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[LilyInTheWater]

You should be able to embalm bodies in the game. Helps necromancers keep corpses around longer and also can be given one more thing to do. I'm also very interested in the act of embalming itself.

There are some ways they embalmed people! I'm drawing my suggestions primarily from this page, but embalming to me is fascinating. Apologies for the eurocentrism of my source--if people have suggestions about how other cultures embalmed their corpses that you think might be doable, I'd welcome them! I know this has come up a few times, but I've rarely if ever actually seen embalming methods discussed in detail telling from a search in the forums. I’ve taken it on myself to do some research to see how it can be incorporated into the game.

There are multiple ways to embalm, like evisceration where you take out the organs and pack the body with cloth and herbs. In terms of actual embalming herbs I would not bother, at least with the way the game it is now. Hunting down all those herbs feels like unnecessary work for the players (Plus most of them arent in the game, like mint) but the cloth is doable.

There’s excarnation but I don’t feel its something that would be useful in the game since it involves defleshing the bones and burying them. Then there’s immersion (less effective but easier to pull off in dwarf fortress) where they just put the corpse in a specific material like honey.

There's more than one way to embalm that's possible with existing dwarf fortress mats already, I believe. If it were possible, I’d make it so that the most of the following you did the longer the body would keep. (So it would make the rot timer in the code go back) Here are a few of my suggestions. (+ some misc ones)

Honey and Beeswax Immersion In Burial Receptacle
All you needed to do is to have a dwarf put honey in a burial receptacle at a workshop. (No idea which one--farmer's workshop? I feel like there doesn't have to be a separate workshop to do this) This is my primary suggestion (Next to one other that will come up) that I will suggest, because it is fairly easy to do and also gives players a reason to use the beekeeping industry.

It also allows you to prep a coffin ahead of time!

Honey has been used as a way to embalm corpses in ancient times. Alexander the Great was embalmed in a honey and beeswax mixture when he died, and honey has well-known antimicrobal properties. The people in the past might not have known what microbes are, but they knew honey kept the bad stuff away.

Boil the corpse in wine or alcohol[/b]
This would probably be the most dwarfy and easiest way of doing it.

Rock Salt Immersion
Packing a coffin with a block or boulder of rock salt!
For people who don't want to get a beekeeping industry set up or can’t (Gotta stay off the surface in evil biomes!) and still want to prep a coffin ahead of time.

Rock salt is underutilized in the game currently, and sometimes people packed salt in coffins instead of honey. Salt, while not as effective as honey, dehydrates stuff easily and that includes microbes.

Bury in Lead Coffin
Much like the above suggestions, would give players a reason to use something that isn't often used. When smelting galena you get more lead than silver, resulting in a bunch of lead bars you have no use for outside. They would put the dead in lead coffins before putting them in the outside coffins, which could be done in the game in case you want to appease nobles who want a fancy tomb.

Boiling in alcohol
Just like it says. Take five units of alcohol and boil the corpse. That’ll help newer players.

Misc Suggestions
Mummify organ/body part[/b]
Middle age nobles would mummify their organs as well, a holdover from the old days of egypt. French nobles would mummify their hearts. I think it would be a really cool scenario in adventure mode where you had to hunt down the mummified heart of a demon or cursed king that was stolen by a sorcerer. (Okay maybe that’s a huge reason I want this.) Or maybe you killed a particuarly nasty beast and you want a gristly trophy of your triumph on display. Doesn’t only have to apply to organs, could apply to stuff like the head of a forgotten beast one of your dwarves sliced clean off.

But seriously, a mummified heart or organ from a noble could be an artifact in of itself, depending on how important that person is. Or maybe your champion dies in battle so you decide to mummify their heart and put it on display. You’d do it by wrapping it in Cerecloth.

Make Cerecloth[/b]
Cerecloth is a cloth infused with beeswax and turpentine. Since dwarf fortress doesn’t have turpentine yet but beeswax I’d just have Cerecloth be made of cloth + beeswax. (Or maybe you can collect resin from trees to make turpentine at a still). You would wrap bodies and organs in it.

Grinding up Cinnabar Dust
There is evidence to suggest that cinnabar dust was used as a rudimentary embalming method by prehistoric peoples! You can grind up cinnabar blocks or boulders at a craftdwarf’s workshop and have the dwarves scatter them on corpses if nothing else.

Aqua Vitae
If players don’t want to devote precious alcohol at any time, they can make aqua vitae from alcohol (presumably made for this purpose) and have the dwarves use that to boil the corpses instead of precious drinking alcohol. You’d be able to use the detail menu to pick which alcohol you want to use. Aqua vitae was also used a lot in alchemy too, in case Tarn wants to still do stuff with it.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

Different cultures have different ways to bury the bodies. They can cremate them, throw in water, bury in soil, leave to wild animals, preserve as mummy or even just butcher and eat. Making totems from skulls of their eaten dead looks very goblinish, so they even can create memory halls filled with totems. When goblins kill enemies, they can make skull cups.

