Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TauQuebb]

Seeing a really cool fortress once, with a magma moat from the edge of the map all the way around, with one section left free so all sieges and bad guys turn up there and thinking,'I have to do that'.

So set about a nice spot with a magma pipe and work on the deep pumping system to draw it up, two pumps to each level, masses of wooden axles to work the lot. Then i turn it on and grin, all the pumps start up.

A second or two later, where is the magma? its not coming out the top? check the magma pipe, its going down, so where is it going?.

Turns out I had placed one pump the wrong way around, the magma had leaked back half way up, melting mechanisms and burning up a tone of axles...on a low wood map and all

[SquirrelWizard]

This has probably happened to everyone at least once, but as i was digging down to make my multistory entrance hall,
both miners at the exact same time, stood on the supports and dug out around themselves.

Actually thats fairly easy to fix, just have the miners dig out the rock under them (I assume you are channeling) and on the lower level, order them to convert one of the soon to be channeled out walls as a ramp, and voila miners are back with the general populace.

Face palm moment of mine.

I spend hours meticulously designing a pump system for my constructed volcano. Everything is perfectly in place so I throw the switch to see how it works, and the pumps dont work. Why? Because the power access to the bottom pumps was blocked by a floor. I remove the floor, and the pumps collapse... So I had to spend even more time (albeit not as long as the first time around), redesigning my power structure to work the pumps.

[Quietust]

There's a nifty trick for preventing that - build a supported axle or gear assembly next to one of the higher-up pumps and none of them will collapse.

Of course, I discovered this one the hard way, though thankfully it only resulted in a few tiles of mud (a 4-tall pump stack for a waterfall room).

[SquirrelWizard]

yeah I did that one one of them and it worked, buttt...

when I dug out the floor where the power was supposed to transfer, the stacks stayed up, so I thought to myself, "huh... guess it works." couple of minutes later the stack collapsed, the one stack I attached the gear to to keep it up, I said screw it and let it collapse as I was gonna have to redo the entire thing to begin with.

[geoduck]

My latest- finally learning that you can "stack" repeated orders in workshops.

[carebear]

My latest: Learning that you can  not just use / and * but also 9 and 3 to scroll faster through several menus. Previously I was scrolling through long lists of units and through the trading screen one line at a time!

[Innominate]

The humans have been besieging my fortress for so long that their horse mounts have given birth. I now have hostile horse foals running around outside.

[Heliman]

Oh god, I never thought I'd be able to laugh again before that

[KenboCalrissian]

v.

Really.  For a long time, every time I wanted to check a unit's wounds/jobs/status, I hit k, found the dwarf in question, read the name, hit u, searched my LONG list of units for that name, hit c.  I didn't catch on that there was an easier way until I watched a couple of DF movies and went "Wait a second... how did they get to that directly from the main menu?!"

Other than that, I almost drowned all of my dwarves hanging out at the meeting zone/well in the main entrance of my fortress with an artificial waterfall accident.  For my first attempt, I followed the Wiki's directions for building a pump tower and made the mistake of trusting this line:

Even without walls surrounding the pumps, water still gets up with only minor leakage.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.  Or at least, what it seems to suggest is wrong.  I didn't completely wall in the pumps thinking everything would be cool, but I ended up creating a tower of misty death spewing water in every direction at an alarming rate.  One of my hunters was immediately swept away into the makeshift river.  Fortunately, I had thought to tie my gear assembly to a lever, so I was able to kill it and save my fortress.

[azaydius]

So I had this dragon get captured in a cage.  I thought, "Sweet! I'll have my Dungeon Master tame him and it will be the most badass pet ever!"  After he had been tamed and was set loose to guard my fortress he found a Kobold thief sneaking about in my main hallway.  The dragon was more than willing to help with this matter.

Unfortunately, dragons happen to breathe fire.  Fire happens to not care what it hits and the giant cone of fire death breath my dragon put forth to kill this kobold did its job admirably.  The kobold died a horrible death... along with about ten dwarves who were in the path of the blast.  Additionally the blast set fire to EVERYTHING flammable, which was the majority of all my food, items, drinks and shops.  The ensuing blaze and smoke from it effectively rendered that level of my fortress uninhabitable.  To top it off, the pathways to the rest of my fort were through this inferno of death.  Dwarves don't seem to know that smoke and fire are bad for them so very quickly pretty much every dwarf in my fort was dead or dying.  Lots of FUN, but also FML.

[Flaede]

I made a ridiculously complicated ice fortress on a glacier. Engravings everywhere, giant architectural marvels and crazy aquifer management schemes. It was all designed from the get-go as a fort to be visited in adventure mode.

...where it promptly melted.

[gerkinzola]

Spending literally 6 hours making a 29z level pumping system and aqueduct system to move water across a 6 by 6 map only to discover an underground river right BELOW my moat

[KenboCalrissian]

Oh god, I never thought I'd be able to laugh again before that

Urist McMiner has died of thirst!

[denito]

WRONG WRONG WRONG.  Or at least, what it seems to suggest is wrong.  I didn't completely wall in the pumps thinking everything would be cool, but I ended up creating a tower of misty death spewing water in every direction at an alarming rate.

Tower of misty death?  SWEEET!  That will go perfectly with my new fort.  I must build one.

[Canadark]

...my first time fooling around with moving water to higher z-levels. I built a windmill on top of a pump by a brook, I came back a minute later to see a few of my carpenter dwarfs holding on for dear life while the ones standing at the higher z level were yelling over the torrent of water, "turn it off! turn it back off!".