Hello. Long time player/lurker, first time poster.
Since the advent of the new version, I can only seem to embark on evil biomes. After conquering spontaneous resurrection, evil rain and zombie wildlife, I went on a search for the fabled cursed fog. After many embarks, I finally found an evil biome with clouds of "eerie dust" that turned things into husks.
The first cloud drifted along the side of the map, no problem. The second one passed right over the entrance to Mistcopper (my randomly named fort). No dwarfs were harmed because I had wisely dug an emergency shelter first thing. However, the dust caught the pack animals, turning them into husks; and having read about the nastiness and contagiousness of husks, I forbade the entrance hatch. I dug a vertical staircase straight down and miraculously stumbled on the 3rd cavern layer, close to a magma pipe, and made the cavern our new home.
The first wave of migrants were caught in another cloud. When the second wave arrived, I managed to let two of them in (one of them a kid). The population of husks on the surface grew constantly, topping at about 140, while I managed to attain a grand total of 11 citizens, after sneaking in some more migrants and after two deaths by magma crab.
So with not much future to this fort I decided I would perform some !SCIENCE! on the husks, because why not. And thus I embarked on a most retarded enterprise: I set up a drop trap of over 40 z-levels depth and created a system to pump magma into the bottom, to cleanse any hypothetical husk survivors. Meanwhile I mined the candy and set up a long hallway with serrated candy disc traps, to see how much murdering was needed to murder the unmurderable. All of this took about 5 game years and a horrifyingly long real-life time, due to extremely low FPS and scarce dwarfpower.
Oh, and at some point I received the friendly visit of a forgotten beast fire blob, that after blocking all possible accesses, decided to just stroll around the cavern lake, evaporating water nonstop and further killing my framerate, plus three other less remarkable fbs and a werelizard (more on that later).
This is getting too long, I'll stick to the facts.
Generic husk observation:
- Husks themselves aren't contagious, it's the dust covering them. A clean husks is just an unkillable, somewhat harmless creature.
- They gain skills. My map is now full of elite soldier husks, mostly wrestlers.
- Husk behaviour varies per individual. Sometimes they attack anything in sight, sometimes they behave like the original creature: I've had husks trying to get into the fortress via the hatch when it's unlocked, but turning away the moment I forbid it. Also I've seen husks run away from enemies, like normal dwarfs would do.
- Regarding the previous point, I'm not sure but it looks like first generation husks belong to the same "we hate everything" faction, while second and later generation ones remain in their original faction (maybe this is utterly stupid, but it's the impression I got)
- Two or more husks may lock in eternal combat, to the point where they are just limbless, featureless trunks forever pushing each other.
- The ammount of eternal combats escalates rapidly, I believe this is due to the various factions that husks seem to belong to. The ammount of fighting is so ludicrous that my framerate was murdered.
- Merchants, diplomats or invaders that get huskified will just leave the map. In the case of invaders it looked like a case of retreat due to losses, just with husks.
- Diplomats that get huskified will "leave unhappy".
- Were-curses do infect husks. They also seem to regenerate every time they morph. Now I get about 6 pages of "X eerie dust husk has transformed into a X" every month. This is strange because the rate of werestuff contagion seems to be very high. Haven't checked but looks like all dwarf husks are now werelizards, too.
- Non-contaminated husks make excellent practice dummies. Since they are pretty much unkillable they can be bashed forever, for amazing skill gain. A merchant crossbowdwarf became a hammer lord in a short time bashing a husk with his crossbow.
- Ofen, husks don't seem particularly interested in attacking your fortress. My entrance is now open, but few of them have actually wandered in. Some of them just stand on a spot forever.
On killing husks:
- Regular combat can't kill them, from what I've seen.
- Serrated disc traps do kill husks. All my traps have 3 candy serrated discs, and they have destroyed most husks that walked down the hallway. I gues the same applies to giant axe blades, but I doubt anything non-slashing will work because:
- The only way of killing them seems to be cutting their head off or cutting them in half (lower body flies off etc). You get the message "X husk has been killed by a trap". Maybe axe and sword dwarves can kill non-contaminated husks with lucky hits.
I'm still waiting for any of them to reach the huge drop trap, but I'll report any findings on husk susceptibility to high drops (and magma) if anybody cares.
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Topic: Accidental husk !SCIENCE! (Read 11088 times)