I lost at dwarf fortress... interesting story

Well my dwarven fortress is coming to an end. After an unfortunate incident where a very well liked miner carved a hidey hole out in the wilderness and forgot to dig himself out, then starved to death, the miner’s best friend and legendary hammerdwarf who had already been having a bad day, went berserk, killed all of his trainees, killed their kids who had been watching the training, then went off and went on a killing spree attacking and killing a lot of other dwarves before walking into a spinning blade trap meant for enemies that cut him in half.

Well, that guy and some of the other guys he killed were all good friends with the chief crossbow instructor. So the combined grief of losing all those people sent him insane, so he shot all his trainees, all the prisoners they were guarding, and then went off on his own killing spree.

So now I’m watching my dwarves all go berserk one by one and get killed by each other or weapon traps and then their deaths make all their friends get progressively closer to insanity. No one is sane enough to clean up the bodies or take out the trash so there is miasma and rot and corpses littering the halls which doesn’t exactly help either.

My last somewhat sane dwarf just cracked a hole into a magma aquifer and was incinerated. Oh, and the mayor just went, who at the time was having a meeting with the representative of the dwarven capital which had, based on their impression of the fortress last year, decided to upgrade my fortress to barony status. Hopefully he doesnt kill that guy and have the capital march on my fortress for treason.

Fun.

Pics or it didn't happen.

bet it smells good

Heres a pic i took of the first floor during the chaos. Mulitcolored people looking sprites are dead bodies. everything red is blood.

How do you play this game?? I'm trying but it's impossible to figure out

Dwarf Fortress really comes down to three major buttons.
d for designate and b for build.
d-> d will allow you to use the arrow keys and the enter button to paint an area that your dwarves will mine out, for example. d-> t will mark an area for your dwarves to cut down all the trees. There are not too many designations, mostly they're used to make mining selections, staircases, and channels.
b->w->c will allow you to place a carpenter's workshop. b is used to build pretty much everything.
q is used to use the actual workshops and buildings that are made. If you hover q over the carpenter's workshop you built it will allow you to add things to be built from it, like beds and such. If you have logs lying around and a dwarf with the carpentry labor set he will go over and start making however many beds you set there to be.

Look for the "lazy newb pack". It includes the latest version of the game and helpful gui to edit different parts of the game before you start. You should turn off aquifers in the gui.
You should click install with the phoebus graphic pack highlighted.
Then click launch dwarf fortress from the gui.
To get started you should go on to fortress mode and find a site to embark on. Use the little search thingy to specify some stuff. You definitely want
- No aquifer
- River
- Flux stone

It will go through and put an x over all the spots that match that description. The three boxes to the left of the searchy stuff are the embark site you are selecting at different magnifications (leftmost is local, then region, then world). When you've got your selector over a site, make sure it has the flux stone, a river or at least some water, soil, no aquifer, and a good deal of trees (forested).

When you select that site to embark it will bring you to a screen that allows you to select what to bring with you. Just use the lazy newb preset that should be there.

The first thing you should do when you get to the actual game is to go esc -> key bindings and change the mappings for the secondary selector to something like alt+down and alt+up just to make it easier.

If you go back to the lazy newb gui, go to the utilities tab, and launch dwarftherapist, and then click in dwarftherepast the "connect to df button", it will show you all of your dwarves and the labors they have enabled.