Only the deserving ought to get proper burials, and that automatically rules out virtually all dwarves.
Hmm... I am in fact building two proper tombs (or rather a large hall for heroes), which will be dedicated to future heroes and two of my starting 7 - marksdwarves (given the honorary title of Urist for their 'sharp' shooting capabilities), who have both racked up a total of over 91 kills and saved the fort from many undead raven swarms, and a badger migration. They haven't died yet, and I hope they stay that way, but I still want them to be appreciated.
I say let them suffer unlife. You could also kill two birds with one stone and make it into a handy-dandy execution chamber. No need to haul those corpses elsewhere after the zombies feast on their flesh.
Burial is dangerous business on my map. All of the corpses are kept strewn about the main dump, but eventually I decide it's time to bury the bones, turn off all of the labours except hauling (easy with just 15 live citizens), and begin mass dumping all of the corpses. A chute would be very tempting, but the amount of flying zombies I get make this slightly impractical sadly. Not to mention I probably won't be sacrificing many Dwarves, since the mortality rates in my fortress army tends to be relatively nice.
Still, I could make a moose pit...
If you can manage it, hook it up to a floodgate and use the undead as defense troops against goblins and titans.
I prefer my Titans alive, and goblins slain by my Dwarves. The undead are an even bigger enemy to me, and my fort is in the lucky impasse between the spidery forest (a haunted forest surrounded by mountains) and the rest of the civilized world (modded every entity to build towns and cities - even Kobolds) - IT MUST NOT FALL. (Seriously, all of my statues and engravings depict Dwarves being killed by zombies, Titans, zombie dragons, grizzly bears e.t.c. in the spidery forest, or going out in hunting groups to kill said monsters, and usually failing. They sure like their death).
Which means I don't exactly want to be raising an undead army I cannot keep dead, or contained, lest the Dwarves to the east suffer :|
Also, I keep everyone in my military. I don't want the undead to have all the fun eh?
*And it all comes down to this really, if I simply holed up underground and let the undead do the work, then what's the point of me building this?
A megaproject under progress, built entirely out of limestone blocks. It'll be finished when I reach the map height cap of 100z lvls above ground. So far, the goblins'll have uncontested access to attack every sector of the fort except for the civilian quarters/barracks. And don't even get me started on the ravens. The quarry in the top left will hopefully give cavern critters access to the surface. Me want undead trolls on the map
!
If you can manage it, hook it up to a floodgate and use the undead as defense troops against goblins and titans.
Doors > floodgates. Almost always.
Yup. My resevoir is built out of two bridges and three doors, no floodgates to be seen anywhere >;]
*Note to self, telling legendary miners to dig out the resevoir whilst it's still connected to a frozen river is a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. I wonder how long this winter'll last... I feel like I'm slowly derailing my own thread by staying on topic D:
I just also checked out my embark, and I seem to have completely missed the fact that my fort is in range of a tower.
HFS YES.
Erm... Yeah. I think I'm just going to chuck the captain's body in the catacombs then, unless a surge of
NO happens.