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[Zack Weinberg]

Those annoying antmen crawl up from the chasm, and your traps / dogs / fighters kill them, and then you have to haul their corpses all the way out of the fortress (unless you want miasmas) and then you have to wait for them to decompose, and then you have to haul their bones back in to the craftsdwarf to make bolts out of.

The solution is corpse beetles (Dermestidae).  A corpse beetle colony is a workshop, runs off Butchery (or perhaps a new skill).    To build it you have to collect beetles from along the cave river (this happens automatically when you ask for construction).  The task is called "Clean Corpse"; it takes one inedible corpse and produces however many bones/shells that corpse would have produced plus one unit of compost.  Compost is just fertilizer.

Unlike most workshops, you can have multiple Clean Corpse jobs running at the same time, because the dwarf just has to dump the corpse into the colony and then come back later.  (There should be a limit, but it should be high, like 10.  Otherwise this doesn't do anything to prevent miasma / long hauls.)

If you don't give the colony any food for a year it dies and you have to re-seed it with beetles.

[Misterstone]

Failing this, it would at least be nice if you could tame some kind of corpse-eating critter (carnivorous giant dire hog?) and just chain it up in a corpse dump somewhere.  Of course, then it might eat useful corpses.

[Turgid Bolk]

Well, you can just build a refuse room that seals off the miasma. Put it right next to your craftsdwarves' workshop, and you got a nice bone supply right there.

But those beetles are really cool. They would just accelerate the process of decomposition if you put a bunch in your refuse stockpile. The compost would also be handy, like fertilizer. You could even add rotten plants to the compost. Oh, and of course left over chunks and skins from the butcher's.

[ October 13, 2007: Message edited by: Turgid Bolk ]

[caeono]

I think the rotten corpse -> compost idea is great. Just putting that out there.

[kuro_suna]

seems like a good idea as 80 rotting ratmen can lag the game up quite a bit.

[Faces of Mu]

I would like to see this idea in DF, and it doesn't seem dwarvish enough for me. Maybe for other races down the track (like a race of elves that use bones in some way, or hermit necromancers). Maybe even for a torture method used by goblins, or as a type of pit trap. Actually, installing such critters on the weapon traps might save having to clean them..!

[Cosmonot]

Why do you need beetles to make compost? Corpses rot all by themselves, you know.

[Karlito]

Yeah and how would beetles eating the corpse stop it from smelling bad?

[Tamren]

Well, presumably they consume it fast enough that it has no time to putrify.

Either way it will soon be crawling with maggots which will accelerate the process.

[Fieari]

I don't like the idea of this being a workshop.  Now, simply having the beetles exist, and having the ability to corral them, and then dump corpses there... that is appealing to me.

[Zargen]

The idea of having a hermit necromancer is what I think would be great  . Create undead, control them as you would normal dwarves. But they move horribly slow xD. And the higher your skill gets the better your undead making skillz are!

[Zulaf]

quote:Originally posted by Fieari:
<STRONG>I don't like the idea of this being a workshop.  Now, simply having the beetles exist, and having the ability to corral them, and then dump corpses there... that is appealing to me.</STRONG>

Agreed this sounds better then having a workshop.

quote:Originally posted by Zargen:
<STRONG>The idea of having a hermit necromancer is what I think would be great   . Create undead, control them as you would normal dwarves. But they move horribly slow xD. And the higher your skill gets the better your undead making skillz are!</STRONG>

=.) its like you know me!

[Lightning4]

That would be awesome. New game mode: Undead Ruin!

Plus, this means the undead in some ruins have been made by a necromancer, and that necromancer is still alive.

So if you die, your adventurer gets raised as a zombie, or a skeleton depending on stage of rot. And you get to send another adventurer to fight your first adventurer!