40d:Losing

Losing is fun!

Either way, it keeps you busy.

There is no internal end point or single goal or final Easter egg or "You Win!" announcement in Dwarf Fortress. Therefore, eventually, almost every fortress will fall. The only ones that don't tend to be very conservative and very boring - and what fun is that? Therefore, fun = losing, losing = fun, DF = losing = fun, and that's okay! It's a game philosophy, so embrace it, own it, and have fun with it!

Most new players will lose their first few forts earlier than later; if when you lose a fortress, don't feel like you don't understand the game. Dwarf Fortress has a steep learning curve, and part of the process (and fun!) is discovering things for yourself. However, this Wiki serves as an excellent place to speed up the learning process.

If you lose, you can always reclaim fortress or go visit it in adventurer mode.

If you're looking for more ways to die horribly test yourself, try either the Mega Constructions, or the Challenges pages.

Autopsy

Various common things can cause you to lose a fortress.

Losing your miners

If your miners are killed in a collapse and their equipment destroyed, chances are good that you will no longer be able to continue your efforts. Consider abandoning your fortress. Alternatively, you can try to keep your fortress running long enough to request additional picks from your Outpost Liaison, who will arrive with the next dwarven trade caravan. It will take another year before they will return.
Also consider the tedious but fun option of making buildings outside! If your woodcutters with axes are still available, then you can build structures of wood. This is not recommended for very new players though, as it is intensely resource-demanding and takes a lot of managing to get right. (Also not recommended if you don't understand the z-axis system yet.)

Also known as Diggor Mortis. Diggor Mortis: Defined as when a Dorf with a pickaxe decides that digging up into Fun causing material (Water/Magma/once supported rock) is a good bloody idea.

Averting this fate is simple: Stockpile additional picks at the first possible opportunity.

Starvation

A serious danger, generally in the more inhospitable climates, is the loss of your dwarves due to starvation; if you are in the heart of a mountain with no soil to build on, it is possible you will not be able to establish farms. As dwarves begin to starve, they will become Hungry, then Starving. This will cause them to become very angry. When they die, their friends will become upset and will become even angrier, potentially causing the remainder of your fortress to break out in a terminal brawl.

Don't forget your alternative sources of food. Try butchering your animals, gathering plants, or resorting to hunting of local wildlife.

No water

This can be one of the biggest problems with a fortress that has no brook, river, or other source of fresh water. Any available standing water must be rapidly gathered from stagnant pools and stored into an indoor basin or water tower, with sufficient depth before it evaporates. If this fails, all of the water on the map can quickly evaporate and your dwarves will be left without any water.

Healthy dwarves will not die of thirst as long as they have alcohol, which in the current version can be brewed without the use of water. However, injured dwarves must be given water, not alcohol, or they will die of dehydration.

In the current version^{v0.28.181.40d} rain will refill stagnant pools of water slowly. In a hot climate, this may evaporate almost immediately. What's more, if the map is in a dry climate, such as a desert (hot or cold), then there can be long periods of time with no water anywhere - in extreme cases, none ever. Snow will not refill pools, so you can also have a lack of water in very cold climates. Also, if weather has been turned off in the init.txt file then there will be no rain and no water will accumulate, though it may be there at the beginning of the game.

Flooding accidents

The opposite side of the dehydration spectrum is having too much water. Remember that water can flow in 10 directions (the 8 horizontal ones as well as up and down, to the level of its source.)

If your fortress is beginning to flood from sourced water, abandon all of the levels the water can reach immediately—drafting dwarves into the military and stationing them onto the surface if need be. You will never be able to recover those areas unless you can manage to pump out the water faster than it floods in, which can take over a year or two of game time to establish a functioning automated pump system. Generally, a flooding accident spells doom for your fortress.

Sometimes a fortress is flooded with magma. This is even more fun, and even harder to recover from. Most doors will stop magma, it doesn't rise as aggressively (via pressure) as water, and magma can be pumped out with the right equipment. Read up on it. Good luck.

