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[Girlinhat]

Nah.  I'm doing this hardball.  I'm staking a claim on the surface and zombies be damned I will own the earth!

[Broseph Stalin]

Nah.  I'm doing this hardball.  I'm staking a claim on the surface and zombies be damned I will own the earth!

You're boldness will be your downfall! Like the mighty turnip I will wait beneath the earths crust and when I'm ready I will burst forward with righteous fury assembling the greatest tower the world has ever known!

[Talvieno]

I don't know... Out of curiosity, might you be able to drop them all down a magma chute? Something like a retractable bridge over a deep pit?

[Girlinhat]

Hardly have time to dig for the liquid fun stuff.  Most failures finish before summer arrives.

[Teach]

Lol every single evil region is boring as hell.  I went through all the evil areas on 3 worlds and I'm on to my fourth.  I've had forts with dead but they're not really a problem.  I'm trying to find a place with skin melting rain, so far I've only experienced bloodrain on about 25% of my evil embarks (which does absolutely nothing). 

1. How often do you guys experience syndrome inducing rain on your embarks?
2. How long do you typically wait for it to show? (For me it either starts off raining right away or doesn't rain at all)
3. Do separate biomes (in the same region) have different weather or is the weather standard across the region?

[Sus]

So far I've seen (on different embarks, obviously) phantom spider webs on the surface, eyeball and tentacle "grass", blood and muckus rain and a pair of different cloud types. The first one did nothing, AFAIK.

The second one, however...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Stray Horse Ash Thrall (tame) kicks the Militia Commander in the head, shattering the skull, driving the skull through the brain and tearin apart the brain!
A tendon in the skull has been torn!
The Militia Commander has been knocked unconscious.
Urist McArcher, Militia Commander has been struck down.

Although I've also seen a lot of rather "tame" regions for their "Terrifying" status as well, with normal vegetation and barely the occasional blood rain.

Anybody seen any of the evil (or good, if you're feeling like an elf) trees or shrubs in this version? 'Cos I've yet to see the first glumprong...

Oh, and I did manage a fine dwarf dystopia for a while, where everybody is drinking slime, sleeping on rock floors and spending about a third of their time in my "hospital" area of the entrance cave with bruises from the nauseating muckus that frequently rained down all over the place (and never got washed away by normal rain until the next muckus storm). Too bad winter came before I got a booze industry running, so pools freeze, everybody dies.

[Teach]

I don't think blood rain carries syndromes.  It causes the "Caught in freakish weather" thought but other than having a map that would make Armok proud it doesn't do much.

5 worlds so far and no Syndrome inducing rain. 
I want my cake

edit: I may not have been waiting long enough.  How long do you usually wait before it starts raining?

[Ieb]

Embarked on a haunted tropical savanna/terrifying badlands 2x2 area.
The badlands has putrid muck rains(causes fever, minor blisters) and the savanna has blood rain. It also keeps raining every few days or so after the other rain stops, often both biomes have rain at the same time.

So, I cranked up all the evil biome related effects to 100. I'm starting to assume however that these 2 biomes do not have anything more to them but the freaky rains. I haven't seen any undead yet either. Nor do the biomes have the "raise undead" ability.

So, am I to assume correctly when I say that these evil biomes are mundane ones in the new version? With only minor inconvenience(harpy herds, ogres hanging about) rather than all the OH DEAR GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD- that come from clouds and undead raising?

Or are there evil biomes where it takes time for the undead to rise up rather than all-the-frigging-time that I keep reading about, and how rare are the evil clouds?

[Carnes]

The undead embarks i've had are immediate.  The wildlife will all arrive as corpses.  Thankfully they shamble around a bit and aren't that fast (except for flying zombies!).  If you don't have a zombie within the first five minutes, pray for some wicked rain or other awful event to start the fun.   

The rains i've had so far either outright killed everyone within two minutes or was merely gross.. not much in between yet.  So if you do a surface fort, treat the rains as potentially world ending until you figure out what your embark is like.  My dusts and rains came within a few minutes of embark. So if you haven't had anything yet, you may not have any in the future.

[Ieb]

I guess I'll do more science, crank the evil biome numbers up and find a nice intersection of multiple evil biomes at some prime area.

Anyway, onto gameplay, anyone managed to survive for a long period of time on an undead-raising evil biome? Are there any limits to what sort of things pop back up to life, like only whole skeletons and so on? Do raised undead eventually leave the map or will they remain there indefinitely? How much time does it take for a body to rise? Is it always the same amount of time? How easy is it to dispatch undead in such a biome, is there enough time to dump them into the magma flow, or an atom compressor?

And the thing that came to mind the most: In an "everything rises as undead" biome, I found someone going on about shell of a mussel coming back to life. Let's say a dwarf gets a mood and picks up a shell in a hellish biome where nothing stays dead. What happens if the shell comes back to life before the artifact is constructed? Or when the dwarf is carrying the shell? Nothing major?

Also, since I assume that the game STILL does that god damn "this animal is huge, IT MEANS IT HAS HUGE BONES AND SKIN" thing when it comes to butchershops and tanners, does this make processing corpses in an undead raising biome impossible since your average butcher/tanner isn't all that fast at their work, or does starting work on a piece of creature that's able to rise(corpse, skin) cause it to not be able to rise?

[Siquo]

Toady: "Oh, and I added some rains that instantly kill everyone, making the game impossible."
Fans: "Challenge accepted!" 

[Psieye]

Also, since I assume that the game STILL does that god damn "this animal is huge, IT MEANS IT HAS HUGE BONES AND SKIN" thing when it comes to butchershops and tanners, does this make processing corpses in an undead raising biome impossible since your average butcher/tanner isn't all that fast at their work, or does starting work on a piece of creature that's able to rise(corpse, skin) cause it to not be able to rise?

There was a post mentioning just this: the skin/hair will not wait kindly if a dwarf is working on it, it will rise and harass.

[Angel-of-Dusk]

I present to you, my current, above ground strategy.

Z-1
W W W
W X W
W W W
W > W

z-2

F F F
F < F
F F F
F H F

Key: W=Wall, X=Up/down stair, >=Upstair, < Downstair, H=Hatch Cover, Downstair, F=Floor.

If you can whip this up fast enough, its a rather good to control flow to your fort, because creatures can't destroy hatches above them.

You can then proceed to build from there, maybe some walls and a roof. You'll need a decent military to fend off undead well enough to get this up, however.

[Broseph Stalin]

There was a post mentioning just this: the skin/hair will not wait kindly if a dwarf is working on it, it will rise and harass.

I've actually been thinking about this, if you hack off a part of an animated skin can you tan the part you cut off? If you could keep it dead long enough -or take them to an area where zombies don't rise- you could get at least six pieces of leather from one animal.

[Ieb]

Thanks for the info there, Psieye. The Wiki is sadly still without anything related to the new version(understandable) and I figured this was the best thread to obtain information for SCIENCE! Or I guess MAGIC would be more accurate here. Anyway.

Related to above, as far as I remember, limbs hacked off from creatures do create a skin piece of their own when butchered. So the optimal way to create leather from creatures is either to kill them with axedorfs, or drop 'em from great heights so they splatter into a million pieces. There is a possibility that it only works with large-enough creatures though so don't be too shocked if that kitten didn't leave behind any skin to work with(they don't right? Even when butchered normally, probably picked a bad example).