Print

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

[Trif]

How does the hospital handle pulped limbs? Will a pulped hand get amputated?

[Footkerchief]

How does the hospital handle pulped limbs? Will a pulped hand get amputated?

My expectation is that pulping causes the body part to completely collapse, with the remnants falling to the ground, leaving nothing to amputate.

[LordBaal]

I'm the only one feeling uncomfortable with all the pulping? I mean, it's going to be used only against undead? How is decided when to pulp what and who?

[Footkerchief]

I'm the only one feeling uncomfortable with all the pulping? I mean, it's going to be used only against undead? How is decided when to pulp what and who?

The devlog covered this:

03/07/2013 Toady One Next up is a list of old combat mechanics that need to be moved over to the new action system. Every creature's "turns" used to work more or less with a single delay variable which was used all over the place, and many non-combat actions will still work that way in the next release (since I don't need to put it off further converting the 80 remaining minor cases), but there are some combat activities that should be converted now so that that system at least is homogeneous -- dodging, twisting weapons, that sort of stuff. In particular, the last tweaks I need to do for combat reaction moments rely on getting all of the timers interlaced, and I'll need all the combat actions for that to avoid weird arbitrary waits that the reactions don't see. Once that's more fluid, we'll have a clearer picture of exactly what sort of combat mess we have overall. Hopefully a mess that'll be ready for lots of wholesome undead pulping. I guess living things would get pulped too by default sometimes, although rotten tissue should probably be more pulpable, like those month-old forensic cubes they find in trash cans and stuff.

Would pulping just apply to anything coming from a creature by default, allowing ridiculous things like pulping bronze or gabbro?

While the term "pulping" is ridiculous when applied to bronze, the concept is not.  You know how, no matter how many times you "shatter" or "dent" a bronze colossus's arm, it never falls apart?  Pulping will hopefully fix that.

[Mr S]

I really hope a pulped appendage does NOT fall off.  You'd see your war duckling fleeing from his sentry post dragging a useless bag of wing bone paste from his shoulder after being knocked back by the goblin maceman.

Also, since the BONE layer should provide only a fraction of its original resistance, it should be easier to, subsequently, cause the area to sail off in an arc.

I am actually hoping that "pulp" isn't, as a state, a thing, like bruised or shattered.  I'd like to think it's more detail and/or analysis, as well as persistence, in the tissue damage data.  Thereby, IF Urist McUnluckySwordswarf's Right Arm has had 8 of the wrist bones broken, as well as a cumulative sum of 8 fractures between both the radius and ulna, and each has at least two breaks, THEN Urist McUnluckySwordsdwarf's Right Arm has been pulped, gaining a PULPY flag, and is no longer eligible for further raises.

If that is true, then it may be possible to treat, on a living dwarf, PULPY extremities (limited to HAND, FOOT, UPPER/LOWER ARM/LEG ?) with metal rods and Surgery, eventually healing to a maximum of INHIBITED perhaps, with much scarring.

I can't say if that's what is on the plate for this release, but that seems like what would be the eventual goal for deep, detailed modeling.

[Caldfir]

Well, for it to work as a way to get rid of undead (which can be raised from titans or whatever crazy stuff) pulping would probably need to apply to arbitrary parts.  I don't imagine that any part destroyed beyond the abilities of a necromancer to animate will be recoverable ever.  If the dwarf's arm gets turned into purée then I'm pretty sure that at the very least the nerves are severed (the the part will never be usable) and at most it would just kinda fall off.  I imagine it will end up working a lot like severs do now, but with a slow buildup. 

Also to clarify: in my previous post I wasn't saying that the pulping changes would be an intentional "buff to undead", but rather that the current hit-points system makes them extremely weak combatants, and that the removal of that system will very likely lead to much more dangerous undead (albeit not infinitely reraisable ones). 

I for one look forward to the change.  There are a number of cases where combat right now just makes completely no sense at all, and this ought to go a long way to fixing a number of them.  If pulping happens all the time to everything then yeah, that would be stupid and annoying, but I doubt that's the intention.  Mostly it will probably be noticeable in those weird situations where your dwarves have been hacking at a sponge (or whatever) for an entire season and are starting to die of starvation while the completely mangled sponge just sits there accumulating unlimited amounts of damage. 

[monk12]

Yeah, most living things are going to die to blood loss or organ damage before pulping, I expect, unless the player is being deliberately sadistic, which quite frankly I also expect.

