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I got bored

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20 (32.8%)

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17 (27.9%)

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3 (4.9%)

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2 (3.3%)

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3 (4.9%)

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Total Members Voted: 58

[MDFification]

I'm pretty sure this thread has been done before, but how did you lose your first fortress?

My first fort was lost due to aggressively spreading beast sickness (in the horrifying form of Were-elephants. I boatmurder'd) followed by a loyalty cascade as I tried desperately to kill the infected before they transformed back into their were-elephant form.
I did a reclaim, continued to manage everything poorly, and got killed by a giant. A 3rd reclaim (by purely military dwarves) failed to kill the giant, and I gave up on ever liberating my first fortress. I actually played another 3 (miserable failures of) fortresses on that world before encountering the nemesis bug. Good times.

[Witty]

RIP'd due to kid claiming a workshop and me not having a single clue what a mood was. The kid went berserk, and beat the starting seven miner to death with his sock. That miner had a lot of friends...

[HooliganintheFort]

Ahhh, I remember.  It all started with that goblin ambush.

I was a total nooblet, and I didn't know what I was doing. Then one day a goblin ambush surprised me and I didn't have a military. We were slaughtered and I manully burrowed every single surviving dwarf (Around 100 or so) into my safe room. Well, that didn't go as plan because we were dieing of staevation and dehydration.  Everyone was going insane, but with one of my sane miners I dug into the river where I was going to put a well. Yeah.... Everyone drowned after the water flooded the place, but the good thing is that elephants destroyed the goblins.

So that was my first ever fort. After that I learned that losing is fun and that I could come back with a decked out adventurer group ready to take on the elephants still there.

[Greiger]

I did not know how to dig into the cliff-face or change labors assigned to dwarves.  Everyone starved, in fact I think I did so badly they all starved before the first winter.

(this was before I knew hunting for vermin was basically the point of no return too, so I actually waited for them to starve before giving up with only one vermin hunting dwarf left)

[Cptn Kaladin Anrizlokum]

I still have my first fortress, I have a slight giant bees made of fire problem in the bottom levels, but other than that 10 years safe.

[Evaris]

RIP due to frame per second death on my laptop by year 5, followed by a loss of data on that hard drive. 

[DeKaFu]

My first ever fortress? I couldn't figure out how to dig a staircase so my dwarves milled around on the surface until they starved. Then I quit the game for a year.

My first successful fortress I lost to hippos. I'd embarked on a river which was full of the things. I attempted to dig a tunnel to the river's edge, which I planned to seal with a grate for safe water access, but partway along the way I accidentally left an access door open and a hippo beelined into my fort's central hallway.

It was... horrifying. I had a fledgling military of barely-trained dwarves at the time, so I set them on it. It dismantled them. Grabbing a limb in its mouth, ripping it off, dropping it and proceeding to the next. It reduced my military to a pile of parts in seconds.

Beginning to panic, I quickly recruited a couple dozen other civilian dwarves and set them on it, with predictable results. The hippo ended up so exhausted from combat it started passing out mid-battle, but still it wouldn't die. The recruits would beat on it until it woke up and ripped off a torso or two before passing out again. It was only after it had singlehandedly halved the population of my fortress that it finally bled out.

I went to close down the tunnel where the hippo got in, but as the dwarf was on its way to wall it off, it was interrupted by hippo #2. It proceeded to charge into my staircase and repeat the process all over again, including the ever growing mess of blood and discarded limbs and the incredibly slow eventual death of the murderbeast. My fortress population had gone from the range of 50-60 to single digits. Enough survived to engrave the entire diningroom with images of the hippo massacre, but the fortress was pretty much shot at that point.

The two hippos both earned names from their long kill lists. The first one was named Nastymeal. The second was Perfectfeast.

[condonzack]

My first handful of forts I lost to frustration from (in retrospect) bad stockpile management. And messing around with Burrows.

[neblime]

my first fortress died because I tried to siphon a stagnant pond into my fortress for water (everyone was complaining of thirst because I didn't make any booze at that point), as you may guess the complaints continued because they don't like to drink water (let alone stagnant pond water) until they're quite thirsty, and then when the goblins came they used that as the perfect entry point, straight into the meeting hall.

[Fen]

a lot of things killed my first fortress..

