I’ve hit some OSHA fun. I try to keep the architecture of my fort and anything nearby reasonably safe since all my dwarves in the past have been pretty cluelessly careless.
I noticed earlier that I had a possibly-dangerous spot at the edge of my map. A river comes down from the mountains at a high level and falls over a long waterfall into a deep gorge while to the side it cascades lightly into giant foamy sprays over the mountainside. It then flows down the gorge to eventually reach the valley floor where my fort entrance is located.
The issue is that the edge is too steep to cross the river upstream of the waterfall except right at the fall’s edge and the gorge is too deep to cross until well downstream. I figured my dwarves have no reason to go up there, so it could wait for a bridge or something when I was better set up.
After a few migrant waves entered elsewhere and I had ignored the waterfall, one wave finally entered over that mountainside. They and their animals proceeded to cross the top of the falls and fell 13 Z-levels to the bottom of the gorge into deep water, leaving them all injured and drowning. I attempted to tunnel stairs down to the bottom of the gorge to attempt to save them, but by the time my miners got through only a single donkey had lived, though it later died of its wounds.
I didn’t want to risk my dwarves gathering corpses from beneath the falls and so restricted the area. Next time I thought about it, two of the migrants were now running around the other side of the river a ways away as zombies. (I think it might have something to do with a necromancer who had arrived in the prior migrant wave.)
I decided the undead could stay on their hillside for now and focused on my own defenses and on some bridges around the top of the falls and some walls to block passage right at the edge. With that dealt with, I then ignored the problem again.
A human caravan was leaving the fort when I got the alert that the zombies were fighting and dying. Their warriors seemed to have it under control, so I left it alone.
Then just as the survivors were about to zone out, the caravan’s elephant died of its wounds and rose from its grave to murder the remaining merchant as he fled over one of my new safety bridges. I lucked out though and it seemed to leave the map on its own while I mustered defenses.
Now I just need to deal with the ghosts rising from their watery grave to haunt the fort. Need to re-prioritize the coffins and burial detail before anything actually gets bad (well, for the rest of us). I hope the next human caravan doesn’t steer clear of our site or attack us.
