hmmmm, no, i guess it needs to be liquid to impart syndromes.. ohwell.. I just want a bit more control over who has my awesome spells... I guess CE_DISPLAY_NAME will have to do
More accurately, it needs to be
fluid — the standard hack is a reaction that creates a BOULDER whose boiling point causes it to promptly gas the dwarf who did the job, imparting the spell via inhalation syndrome. This does "miss" sometimes, however, and can affect
innocent bystanders.
What is the exact difference between a semimegabeast and a megabeast ? I cant find any infos on that.
My guess is semis spawn like wild animals(instead of using the funky unique spawn system and being tracked by things like Percentage Beasts Dead For Stoppage), but they still attack like a full mega. It is, however, a pretty uninformed guess.
Edit: Some weird accidental science I want to report.
I made "stone dwarves", intended to simplify out some of the combat crud(since even 40d had too much). For "fluff" reasons, I removed body hair.
Over the course of several forts, I noticed they were having some real trouble with kobold thieves. Now, kobold thieves routinely outrun dwarves(especially since they tend to get spotted outside, well, everything), but this was "woodcutter kills thief with axe, only after taking unusual damage" kind of trouble.
So I did some arena testing. Turns out, dwarves with no nerves and such, but also no hair, lose 1-on-1 to regular dwarves more than 2/3 of the time.
I just added stone's combat properties to all their materials and now they do fine, but for those who want [DAMBLOCK] back, thicken the body hair. IIRC the hair layer has a base thickness of 1, crank that to 10 or so and you should get some significant but not overpowered damage blocking.
I also thought of the ultimate test of the "worldgen doesn't care about amounts" hypothesis: mod out all [ENVIRONMENT]s from all iron ores, then add [ITEMCORPSE:BOULDER:NONE:INORGANIC:HEMATITE] to one of the megabeast types. Gen a world, set to stop at year 100, and check legends; if only one megabeast of that type was killed, you've got the right kind of world.
Then start to embark from the various civs, and see if the one that killed it has all the iron/steel tools you can afford.