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[Ethereal.Frog]

Trying to find the upright spoiler entrance is a bad idea unless you're really prepared for it.

Half of my guys are dead, and then I found several goblinite veins on surface level. So now I'm gonna half my armorer make a set of bluemetal armor, and come back shortly with an adventurer.

[Puriri]

First I dug out an area for my farm that I thought would be at the same level as my river. But then I realized it was actually above it.
So I made a screwpump on one side and a drain to the river on the other side of the room. My mason went to pump the water in. When the room had enough water I told him to destroy the pump. Since he built it he had been trapped but safe from the water but when the pump disassembled the water immediately pushed him out into the river to drown.

[AngleWyrm]

Coming back to my fort after a week off, and then realizing I have no idea what's going on.

[Twobeard]

I stocked up on tons of food before embark, figuring that it would buy me some time to get myself established before I had to go and farm.

I hate farming in this game for some reason.

Anyways, so I bought lots of food and booze, having sold my bronze axes (no more defense and no more wood. Not a good idea) and anvil (I didn't know about metalworking at the time) to get it. I also sold some various other seeds and items that I'd viewed as useless at the time.


I also didn't bother giving my dwarfs  any skills save for a single miner/mason and a wood cutter/carpenter (who was half useless).

It actually didn't start off so bad, I dug out my burrow and stockpiles and made makeshift bedrooms so that even if they didn't have beds, they could still sleep somewhere.

Of course, after that I decided to go looking for some stone to mine so I'd have some building materials. I found nothing, even after going about 5+ Z levels down.

After a while we started running low on food and decided to plant some of my plump helmets. I decided to go and try to mine out a medium sized water pocket into a place that I named the "Farming Corridor". I figured that it was big enough to absorb all of the water; I was wrong. So now I have no wood, no stone, a flooded burrow, no beds and limited food and booze supplies.

"C'mon, trade caravans, I need you!" "Wait... Why are we getting immigrants?!"

Now I have more mouths to feed, my dwarfs are running on dwindling food supplies in a half flooded cave and we have no building materials.

Finally, the flood clears up and I'm able to plant some seeds in the mud. "That was easy."

Nope, it wasn't, because then and there for reasons unknown, a couple goblins roam into my fort and attack my unarmed untrained dwarfs. Of the fifteen or so that I had before, my population is now down to ten.

This story ends with a big "Fuck it" and me abandoning my fort.

I hate to say it man, but that was giving up to easy. Like lance said, you could have gathered aboveground plants. You could also have butchered your animals.

 In terms of wood production? Break apart your wagon, you get logs, those logs can make a carpenters shop with b-w-c, then make a wooden training axe at the carpenters. I know it sounds silly, but they cut trees. Once you have that you should be fine for wood as long as there is some on your map. Then you can make more barrels for storage of food/booze, doors to keep out gobbos, beds and things.

 Migrant waves are fairly constant and ten dwarves is enough to work with for any amount of time. Hell i started a fortress alot like yours the other day, but without the miner or pick. My first seven got beaten to death by skeletal dear, just in time for 2 migrants to show. Its an interesting map. Bottom line, if your not sure about something in the game, feel free to ask, and dont give up on a fort to early. Dwarves dying is half the fun.
Goodluck dude.

[plstcflsh]

i had an interesting facepalm a few games ago. i embarked, dug a hole, set a stockpile in that hole, and deconstructed the wagon, for it and all parts to go into the hole. in an effort to what i thought would expedite the process, i set one massive custom stockpile, and permitted all types of everything inside of it. soon after i notice a mess around the wagon, trails of what looks like blood leading away from the wagon in all directions, but it turns out to be all the wine, rum and beer. this must be a noob error? i abandoned that fort as it was off to a rough start with no booze.

[abadidea]

i had an interesting facepalm a few games ago. i embarked, dug a hole, set a stockpile in that hole, and deconstructed the wagon, for it and all parts to go into the hole. in an effort to what i thought would expedite the process, i set one massive custom stockpile, and permitted all types of everything inside of it. soon after i notice a mess around the wagon, trails of what looks like blood leading away from the wagon in all directions, but it turns out to be all the wine, rum and beer. this must be a noob error? i abandoned that fort as it was off to a rough start with no booze.

I have never actually seen spilled alcohol, but it sounds like you accidentally designated all the barrels for dumping.

