They even had cheese.
  Then the goblins came.
Somehow a single squad of wrestlers and their war-dogs beat them back, but at great cost to the population.
  Records from the colony show that the overseer had neglected to prepare a burial chamber for the colonists. His confidence in the longevity of dwarves and our mastery of the arts of war betrayed them all.
 By the time the coffins were ready, the bodies had started to rot. According to job reports, there weren't enough masons and their leader, in his panic, failed to delegate new ones along with shops for them to work in. Only the mayor and a handful of immigrants were sane enough to give them a proper burial, but again their inexperienced leader had failed them by not "q,b"ing the coffins. Tantrums had long since stopped all food and drink production. The mayor could only watch in horror as the new arrivals cracked under the strain of working in the sickly sweet smell of rotting dwarves and stray animals with no booze and no food as the ghosts of their fallen ken returned to haunt them.
   I was a guard in the last caravan sent to Paintpaddles. When we arrived only the mayor and two dwarves-of-all-trades were alive. By the time we'd unloaded our goods they'd lost their sanity. One of them even tried to attack the liason.
   We never returned.

[Haspen]

My first fort's death?

Oh, it's a simple thing, really: I thought that making a tunnel from my farm rooms to a river would be a wonderful way to irrigate them.

It wasn't!

[MDFification]

My first fort actually survived for quite a while, thanks to the miracle of tutorials.
Some minor hitches included a complete lack of farming ability; I accidentally created hundreds of single tile farm plots... 
I also failed to efficiently set up metalworking and butchered my military training. I fixed the deficits of necessary goods via trade, but this left my military very weak. Also, since my food supplies were low, I was gathering every plant on the map (I had a lot of spare dwarfs; my population got really high) to surivive.
Then, the Wereelephant came. Jesus Christ, it was terrifying. My military killed it (luckily soon after they arrived it turned back into... a kobold?) but it slaughtered many of the workers, and an unfortunate one survived. After his first rampage, noticing the troops couldn't get to him in time to stop the killing, I tried to have the military execute him, inciting a loyalty cascade that further weakened my pop.
At the end I had 4 legendary, psychologically damaged wereelephants. One swallowed its own child whole, I might add. So, with basically no prospect for population growth, all real jobs blocked by eventual elephant-transformation and running out of my entertainment (locking elfs in the trade depot and unleashing the elephants on them) I abandoned.

[Eric Blank]

My first fort, I literally had no idea what I was doing. At all. Everyone died of starvation because I didn't know how to set up a farm.

[misko27]

Abandoned immediately after realizing I had no clue what was going on. A few minutes of wiki checking later, I reclaimed, and the fort went on to live meager life full of dwarves killed by me not installing stairs, farms not set up properly, water not found, till killed by a goblin ambush (A attempt to fertilize a area had opened up a hole to the surface). I reclaimed again. My final attempt was brought down by a combination of gobbo attack driving dwarfs made with grief. lack of water again, poor living conditions all leading to a massive tantrum spiral, and finally a Forgotten beast decided to finish it off.

Only a cat was left to fight it by the time it showed up, everyone else was bleeding or dead or crying in a corner. The cat did put up a admirable match though, managed to hurt it with it's own breath, bruised it pretty badly, and managed to skulk off to hide in a bedroom after being hurt with only minor injuries. At that point, I decided the place was pretty much doomed, and I abandoned, leaving the remaining gobbos to to be eaten by the giant, I think it was a bat. Any dwarf that could manage to escape to the surface got out with their lives, I imagine.

[DreamCarver]

The very first died of dehydration, due to me not setting up a still. The farms were fine, but plump helmets were not being processed into booze.

Another death occured when an elven ambush marched into town, scaring off all the pastured animals. My dwarves attempted to put them back where they belonged (wut's a burrow, hur hur), and were hunted to bloody smears in the grass.

[Corrupt Ai]

My first fort died from a necromancer siege. During embark, I picked a place that looked appealing. I decided to ignore the "Tower" listing in relationships, as I didn't know what that meant, and the subsequent warning about embarking there. Everything was going well, until the second season, when about 40 zombies arrived and ate my dwarves.