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[Thiickshake]

So i started out this nice fortress on a nice cliff with the promise of an aquifer BUT NO the embark screen lied and no matter how hard i looked i could not find it, and because of the shortage of water i could not irrigate and as such could not grow crops to make my BOOZE!!, so i devised a plan, a cunning plan.

it was the travel down into the caverns and completly relocate my 25 dwarves there homes and all the goods, this was harder then expected due to the abundance of fun things, but so far so good.

My question is whats the best plan you've come up with for a unforeseen situation?

[Urist Imiknorris]

In my latest 40d fort, I found a serene forest with limestone bordering a haunted mountain range with brook and magma. I have a legendary weaponsmith, trained by making iron battle axes.

Problem: Gobbo ambush decloaked in my dining room
Solution: Every single dwarf had mining or woodcutting enabled. Mass draft. Clean up the blood.

[LordSlowpoke]

In my latest 40d fort, I found a serene forest with limestone bordering a haunted mountain range with brook and magma. I have a legendary weaponsmith, trained by making iron battle axes.

Problem: Gobbo ambush decloaked in my dining room
Solution: Every single dwarf had mining or woodcutting enabled. Mass draft. Clean up the blood.

...Use the iron battle axes in weapon traps, maybe?
Automation over dwarfpower, as said by Urist McTzu.

[Kuraudo]

Problem: Gobbo ambush decloaked in my dining room
Solution: Every single dwarf had mining or woodcutting enabled. Mass draft. Clean up the blood.

OH MAN, that is insanely epic.  I demand fluff pieces be written about situations like this post haste.

The most challenging situation I've had to deal with was rather mundane, but fun to work through:

I created a massive pump system in order to supply water to all points of my fortress with, what I believed, was an ingenious plumbing system.  When I finally laid down all the pressure plates, levers, floodgates, grates, and constructed floors, I turned the system on.

As you might imagine, there were problems.

Predictably, I ended up flooding my fortress before I realized there was a problem.  Before I could turn the switch off, the, in hindsight, poorly placed control room became completely submerged (Protip: never put the majority of the pumping equipment in the control room, no matter how cool it sounds).

So, instead of abandoning the fortress, I gathered all the survivors outside and lived in wooden shacks and impromptu holes in the ground while I started the arduous task of pumping out the water (difficult given how much water was being pumped *in*).

Finally, having accomplished this, I sealed the flaws in my system and re-engaged.

Everything was working fine until the giant Snail Titan showed up and smashed one of my critical floodgates for my tower-cap farm.

I love this game.

[Shiv]

Everything was working fine until the giant Snail Titan showed up and smashed one of my critical floodgates for my tower-cap farm.

Had a flood trap in my main entrance.  Then some goblins came and their crawler destroyed the gate.  Unfortunately, I never cut it off at the source (the river) so...yah.  Luckily there was a huge chamber in between the entrance and the actual part where my base was, so I just sealed it up real quick and build another entrance next to my new waterfall that was streaming down the mountain.   Later went on to channel a stream bed for the new river and we lived happily ever after.

Lesson learned: build fortifications with the flood gates behind them.

[monk12]

In my latest 40d fort, I found a serene forest with limestone bordering a haunted mountain range with brook and magma. I have a legendary weaponsmith, trained by making iron battle axes.

Problem: Gobbo ambush decloaked in my dining room
Solution: Every single dwarf had mining or woodcutting enabled. Mass draft. Clean up the blood.

That's my default backup plan every time.

Last 40d fort, I had a nice thing goin. Walls, corridors of traps, fortifications to fire down from, moats, the works. Ambush after ambush, siege after siege broken on my walls.

One year, a large siege came, and every squad scrambled to their stations. And waited. And waited.

Turns out I had dug out a bit of the wall several layers lower on the mountain, and the wall I had designated to block it off had been suspended when I wasn't looking. And now several squads of Champion lead goblins were in my catacombs, spreading through the 1 tile wide exploratory shafts on their way to the creamy filling of my fortress.

Solution? Send the single squad of melee fighters down to hold them off while the entire population of some 90 civilian dwarves raided the weapon stockpile for whatever was there. There was much blood.

Doesn't work as well in 2010, what with wrestlers being useless and training buggy as hell. But hey, more FUN for all!

[Thelogman]

Problem: Goblin Invasion comes while I am in the middle of preparing for a goblin invasion. All but two of my Dwarves die.

Solution: Seal off the Miner and Mason and a Pick in the second Cavern, which had a lake. Survive there on gathering cave wheat and making biscuits until 3 months later, when the goblins had all impaled themselves on traps I had installed at the last minute and the rest got cleaned up by caravans.

[Marconius]

I'm playing in a freezing biome. A forgotten beast came and decided to slaughter an Elf merchant and his mule who was swimming in an underground lake for... some reason... I have no idea.

Anyway, the beast succeeded, then decided to make camp there... now it's chilling in the middle of the lake.

So, the plan was! Channel a shaft down from the freezing surface and open it up directly above the beast. This will cause the water the beast is standing in to freeze instantly, encasing it in ice!

Unfortunately I screwed up and opened the bottom of the shaft first, so now whenever my miners try to dig out the rest of the channels, they see the beast waaaay down below, get scared and stop working... cowards!

Current plan is to get the beast to move somehow... how? Probably gonna have my military stand on the edge of the lake and ask them to taunt the thing loudly.

[carebear]

I'm playing in a freezing biome. A forgotten beast came and decided to slaughter an Elf merchant and his mule who was swimming in an underground lake for... some reason... I have no idea.

Anyway, the beast succeeded, then decided to make camp there... now it's chilling in the middle of the lake.

So, the plan was! Channel a shaft down from the freezing surface and open it up directly above the beast. This will cause the water the beast is standing in to freeze instantly, encasing it in ice!

Unfortunately I screwed up and opened the bottom of the shaft first, so now whenever my miners try to dig out the rest of the channels, they see the beast waaaay down below, get scared and stop working... cowards!

Current plan is to get the beast to move somehow... how? Probably gonna have my military stand on the edge of the lake and ask them to taunt the thing loudly.

Freezing a forgotten beast... Awesome!

[Ubiq]

Unfortunately I screwed up and opened the bottom of the shaft first, so now whenever my miners try to dig out the rest of the channels, they see the beast waaaay down below, get scared and stop working... cowards!

How much of the shaft is yet to be dug? Couldn't you cancel the bottommost designations and have them do the rest first? At a guess, they're trying to walk past the bottom channel to carve out another section and happen to look down. You could get around this by carving tunnels around the area to be channelled and micromanaging the rest of the work so that they won't pass the open area.

That and you could wall them off down there so that they won't have far to run when they panic. So you'll get a bunch of job cancellations whenever a new channel is dug out, but they'll be close enough to send them right back to work.

It's tedious, but it's a better way of guaranteeing a Forgotten Beastsicle as the more likely result of sending down dwarves is that it'll leave the lake and it might not go back.

[Untelligent]

Back in 40d, I made a fountain at the bottom of my tower. Unfortunately, water pressure didn't work QUITE the way I expected it to, and it ended up filling up to exactly one level higher than I planned when the cistern was opened.

Fortunately, I had been grappling with the problem of how to move my farms to the tower, which had no soil. Whoop, now there's mud all over the floor, right next to the kitchens. Nevermind.