[WillowLuman]

What really doesn't make sense is things like skin, hair, and oyster shells reanimating, and being deadly. Some things really ought to be considered pulped by default, and little mussel shells neither have very sharp edges nor much mass, and thus no way should they kill anyone if they start flopping around.

[Neonivek]

What really doesn't make sense is things like skin, hair, and oyster shells reanimating, and being deadly. Some things really ought to be considered pulped by default, and little mussel shells neither have very sharp edges nor much mass, and thus no way should they kill anyone if they start flopping around.

Can they even Flop around?

Obviously these are muscular muscled mussels.

[Tomcost]

Has Toady stated that animated dead will lose their hit point sistem? If not, pulping would be only a means of preventing that gobling hand in the dinning hall from not letting your dwarves eat.

[Footkerchief]

Has Toady stated that animated dead will lose their hit point sistem? If not, pulping would be only a means of preventing that gobling hand in the dinning hall from not letting your dwarves eat.

Yes, in DF Talk #14:

Rainseeker:   So the more wounds a creature has the easier it is to kill, or, how do you kill one of these creatures?
Toady:   Well if it's already wounded then it has a lesser attack capacity, especially if things are missing and chopped off, and you can hack off their heads and arms ... If a zombie has no grasping portions and it has no head then it collapses; so that's one way to go, is to hack it to pieces. Otherwise we've still got this system in where it just takes the amount of force that has been applied to it and you're kind of shaking loose the animation effect and then it just collapses, which is kind of like saying hit points, there's just a little bit more to it than that but not much, it's basically hit points, and that is until we get combat pulping, like really so that you can take a mace or a baseball bat or whatever and beat it into a pulp, an actual pulp. Then we won't need that system anymore, but we require pulping and there's no pulping so there's still a kind of crude damage that it just keeps track of in an abstract way for the animation effect.

[arkhometha]

What really doesn't make sense is things like skin, hair, and oyster shells reanimating, and being deadly. Some things really ought to be considered pulped by default, and little mussel shells neither have very sharp edges nor much mass, and thus no way should they kill anyone if they start flopping around.

I kinda like those things and I hope Toady doesn't get rid of that.

And I do imagine pulping as in, turned into pasta and unrecoverable. Or very tiny bits. Could be done to a living thing, but the thing would already be dead anyway, so it makes sense only with the undead. Or the sadistic. Maybe dwarves could, in a berserker mood, beat other things until they due and after that, pulping them a little?

Anyway, this will certainly make handling undead and sponge monsters more easy or at least realistic. I wonder if Toady will change fortress mode squad behavior along with the combat changes he is working on?

[WillowLuman]

I just hope "pulping" won't be an actual verb ingame, as "strike the swordsman in the left lower arm with your +iron mace+, pulping it!" sounds... bad. Hopefully he just means it as a technical term.

Skin doesn't make much sense as an undead, and neither does having every single product of the creature reanimate. Skin has no structure whatsoever, unlike bone or muscle, and really doesn't have any way of hurting people even if it did flap around. Right now, the skin is treated as having the mass of the entire creature and so breaks bones by "pushing." Also, what's to stop necromancers from just making people's leather clothes kill them if skin reanimates? What's really that different between tanned leather and leathery mummy skin?

[Chronas]

I expect it will play out like ye olde Liberal Crime Squad.
Urist's head is smashed into the body, an unrecognizable mass!

[arkhometha]

I just hope "pulping" won't be an actual verb ingame, as "strike the swordsman in the left lower arm with your +iron mace+, pulping it!" sounds... bad. Hopefully he just means it as a technical term.

Skin doesn't make much sense as an undead, and neither does having every single product of the creature reanimate. Skin has no structure whatsoever, unlike bone or muscle, and really doesn't have any way of hurting people even if it did flap around. Right now, the skin is treated as having the mass of the entire creature and so breaks bones by "pushing." Also, what's to stop necromancers from just making people's leather clothes kill them if skin reanimates? What's really that different between tanned leather and leathery mummy skin?

Bone also doesn't have much structure. You need tendons and muscles to keep it up, otherwise the skeleton just crumbles. What keeps it together in DF is the necromancer magic, so skeletons raise and attack you. The same thing can be done with muscle, hair and skin. A hollow man, made only of skin. You could argue that it can't hit hard but then again, it's using magic to keep things together, so it probably could. I would be okay with necromancers reanimating tissue, bonding them together to create hollow, hair or muscle only monsters. Of course, they would need to be destructible.