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[Loud Whispers]

Removing the head does not kill the zombie.

Will attempt to replicate the results.

[NecroRebel]

Well yeah, zombies have to have a THOUGHT or GRASP body part, and until you removed the arm it still had one of those, so it didn't drop. Massive damage can also drop them, of course, but as long as it has at least one such body part, they might stay up.

[Loud Whispers]

1. Husks.
2. Selective dismemberment. The main quarrel here is that the zombies are going against the #1 rule of zombie defense - you have to shoot them in the head. Kill shots are useless now.

Thesis;
The most effective form of zombie elimination would be to cause dismemberment of the feet, legs and extremities, lowering the lethality of the main body without creating more eligible zombie parts. The undead still run on a hp based system.
Will begin attempts at destroying zombies by chopping off their toes/fingers in adventure mode and arena mode.


*EDIT

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Arena mode appears to support this statement.

[Leonance]

The main quarrel here is that the zombies are going against the #1 rule of zombie defense - you have to shoot them in the head. Kill shots are useless now.

Dwarf Fortress is trying to emulate realistic life of a "fantasy" planet but uses the rules for how things work as if they were "realistic." Zombies are not "realistic" so killing  the head would no cause a zombie to immediately keel over. Most cases of Zombie Rule #1: Aim for the head, involve some sort of parasite inhabiting the brain of a the host body. The other symptoms of the parasite usually include necrosis and increased paranoia and mimic rabies in its host.

Necromancy is a whole different beast from parasite and virus zombies. Necromancer infuse their will into a dead body to fight for them. So as long as the body has a means to fight it will keep on fighting.

Edit: heh heh wrong V word type zombie...

[Loud Whispers]

Bah, no need to go into why things are, this is !!SCIENCE!!, we only need to look into things as they exist! And as it stands, this is how it works. And I'm looking into ways to seeing if Husks behave the same way - killing them could just be a matter of constant smashing, and general zombie killing know-how and the best ways to deal with them.

Marksdwarfs are looking that much more attractive now.

[Leonance]

Well, I believe that ‼SCIENCE‼ is like all other forms of science and that not following the scientific method will lead to bad output.

[Loud Whispers]

Well, I believe that ‼SCIENCE‼ is like all other forms of science and that not following the scientific method will lead to bad output.

You appear to misunderstand the scientific method, in fact, the whole reason this thread exists is to follow it.
Going into why said things exist is walking into the grounds of !!PHILOSOPHY!!

[Leonance]

Well, I believe that ‼SCIENCE‼ is like all other forms of science and that not following the scientific method will lead to bad output.

You appear to misunderstand the scientific method, in fact, the whole reason this thread exists is to follow it.
Going into why said things exist is walking into the grounds of !!PHILOSOPHY!!

I guess your right. I've always had a preference for WHY things happen instead of HOW.

Looking at the picture it says the ax is in the head, does it tell us where in the head it is? Could be in the cheeks for all I know. Guess this might be a case where DF has too little information.

[Frogwarrior]

Husks cannot be killed except by beheading and bisecting. (And cave-ins and atomsmashing, of course.) I had a guy skill up from no axe skill to high master axedwarf on a single bunny foul fog husk. At the end, it was limbless and gutless and I think noseless and earless, but since apparently it's really hard to behead small things he didn't kill it. (Although I have seen someone behead a cat with a pick.... I'll keep that in mind...)

[Intro1827]

I once managed to bisect a zombie in adventure mode without killing it. On the other hand, blunt hits to any body part is pretty much an insta-collapse.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Remember that husks weren't affected by the reanimation code, being corrupted living. AFAIK Toady has special hardcoding for reanimated zombie deaths and behaviour.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Husks cannot be killed except by beheading and bisecting. (And cave-ins and atomsmashing, of course.) I had a guy skill up from no axe skill to high master axedwarf on a single bunny foul fog husk. At the end, it was limbless and gutless and I think noseless and earless, but since apparently it's really hard to behead small things he didn't kill it. (Although I have seen someone behead a cat with a pick.... I'll keep that in mind...)

