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[Salkryn]

While I do my best to ensure my fortresses have an abundance of coffins for both my citizens and their pets, I've noted that my dorfs have a tendency to develop HUGE amounts of stress when dumping the remains of goblin sieges and the like into the refuse stockpiles, getting a "Urist felt horrified at watching a goblin die" for each individual decaying body part in the entire stockpile and their stress levels skyrocketing beyond the level of my legendary dining halls and wide variety of lavish meals and excellent booze to counteract. I've tried blinging out the fortress with hundreds of gold and platinum statues and engravings on every wall, but the damn corpses, no matter how decayed still trigger horror in my haulers and gradually stress them to the breaking point. Is there any way short of atom-smashing the bodies or a similar exploit to prevent this? I tried building walls around the stockpile so only people who were actually going in had any contact with it, but only had limited success.

[Pirate Santa]

Place your refuse pile at the bottom of a deep pit, and have dwarves dump things in from the top, this has the added benefit of also protecting you from reanimation.
If you don't want the stuff back put magma at the bottom.

[utunnels]

Also hire a couple of refuse haulers, maybe those who have lowest stress points.
Because they need to actually 'see' the corpse before carrying them to the pit.

I don't know if they can 'see' corpses inside a pit, but they can certainly be interrupted by enemies tens of z levels above/below them, as if z doesn't matter.

[PatrikLundell]

As mentioned, each time a dwarf sees the remains of each individual "sentient" their "see death" stress is refreshed, and that adds to the stress level periodically, probably once per season. Thus, dead "sentients" should be separated from other "refuse" (bones, wool, hide, teeth, etc), and be kept out of view of the dwarves.
Magma will remove the bodies completely (but beware of FBs made out of salt: they contaminate the magma resulting in magma mist when dumping into the magma for quite some time). A pit will probably hide the bodies from view if deep enough.
There are two ways of moving the bodies to their destination:
- Dumping on the rim of a pit, which causes the bodies to drop into it. Carries the risk of the hauler seeing the bodies at the bottom, and also of slipping and falling down (not good if the pit has magma in it!).
- A "sentient" refuse QS design where only select "sentient" bodies are hauled serving as a link for a QS that dumps into the hole. If the stockpile is on one side of the mine cart and the hole on the other dorfs should never have to see what's down there. The regular refuse stockpile should obviously be set up to mirror the "sentient" one, i.e. the species added to the sentient refuse pile should be removed from the regular one. A pain to set up because there are so many species. I add sentients as I encounter them, rather than trying to set the system up for all the species that exist.
- You should also be able to combine dumping and QS by dumping on top of a links only refuse stockpile that feeds the QS, and then unforbid the bodies after dumping. Saves on the setup effort, but paid for by manual dumping and unforbidding.

[lysaght]

I dump all my refuse into the volcano.

Machinecat is stress-free atm

[Rogue Yun]

Minecarts are EXTREMELY handy for dealing with corpses and refuse. There are a dozen ways to do this... this is just one messy way that I would mishandle it.

Code: [Select]

"=" = Small refuse/corpse stockpile
"#" = Wall
"X" = Destination whether it be a pit, volcano, magma, quantum stockpile, you name it.
"S" = Minecart Stop + Minecart
"." = Empty tile
"H" = Maintenance hatch (for pit access if necissary) Make sure to lock it.

#####
#X#H#
#S#.###
##====#
##====#
#.#####
#.#####
 ^
Just below the killing fields.

To be less exploity, you may use doors and add some track and another track stop. I find diagonal paths/corners block miasma way better than doors do however.

If you used a pit make sure you have a refuse/corpse stockpile at the bottom. It will help with decay and prevent idiots from running down there to get their heard smashed by dead vermin. A note from my experience, corpses and remains seem to deteriorate at a more rapid rate stacked onto each other than they do separate. Someone else might be able to verify this.

After digging our area and building a minercart stop that dumps in the direction we want...

1.) Hit h and place the cursor over the constructed stop.
2.) r-s-v, select a minecart and hit enter twice
3.) hit x three times to clear out the old conditions
4.) place the cursor over the stockpile and hit s.
5.) Hit enter and select the same configuration as the custom corpse/refuse stockpile.
6.) Hit esc three times to get the heck out of there.

