Dwarf Fortress II: The Drowning Olympics of Thornlashed

Thornlashed started out like a decent fortress. Stockpiles were made, jewels were found, workshops were built, bedrooms assigned... things were going great! My dwarves all had their jobs and were ecstatic about the state of things. The surrounding animals were benign, there was plenty of water for fishing, and the caravans from afar brought strange and wonderful goods to trade with.

There was just one weird problem: the dwarves kept drinking at a river that would consistently kill them.

At first, it wasn't really a problem. They would go to drink and then be interrupted by a fish. Eventually, though, it got to the point where the fish would actually kill some of these dwarves. "Okay, fine," I say, "Come drink from this pool instead. This pool that contains no murderous fish."

One dwarf does, but I guess he decides he doesn't like the taste and tells all the other dwarves just how much it sucks. They go to the river in crowds, now.

Using some risky mining operations, I manage to build an underground river in the fortress. I tell them to drink from that, but only the fisherdwarves listen, and then only for fishing. This river is starting to be a problem. Not only are dwarves getting killed by Carp and Sea Lampreys, their dead bodies are falling into the river and filling it with blood. The dwarves down river get traumatized by the sight, naturally... but they keep drinking the blood, traumatizing water. Now unhealthy and traumatized, their mental health starts to go. A few go raving mad, running around the fortress babbling while others lock themselves in the workshops below, creating strange, esoteric jewelry worthy of any Lovecraftian lore.

I need to build a well. A well inside the fortress will solve all my problems.

I start diverting the underground river while I order my metalsmith to build the chains necessary for the well. "We need some coal for the metalsmith workshop!" he tells me. Right, okay, so I look around for a suitable location for my Wood Burner Furnace to make some coal. While I'm doing this, my metalsmith runs off to the river for a drink. He never returns.

This is where things start to really unravel. Immigrants arrive by the dozens, and at this point I don't have any architecture dwarves still alive. My only hope is my miner, digging away at the underground river, whom I can't seem to find at the mom--
Bim, miner, has cancelled drink: interrupted by Carp.
Bim, miner, has been struck down.
Fuckdamnit!

So now I'm stuck with an over-crowded fortress filled with insane dwarves who are literally running around muttering to themselves, with no way to save them from the river of doom. It's only a matter of time before the remainder starve to death.

One of the many engravings found on the walls of the now-abandoned Thornlashed.

Dwarf Fortress Adventures, I

Dwarf Fortress is a freeware game by Bay 12 Games. I kept hearing about it from various sources and was really curious to try it because each time, the stories I heard were amazing. The only things that kept me from trying it were that A) the learning curve is apparently extremely steep and B) I don't need another thing to suck up what little free time I have left.

So naturally, I tried it. You can find it here.

They are not wrong about the learning curve. My very, very first experience with Dwarf Fortress was basically just staring at the interface and occasionally pressing keys to see what would happen. It wasn't until my second game that things started happening, but at that point I'd read several wiki pages explaining the basics.

Here's a recap of that second game:

Our wagon came to a halt by a river and my seven dwarf settlers were ready for adventure.

"Okay, Craelin," I said to Craelin, a female dwarf who was occasionally immodest and handled stress poorly, "unload the wagon."

She didn't so much unload it as smash it apart, leaving its contents laying in the grass where swarms of flies and stray horses could get at it.

"Um, right. Okay. Thod," I said, turning my attention now to Thod, a dwarf who disliked immodesty and needed alcohol to get through a working day, "go to the riverside and, uh... smooth some stones?" (I had to limit their actions to what I could get them to do. It didn't need to make sense, shut up.)

Thod happily obliged, lauching himself at the nearby stones and smoothing them vigorously. Meanwhile, I still had six idle dwarves just waiting around. After fighting with the interface some more, I figured out how to get them to start cutting wood. "Great! Craelin, you other guys, start chopping down all those trees. Take the lumber and make a stockpile right over there."

The industrious little dwarves happily set themselves to it, chopping down trees, making piles of lumber and smiling all the while. Yes, I thought, these dwarves have a good future ahead of them.

Then I happened to notice an awful lot of blood running downstream from where I had sent Thod.

System message: Thod has drowned.

Goddamn it.