[Serio]

My best miner, a legendary miner, was digging a tomb deep down below the settlement. I meant for it to be my commander's tomb, and, unbeknownst to me, it was located right above a magma sea. Naturally, my miner halted but not before the expedition leader had somehow bled to death besides the magma. And did I mention two of my other, very good dwarves, are working on the level right below, where the magma is now headed?

[Tryntu]

Just remembered I had forgotten to turn on autosaving after the game crashed, three or four years since the last save. 

facepalm spiral? i keep accidentally unplugging my computer and losing fortresses because i never save. how does one turn on that autosaving?

[Greiger]

in the init files. 

data>init>d_init.txt

the top entry is autosave.

Just change [AUTOSAVE:NONE] to [AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL] or [AUTOSAVE:YEARLY].  Seasonal saves once every 3 months, yearly once per year on the first day of spring.

Note that saving does take about 10 or 20 seconds, so when it does save your game will freeze up for a second.  It usually says saving onscreen during this time, but if yer Graphical fps is set relatively low sometimes the saving dialog won't have a chance to appear. 

I also recommend turning the autosave_pause to YES.  It's not uncommon to have a siege strike on the last month of a season.  Sometimes the fighting is still happening when the season changes, it sucks for the game to suddenly take off at full speed while yer trying to time a lever pull after a few seconds of delay.
 
Autobackup is nice for some people, but I just feel it makes loading a save confusing and fills up yer harddrive with old saves that yer not likely to use.

[Besser]

I have two facepalm moments.

The first was in an older fort of mine, and this is the story I tell all my friends who are new to DF or who I try to convert. I had a really powerful Axelord- Legendary in Axes, a full suit of adamantine plate armor, etc. (this was before the 'fighter', 'dodge' etc. skills were around). She was the first of her squad to advance to the rank of Axelord, so I immediately replaced the old head of my military. Something important you should know about this dwarf- she had more children than a pack of Mormons. She would carry babies with her, caring mother that she was, and for whatever reason, they would follow her around once they could walk. This remained true through all the hard times I had, including the first siege of her career as my Commander-in-Chief. Like a good general, she led the charge against a group of about 15-25 goblins. Needless to say, she tore them to shreds. While the goblins were not able to hit her, they were able to hit her baby whom she carried into battle with what I'm guessing was her shield arm. The goblins not surrounding my war machine decided to destroy her other children. At the end of the day, I had a bunch of dead goblins, 7 dead children, and parts of a baby surrounding my poor Dwarven mother. She was devastated. Eventually, after about a season or two, she went insane from sadness and started killing people. By this point, the rest of her former squadmates had caught up with her in strength, so she went down pretty quickly. Despite her rampage, she was honored as a hero and received the largest of my tombs at the time.

The second facepalm moment is one that I encountered in this new build of Dwarf Fort, and I'm still not quite sure it wasn't a glitch. One of my dwarves went into a mood and claimed the Mechanic's workshop, of all places. He went back and forth with nothing but rocks. I watched for a bit and eventually got bored, because he was moving a LOT of rock, and put my attentions elsewhere. I didn't think anything of it, until I came back a few hours later to see him still diligently carrying rocks. I thought I had found a glitch, and that he was permanently stuck just carrying rocks in his mood. This was actually a good thing, though, because I had been forced to cut off access to the outside world due to about 3 ambushes and then a siege in the span of 40 minutes. Because I couldn't trade, I had very little materials with which 'moody dwarves', as I like to call them, could work with, so I had been losing dwarves left and right to melancholy, insanity, etc and was glad to not have to deal with that anymore. Eventually, to my great surprise, I received an announcement saying that my rock-moving dwarf had begun a construction! Once all was said and done, I got a mechanism worth about $2 million and engraved with just about every image you could hope to see. Here are some screenshots:

Value and Name

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Description Page- it goes on forever.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Haspen]

Besser - it's case of Planepacked.

I think I saw somewhere that with use of burrows (or rather, mis-use) it is possible to make incredibly intricate artifacts in 0.31 as well.

[Lord Shonus]

As well known as that bug is now, it's nice to see soemone stumbling on it by accident.

[xtank5]

On the lowest visible line in the description is a recursive engraving.

[Twobeard]

Oh man those are the most hilarious artifacts ever. I may have to see if i can pull that off now. Thats awesome.

[timtek]

I recently had a pine earring with an engraving of a pine earring on it.