Ambush

The goblins first come with about half a dozen soldiers, then a dozen. Then they come again with about two dozen. Occasionally, they are accompanied by trolls. Since they arrive stealthy it may already be too late when you detect them. Soon enough your traps are all sprung, and your dwarves are dead. If not, the sieges will start. Without some sort of defenses, such as a moat or traps, a horde of goblins on your doorstep can be deadly.

See Also:

• Defense guide
• Defense design
• Trap design
• Military design

War

The goblins may not be your only enemy; remember that time you "accidentally" pulled the lever and flung that poor elf trader into the sky? Well turns out they got pretty annoyed, prepare for an elven war! It may only take a simple accident (like killing a preachy hippy elf) to start a war you can't possibly win. War is especially difficult to overcome when your fort is taking its first steps, but it is easy to prevent unless you really hate elves. The usual goblin skirmishes and sieges do not even count as war - a proper war will be signaled on the embark screen and will be denoted in-game on the civilization screen. (NOTE: You cannot be at war with your own race, so no epic dwarf showdowns.)

Wildlife

Goblins aren't the only creatures that want you dead. Be it unicorns, hippos, undead elephants or a giant cave spider, a sudden wildlife attack can quickly cripple or destroy an unprepared fortress.

Volcanic Death

Volcanoes do not erupt in the current version, but are planned to do so at some point in the future (see Toady's response on the plans for Volcanoes here.) If magma pours from a volcano on your map, it is a bug and should be reported as such (though bugs are their own category of Fun.)

It is still possible to die from magma without bugs if you're trying to pull a Boatmurdered (i.e. flood the world with magma) or if you just want to roast those sieges sitting at your front door.

General Unhappiness

Think it's no big deal to leave your dwarves with a mediocre dining room, living room, and a generally inadequate fortress?

If there is little in a fortress to give your dwarves happy thoughts and enough to give them unhappy thoughts, then your dwarves will start to throw tantrums, go melancholy, and cause general chaos. In extreme examples, this can lead to a tantrum spiral and destroy your civilization. Unhappiness is more likely to occur if your fortress is suffering other kinds of downfall, so try to keep all the bases covered.

Siege

Sieges can be quite devastating to a fortress, but unlike most of the other ways of losing they are unlikely to occur early on, even if you do something stupid to piss off another civilization. Goblin sieges, for example, will only occur if you have 80 or more dwarves.

Should hosts of goblins besiege your gates and drive your peasantry inside, trolls beat down your doors and force you to seal off from the outside world, you may have already lost the game. Even if you have built an utterly impenetrable fortress with drawbridges and moats, siegers may stick around for a long time. Although a dwarven fortress can be made self-contained, with crops, metal and fuel readily available, underground wood source and your own livestock, a fortress may not sustain such a state indefinitely. For example, trade with the outside world has now been shut off, leaving you only what ores are on your map for the production of mandate goods. In the (very) long run even those will run out. This can result in a breakdown of social order if you do not prevent your Hammerer from killing or maiming your dwarves. Shell, bone, and leather commonly acquired by hunting and fishing need to be supplied by previously established livestock, an underground river and a sealed off channel from a murky pool or river. If these resources are no longer available to your workers, moody craftsdwarves will be driven into suicide or worse. Rotten vermin corpses begin to heap in your food supply, forcing you to dump these into inside refuse piles, generating miasma. One small miscalculation of your fuel reserves may leave you without coke to refine further coal, and without a supply of timber for your wood burning furnace this can end your vital weapons and armor production for a future counterattack. Unless an interior watersupply was established your wounded will die of dehydration.

With all these critical industries unproductive, dwarves dying, and friends mourning over the rotting heaps of slain loved ones, it's important to remember your dwarves have nothing to do but throw funeral receptions, grief counseling sessions, and the occasional keg stand. This means they've all become one big happy family of friends, manically depressed from the loss of any dwarf.

In short, the attacking army can simply wait until your dwarves emo themselves to death.