[Azerty]

Funerals should vary following culture and social class, and I agree some places would see nobles and priest be embalmed while other would bury them in tumuli.

[LilyInTheWater]

Different cultures have different ways to bury the bodies. They can cremate them, throw in water, bury in soil, leave to wild animals, preserve as mummy or even just butcher and eat. Making totems from skulls of their eaten dead looks very goblinish, so they even can create memory halls filled with totems. When goblins kill enemies, they can make skull cups.

I tried to make a reaction that would make skull cups but unfortunately it seems like the game is resistant against making mugs out of anything that's a skull weirdly enough without dfhack.

Funerals should vary following culture and social class, and I agree some places would see nobles and priest be embalmed while other would bury them in tumuli.

Oh this is a good point. Like Riaktor said above there's many different ways cultures can get rid of their dead aside from burial and preservation. You could have different burial methods defined by tags in the raws and stick them there, like forbidden materials, days a body is allowed to be exhumed, if there should be a mourning period or other activities. Nothing that would take up the player's time too much but it would be neat otherwise. It would give dwarves a negative thought if proper funerary rites weren't observed, and you could use tags in the raws to decide how they got rid of their dead and use them to customize the rituals or even randomize them!

[NW_Kohaku]

I've mentioned this before a lot in the past, but especially in a culture where they have faced necromancers raising the dead from the graveyards in the past, or especially in evil lands with roaming skeletons, the only sensible reaction would be to start cremating or otherwise destroying any body parts of the dead that might be risen.

(Also, for high-status dwarves like legendaries and nobles, what is a more dwarfy way to be interred into the earth than to have a burial chamber that is magma-flooded, then obsidianized?  Carve a statue and slab to the dwarf in question from the obsidian.)

The Egyptians went with embalming because they had an animist religion and they were in a desert where the dead could be mummified on accident just by being left in the desert sands.  They certainly influenced cultures that came later, but dualist religions like Christianity were open to cremation because a corpse is just a hunk of meat (although local cultural traditions would push many regions to favor burial).

Dwarf Fortress doesn't just have dualism in its religions, it's an actual property of the coding, magic partly depends upon it, and it's a known property to everyone in the world, so as soon as there's a practical reason to avoid leaving corpses that necromancers can send against the living, most cultures should naturally tend towards cremation as a practical safety measure.  (Europe buried its dead most of the time, but as soon as the plague rolled around, they were all about mass incineration of the dead because they're not going to let sentimentality stand in the way of saving their own skins.)

[IndigoFenix]

Dwarf Fortress doesn't just have dualism in its religions, it's an actual property of the coding, magic partly depends upon it, and it's a known property to everyone in the world, so as soon as there's a practical reason to avoid leaving corpses that necromancers can send against the living, most cultures should naturally tend towards cremation as a practical safety measure.  (Europe buried its dead most of the time, but as soon as the plague rolled around, they were all about mass incineration of the dead because they're not going to let sentimentality stand in the way of saving their own skins.)

Yeah, this is a bit of an oversight in the concept, isn't it?  It's one thing if necromancers are virtually unknown and mythical beings.  It's very different if they are all over the place.

However, I think that a lot of it has to do with the incomplete nature of the game.  We know that calling up ghosts will be a thing that necromancers can do, so the presence or absence of a body might not matter as much as it does now.

Ideally, burial rites should be used to protect people from whatever mischief the forces of evil can muster with the dead.  (Historically, burial rites were always very closely connected with a culture's beliefs about evil creatures that could come about due to improperly performed rites.)  This may tie into whatever magic exists in the world.

I think the most straightforward system for game balance purposes would be that a necromancer's ability to raise up the dead is directly connected to the potential for that creature to produce a ghost.  If a body has been buried or memorialized, the necromancer must physically disturb either the grave or the memorial before they can raise the corpse OR the ghost.  They shouldn't be able to animate the corpses in any grave they can see, as they do now.

[Azerty]

I've mentioned this before a lot in the past, but especially in a culture where they have faced necromancers raising the dead from the graveyards in the past, or especially in evil lands with roaming skeletons, the only sensible reaction would be to start cremating or otherwise destroying any body parts of the dead that might be risen.

In Warhammer, some Bretonnian duchies mandate cremation because of necromancy, and there's entire cults about preserving bodies from necromancy.

Another way, when ghosts will be better implemented, would be ancestor worship, or rituals designed to prevent spirits from being awoken by wizards. Of course, it would depend from how this world's metaphysics have been generated: in some places, the mind would die with the body.