I just had a look through the interactions etc in my world.sav file-- the interesting thing that I found was that regular reanimated undead and husks/thralls/zombies (yeah, husks and thralls are the same thing, and sometimes they're called "zombies") basically have the exact same tags.  The difference, I believe, is that husks don't have to die in order to change their tags.  So regular corpses get special corpse-damage code that makes them drop after a bit, regardless of any mortal wounds, and husks don't.

Because the husk interactions do things like add NOBREATHE, and remove blood, that doesn't leave any way for husks to get killed, except bisection and beheading.  A husk fluffball would be invulnerable.

Remember that husks weren't affected by the reanimation code, being corrupted living. AFAIK Toady has special hardcoding for reanimated zombie deaths and behaviour.

Actually, I believe the reason that husks are unaffected by reanimation code is that they have the NOT_LIVING token.  I wasn't sure about whether they were really undead until I saw that token in all of the interactions creating them.  Wierdly, the reanimation effects don't work on things that are NOT_LIVING.  As to how they then affect, say, a severed head, I can only guess that a severed head never gains the NOT_LIVING token until it reanimates, and at the point that the reanimated head is struck down, it loses that token.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I'm not sure that it is impossible to reanimate a husk-- I've, for obvious reasons, tried to avoid situations in which husks get created, much less reanimated.  Resurrection code isn't supposed to work on werewolves either (that's a forbidden class for the interactions), but it looks like the werewolf corpses lose the syndrome while dead, because they're just body parts at that point, not critters.

EDIT2: Husks leave corpses that reanimate.  They're not any more difficult to kill than regular old reanimated corpses though.

[Captain Crazy]

A husk fluffball would be invulnerable.

husk Giant Sponge D:

[trees]

Actually, I believe the reason that husks are unaffected by reanimation code is that they have the NOT_LIVING token.  I wasn't sure about whether they were really undead until I saw that token in all of the interactions creating them.  Wierdly, the reanimation effects don't work on things that are NOT_LIVING.  As to how they then affect, say, a severed head, I can only guess that a severed head never gains the NOT_LIVING token until it reanimates, and at the point that the reanimated head is struck down, it loses that token.

I think you may be a bit confused about what the NOT_LIVING token is. It's not something that gets added to things upon death, it's a token used for creatures that aren't really living things in the sense that a dwarf or a human is and therefor shouldn't be re-animated. Examples of things with NOT_LIVING are the bronze colossus and the other elemental men. In previous versions, the token was known as CANNOT_UNDEAD and only prevented the creature from being used to generate the skeletal x or zombie y that were in evil regions.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Actually, I believe the reason that husks are unaffected by reanimation code is that they have the NOT_LIVING token.  I wasn't sure about whether they were really undead until I saw that token in all of the interactions creating them.  Wierdly, the reanimation effects don't work on things that are NOT_LIVING.  As to how they then affect, say, a severed head, I can only guess that a severed head never gains the NOT_LIVING token until it reanimates, and at the point that the reanimated head is struck down, it loses that token.

I think you may be a bit confused about what the NOT_LIVING token is. It's not something that gets added to things upon death, it's a token used for creatures that aren't really living things in the sense that a dwarf or a human is and therefor shouldn't be re-animated. Examples of things with NOT_LIVING are the bronze colossus and the other elemental men. In previous versions, the token was known as CANNOT_UNDEAD and only prevented the creature from being used to generate the skeletal x or zombie y that were in evil regions.

Yeah, I understand-- in previous versions, it determined whether a creature was eligible for entering as undead wildlife in undead biomes, or for placement in a curious underground structure.  These days, however, undead are most often generated in other ways: necromancers, mummies, weather, regional disturbances.  All of these methods are designed such that they cannot affect the NOT_LIVING (or werebeasts)-- it's just funny, because for three of those causes, the only things they can affect (corpses) are categorically not living.  They're designed to not affect the NOT_LIVING, but that doesn't matter, because body parts don't appear to have that tag.  If they actually didn't affect the NOT_LIVING, corpses would not raise more than once, because they gain NOT_LIVING upon reanimation.