Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Iamblichos]

So I have a fort that is surviving (and was thriving) in a Haunted reanimating biome.  A trash chute by the butcher shop leads to the lava sea, and butchering went easily as long as I paid attention to what was going on.  The last round (3 years in now), a giant axolotl head skin reanimated and it can't be killed. 

I know this bug has been logged before, but is there any solution that doesn't use DFHack?  I am in .42.06 and there is no DFHack yet for that 

[timotheos]

Lure it into a cage trap. Then either drop the cage into magma or set it up to use the head as target practice for your marksdwarves.
Other than that pouring magma on it should work, or caving in the floor above it, or atom smashing it, or any fire breathing creature.

[Iamblichos]

OK, I can try.  I have a giant boiling bar brawl around it, all the dwarves are trying to kill it, passing out, hungry, thirsty, you name it.  It can't hurt them directly, but they won't leave it alone because they're all in frenzy-mode.  Toady really needs to address that somehow... There should be a way to abort the fight once it's gone on long enough to determine no winning is possible.

[Saiko Kila]

Berserk works only for a while, and then you can switch them to schedule - inactive. They should change to civilian roles and run away. These who won't run are too aggressive for their own good, bad genes probably, so the best course of action would be eugenics.

[quekwoambojish]

Freezing, obsidian casting, drawbridge, cage trap, cave in. Most of those options will kill your own dwarves. I'm pretty sure fire just makes it on fire.

I honestly don't know why this hasn't been fixed yet. In particular, 'head skin' seems to be more of an issue than other types of skin due to it's mass/size.

[Sutremaine]

Is it the 'too small to hit' bug? Make giant axolotls bigger, and the separated part should become bigger too. You might have to wait a little while for the game to update the size.

[Iamblichos]

Yes, it is indeed 'head skin' that is the bug.  My military is all exhausted and passed out in a circle around it... the ordinary dwarves have jammed the doors to the room open (of course ) by dropping whatever they were carrying to run join in the scrum.  Since the doors are open, any dwarf coming to the food/drink stockpile sees the battle and either gets scared and runs away or runs to join in the head-skin-flailing fun (and there's a phrase that ought to be NSFW).

[kingsableye]

This is a problem (or training trick) I ran into in adventure mode frequently. I often visit necromancer towers to erradicate them and their books of knowledge, usually resulting with head skin if I start butchering before I kill all the necromancers. Undead used to be immune to fire damage and magma, but not so anymore. Fire is still ineffective, but mage will destroy them. And, as previously mentioned, you can atom smash them if you can catch them in a cage (the easiest way to deal with them).
I think you can stab them in their cheek until they deanimate, but I did that for 2 days in Adventure mode and it was still alive.
You might be able to edit the raws for that world and make the giant axolotl not have a mouth on its head so it can no longer grasp (and thus, no longer be animate). I could be wrong on this; probably better to just cage-trap magma the skin.

[milo christiansen]

For a quick and simple fix do what Sutremaine said, find the giant axolotl entry in the raws and set it's size to something large. That should make the skin big enough to allow it to be hit. Once dead (redead?) simply set the giant axolotl size back to what it was.

If that fails to work then all you can do is try to kill it with something other than dwarves (hopefully before all your dwarves die of hunger/thirst) or wait for DFHack.

[slashnul]

They used to make great training dummys.  Put some fresh recruits on it till they pass out, then evac them with a burrow/inactive.  Now the undead are so weak that they dont give combat experience.  You can still train with them but its worse than sparring.  So yeah... set up your butcher shop with at least one exit lined with cage traps and lockable doors on the others.  Prepare to evac your butchers.  And just atom smash the thing.  IIRC you dont get much xp from hitting it, but dodging and armors raises well... so if you want to get a collection of them and make a defensive danger room, it might still work.