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[Jacko13]

Just lost a five year old fort to zombie parts cancellation spam. I decided to have a serious effort at surviving terrifiying biome and al went mostly well the first five years.  A decent military trained up with a couple of (two dorf) squads at legendary. Metal industry had everybody armoured up. Hospital set up and stocked. First couple of ambush and first siege no problem.  Found a lava pipe and dug dump pit into it.  Nice and easy disposal of the dead bits. Population hits the 150 cap and all is well.

Siege no 2 arrives inside the fortress!?!?!?  No problem, my highly skilled, well equipped military sorted them out pronto.  Station squads at key areas to keep the dead under control.  Cancelled all jobs except dumping dead bits. Dead bits marked for dumping.  Off you go everybody...

My 80+ dead bit haulers hauled nothing. All ran round in circles avoiding the dead hair and dead fingers and dead skin that was left over from my military dwarves chopping lots of gobs and their mounts into small pieces.  Try as I might I could not persuade anybody to haul the dead bits.  The cage traps at key intersections soon overwhelmed and chaos ensued.  Eventually they started to starve cos they were too busy running around in circles not doing anything. Fort abandoned.

Any suggestions on how to avoid this fate on my next fort? (Other than avoiding siege spawning inside my fort which just seemed a little random.)

[i2amroy]

When something similar happens just draft a few dwarves and get them some weapons. Hair and skin aren't really that dangerous, but they can move around to make sure that everything stays dead long enough for your haulers to dispose of everything. I think really what happened here is that you got lucky with your first disposal, it's not that uncommon for dead things that haulers are carrying to reanimate and freak out the haulers, at which point a military dwarf can just run over and smash it flat again so the hauler can come back.

[xaldin]

Interior defenses are critical I've found over the years. Think about the doors on subs to seal compartments. Same idea. Build a ton of those and have ability to isolate off any section of the fort from the rest of it. Bonus points for a 'cleaning' solution to purge the compromised area. The more granular you make it the less you stand to lose at any given point.

That said, the civies are really hard to convince that they really don't have to fear hair. I've given up on that aspect and just work on isolation and localized cleansing solutions. It sometimes means sacrificing something that was nice but better to lose some gold statues or similar than to lose the fort.

[GreatWyrmGold]

When dealing with zeds, station orders are your friend.