40d:Stupid dwarf trick

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A stupid dwarf trick is any project that that requires a large amount time and effort, for little or no practical benefit. They exist only as a challenge for experienced players.

Monumental Statue

Difficulty: Depends on how big you want the statue to be.

Usefulness: None.

Artificial Waterfall

To keep the waterfall going, you need a pump stack, preferably powered by a windmill or water wheel.

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: Dwarves love waterfalls. Putting a waterfall in your meeting hall will give your dwarves good thoughts, although it can significantly lower framerate.

Execution Tower

Just a tall tower to chuck your captives to their deaths.

Difficulty: Easy.

Usefulness: Lets you dispose of prisoners, and claim expensive silk, meltable iron, and (eventually) useful bones.

Bridge-a-pult

A bridge that opens outwards, to fling enemies away. Ideally, they land in a very nasty place.

Difficulty: The hard part is the nasty place they get flung to.

Usefulness: There are a far more effective ways to defend a fortress, but few are as entertaining.

Dam

Build a wall across a riverbed to stop the flow of water. Floodgates optional.

Difficulty: On a map that freezes in the winter, this is easy. Otherwise, very difficult.

Usefulness: Dubious.

Tower-cap Farm

You absolutely need to break into an underground river or lake. Make some muddy floors over a big area and wait.

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: Yes, if it's big enough.

Magma Pumping

It's a lot like pumping water, only more dangerous, and requires the pumps to use magma-proof pipes and screws in their construction.

Difficulty: The difficult part is making all those iron or steel pumps and bauxite floodgates. Very high risk.

Usefulness: Magma is fun, but impractical.

Booze Bomb

If you set barrels of booze on fire they explode. Can possibly be used as a complex trap. About the only way to start a fire on demand is magma. Possibly caged fire imps, magma men, or fire snakes.

Difficulty: High.

Usefulness: There are many easier ways to kill goblins, but so very few that also set them on fire.

Greenhouse

A greenhouse is just a farm with the the ceiling channeled out from above. This lets you grow outdoor plants without venturing above ground. For the maximum style, build a glass roof to keep your farmers safe.

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Surface plants are not so much more useful than underground crops. Rope reed can be grown year round.

Gladiator Arena

Difficulty: Moderate, but time consuming.

Usefulness: The most difficult way to dispose of prisoners. It does give your soldiers a little bit of experience.

Self Destruct Lever

Difficulty: Very high. Extremely dangerous.

Usefulness: None. By definition.

Flood the World

Difficulty: High danger. Will kill your frame rate.

Usefulness: Will prevent any sieges, at least. Or anything else.

Ballista Battery

Overlap a few ballistas to completely cover a narrow corridor. There is an unavoidable risk of your operators wandering into the line of fire.

Difficulty: Low. If you insist on highly-trained operators with high-quality ballistas, it gets harder.

Usefulness: A complicated and dangerous way to defend a single corridor.

Swimming pool

It's a reservoir that fills to 4/7 exactly. Station soldiers inside, lock them in, and fill. This way they gain swimming skill.

Difficulty: Low. It's just a pair of reservoirs.

Usefulness: The swimming skill is only slightly useful. This is most useful if the entrance to your fort has narrow walkways/moats surrounded by water, and you station your soldiers there.

Ice tower

Difficulty: Low. You need to be on a freezing map to pull it off.

Usefulness: None.

Obsidian factory

You need one reservoir of water, and one of magma. Mix, cool and mine.

Difficulty: Medium.

Usefulness: High.

Drowning Chamber

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: You can kill prisoners, useless peasants, irate nobles, hammerers, untrainable animals, or anything else.

Magma Chamber

Difficulty: Dangerous as any magma project.

Usefulness: It's like a drowning chamber, but you can't recover most of the victim's stuff.

Labyrinth

Difficulty: It's a lot of mining. Having a bridge drop invaders inside is more difficult, but more useful.

Usefulness: It makes a nice element of fortress defense, and you can dump your prisoners inside it.

Adventure Mode Fortress

Difficulty: The sky's the limit.

Usefulness: Not applicable.

Vomitorium

It's like the greenhouse, only instead of a farm, it's meeting hall. Prevents cave adaption.

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Low.

Pit o' Doom

Combine with an Execution Tower for maximum z-level executions! Spike traps are a must.

Difficulty: Low. You want it nice and deep though.

Usefulness: Dispose of prisoners, execute nobles, gruesome fatal injuries, laugh maniacally.

Underground Perpetual Motion Power Plant

Combine with a use for the power and you either have an awesome setup, or a ticking time bomb.

Difficulty: High. Maintaining the correct water level is annoying difficult at times.

Usefulness: Depends on size of plant and what it's connected to. Also useful as a puzzle for adventurers.

Dwarfputer Complex

A big mess of fluid and/or machine logic full of hatches, floodgates, gears, pumps, etc. and powered by waterwheels, windmills, or useless idle dwarves. Hook it up to doors, bridges, and traps.

Difficulty: Medium to high, depending on what you want to build. You'll want to build for very high water flow if you have more than a few fluid gates.

Usefulness: Your mechanics and architects will level up very fast. Manual pumps give something for your haulers to do and makes them stronger. Try and make a clock to trigger different mechanisms in different seasons. See if enemies actually blunder into your intricate traps. Watch all hell break loose as water freezes.

Alarm Clock

Are your soldiers all sound asleep while blood soaks the walls? No need to deconstruct their beds one by one, if you bought the Dwarf Wakey 3000! Simply a solitary floor tile balanced on a support, one or more can be toppled with the pull of a lever to produce an earth-shaking racket that'll have them leaping for their axes!

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Low.

Hammer of Armok

A gigantic hammer made out of pure steel and/or valuables looming over your fortress entrance ready to smite those foolish enough to lay a siege on you. Also, gives you a psychological advantage over the traders who unload their goods under it. Attach to a lever-linked support for quicksmiting, or any other single-tile collapse mechanism. BONUS: Cover it with blood.

Difficulty: Low. Depends on size, materials and magma's existence, though. Make it a gold hammer menacing with adamantine spikes, if you're going for high quality.

Usefulness: Low-medium. 10x10 size is minimum for practical effectiveness. 30x30 hammer extending handles lenght from your entrance actually works against sieges.

Mega Water Drowning Trap-Thing

This is basically a channel above some pressurised water with a short tunnel leading to a door. The door needs to be connected to a lever somwhere in a safe part of the fortress. Position the door facing the main stairs into your fortress (for multiple stairs use multiple traps). When enemies come down the stairs, pull the lever and make them drown. (It helps to seal off the rooms).

Difficulty: Medium. Needs flowing water under pressure and levers.

Usefulness: Medium. Depends on the size of your fortress/defences/amount of attackers. Works well on fire demons.