And there you go. A fully automated waste removal system.

A working example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Bakaridjan]

I'm pretty new to DF and trying to figure out some of these dynamics. I have an otherwise amazing fort which is about to melt down due to dead sentient stress issues. It strikes me that my dwarves are more like elves than the wicked mischievous creatures they're made out to be on the forums. I just finished off a large goblin siege by releasing two forgotten beasts on it and impaling any survivors on upright spikes. It was very satisfying, but I don't dare let my dwarves go clean the mess up (not to mention it's a bit of a toxic waste dump with extracts of two FBs everywhere). My question though is why would this event not create positive feelings in my dwarves? Two of your greatest foes just destroyed each other while you sat in the fort drinking booze.  If you see the results of it all, however, you'll get so depressed that you'll start killing other dwarves. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[PatrikLundell]

Dorfs sometimes have a depressing similarity to RL humans...
The most wicked DF creature is usually the player...

I assume you have confirmed that the FB fluids are dangerous. That can be dealt with using a "dwarven foot bath", i.e. a channeled out section with water 2/7 deep (I think 3/7 work as well, while deeper will get your dorfs to refuse to go through it. 1/7 depth will evaporate). The contaminants will be scrubbed off in the water. The foot baths should be placed at your entrances. The dorfs should be safe provided they have footwear and handwear, but if your fortress is having problems with the clothing production they may be in trouble. There isn't much to do about them walking around bare footed when in the process of changing clothes, though.

My main tool for checking the dorf stress level at a glance in the DFHack plugin that enhances the unit screen (included in the Lazy Newb Pack). Unless they start to get stressed out, removal of the cause of stress will get the stress to gradually decrease (helped by positive thought inducing things, like nice bedrooms, etc).

It sounds odd that your fortress spirals down into madness due to a single siege/massacre, as it usually requires a fair bit to push them over the brink (one or two of them might have brittle minds, of course). If you have serious problems, turtling until the stress levels decrease could be used as an emergency measure to shore up the situation, while you concentrate the fortress on stress reduction. After a couple of years you could probably open for (caravan) business again, and start to carefully get rid of the corpses, although that can be done earlier if you can make a careful selection of corpse haulers.

[Bakaridjan]

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't sure about the foot baths. Some people seemed to say that they just wash them off of one dwarf but then the next dwarf through just picks them up again unless you've somehow got the water flowing, which would be easily possible and probably worthwhile in this fort.

It's not that this one siege will cause them to crack it's that there has been a lot of stress on them already and the 100 odd goblins on my door step will probably be too much for many of them. I was actually keeping my dwarves cooped up before this and stress was coming down. Maybe I should just make another caravan gate and leave everything to rot at my front door. I know that no caravan will walk past that mess without auto-destructing.

It just seems to me that somehow killing forgotten beasts and ending a siege should give your fortress a healthy moral boost. Maybe I'm heartless, but why would seeing your sworn enemies crushed at your gates lead to so many negative thoughts in the first place? Are we dwarves or bleeding-hearted elves?

[PatrikLundell]

Having separate main and trade gates is useful for other reasons as well. The way I do it is to have cage traps at both and open and close them to let siegers file in a few at a time before I send them to the other gate. Meanwhile, my dorfs carry the cages away and reload the traps. It also has the bonus effect that there aren't too many bodies lying around (when the captives have been stripped, I pit them into magma for disposal).

Releasing FBs on siegers carry the risk of the FB winning, and then you'll have to deal with it again.

I agree seeing your enemies crushed ought to cheer the dorfs up, but then being under siege should bring them down... Also, they didn't actually crush the enemy, they just defeated another wave of them, and there's usually plenty left where they came from...

If you want carnage, you might try to desinsitize your dwarves. I think the current thoughts are that high discipline will eventually get dorfs not to care about death (and before that they handle the stress of seeing the corpses better, so they can at least haul them away without freaking out). Thus, sending them all through militia training (except the miners, hunters, and wood cutters, unless you rotate their jobs because of the uniform issue) might help.