One was a lack of booze. Dwarves started dehydrating. I hadn't learned to keep up with booze production, and by the time I told someone to start brewing more... it was too late. I also hadn't learned to always keep empty coffins ready and waiting. Bodies started rotting. Miasma broke out. Tantrums. Canceled jobs. More dehydration. Too many problems to make the solutions to any one of them happen, let alone all of them.

It was grim. It was nasty. It was covered in purple death fumes.

[Lasander]

My first fort starved to death.

Somehow I managed to figure out how to build a well in my first fort and yet not understand farming.  I thought all those barrels in my stockpile meant I had food. Made sense, that is how all games worked.  The less icons in my stockpile must mean less food.  Then goblins showed up.  I managed to somehow hastily seal the fort but with everyone slowly dying one by one and not understanding why I flooded the place to put them out of their misery.

My second fort died of thirst.

Not wanting to have another surprise goblin invasion I decided to build an emergency lockdown hatch connected to a control-room near where my dwarves congregated.  I was not aware that by linking doors to levers they could no longer be operated by the dwarves and had to be manually switched open/closed and defaulted in the closed state.  I had not built a well yet and did not realize that they had no access to water until they all died of thirst around the same time.  The only survivor was a lone hunter who was locked out of the fort.  This dwarf wasn't thirsty due to the nearby stream but was going hungry due to no wildlife and my ignorance of the command to tell dwarves to forage for berries. 

It wasn't until my third fort I learned about farming and booze production.  Which fell in flaming glory when a dragon attacked.  I learned that day that dwarves love socks more than life itself...  I learned of the dreaded tantrum spiral and I also learned that I fell in love with this game.

[PrimusRibbus]

My first fortress ever was in 40d. I played it for about 15 in-game years before abandoning it due to boredom.

[puke]

I did not know how to dig into the cliff-face

Haha, I remember this was a common problem, people would post about it a lot.  "what cliff face?  I cant explore any further to the left, how do you find it" and things like this.

Man, I don't know how I figured it out, I think it helped that "d" was context sensitive so if you try to "d"esignate in the black area behind the irregular grey line, it defaults to "dig".  And if you "d"esignate elsewhere it defaults to "chop trees" or "gather plants" or whatever it is.  So I just sort of intuitively knew, the first time I started experimenting with the menu commands.

From there, digging was easy.  I had brought a skilled miner and woodcutter, so lucked out that those labors were enabled.  And I started digging out some rooms and stuff.  Dutifully storing my stone in a stockpile outside, because it seems like thats what you should do:  clear out your tailings.

I lost like two or three when the cave river flooded when I first breached it.  Someone else was out hunting (or maybe fishing?) and angered some pack of animals who came back to kill the remaining dwarfs.

I think I lost the second one to an attack from cavern creatures, or an ambush from river creatures or something like that.  One fell to an actual siege, another to starvation due to a poor understanding of farming and brewing.

That was the first four or so, most of what I lost after that was due to quitting.

I almost lost a major 200+ dwarf fort to starvation once.  It was going so well, I forgot to re-wet and re-designate the farms after they dried during the winter.  By the time I noticed anything was wrong, someone had died of starvation and half the fort was hunting for vermin.

I was only able to save it by designating all the booze and remaining seeds for cooking, and butchering all of our butcherable animals.  I named that event Gingkunakath, which roughly translates to kitten-winter.  Or would, if there was a dwarf word for kitten.  I guess the dwarf word for kitten might just be igril.

[varnish]

My very very first I lost because I didn't know how water worked. I had read that a you needed to flood the spot you wanted to farm, so I dug into the side of a stream. And well, it did flood the spot I wanted to farm.

After that it's hard to remember. I actually still have my first real fort around somewhere. Pre-40d, but after z-levels were added. I like that fort.

[nogoodnames]

I embarked next to a waterfall. After setting up some basic things, I decided it would be a good idea to dig out a window overlooking the waterfall. Unfortunately I didn't quite know how to read the water tiles and ended up digging directly into the river. Half the fort was flooded before the dwarves managed to block it off.

After that little learning experience, I tried to use the water to irrigate my farms. Of course I didn't know how irrigation worked either, so I ended up with four dry farm plots surrounded by mini-moats. In my frustration I tried to flood the world, but the water was drying up too fast so I got bored and made a new world.