Almost all my pets and some of my dwarves are starting to have issues with rot. It starts in their feet, and then spread up through their body. I have a few theories about why it might be happen, and I was wondering if you could provide feedback or help me with this serious plague.
First of all I recently broke into HFS and killed all the demons that spawned below the admantine pipe. I had my dwarves clean up the corpses and carry them up into the above ground cast obsidian tower that my dwarves are living in. So one theory that I have is that perhaps the demon's goo has some sort of rotting effect, since I started noticing this happening soon after the HFS. However, if that was the case wouldn't the rot also be on the dwarve's arms and hands?
My other theory is that perhaps the dwarves are rotting just from walking around in some much blood and filth. One stairway in my above ground tower is covered in blood, as if twenty or thirty stacked smears and smudges of demon goo, forgotten beast ichor, goblin, troll, hydra, giant, and dwarf blood. Since this staircase is above ground the dwarves refuse to clean it. I am thinking that perhaps just walking through the nasty cocktail of blood is causing the rot to start.
So my question is whether either of these theories seem more likely to you, and more importantly how can I clean up the blood above ground? Is there some option that I have missed which prevents the dwarves from using the cleaning skill to clean up blood above ground, even if it is inside my tower? Or is that a feature that will have to wait for a future version? Because if so then DF is broken for me because I like to build above ground mega constructions, and blood accumulates in them over time and seems to make my dwarves catch rotting infections.