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[higgypig]

So I have defiantly got the game down, as far as building a surviving but i really want the next step up, more of a challenge. I want to embark in an evil area buuuuuut...even with military units my settlers get slaughtered right from the start. Is there a trick to embarking in Evil areas? To get dwarves to safety immediately? I could just use some pointers, thanks.

[martinuzz]

1) wall yourself in ASAP
2) never build a butcher

[Burnup]

channel a 4X4 area around where the wagon was, set that ditch as a meeting place, everyone goes into there, remove ramps, construct ceiling to prevent rain/undead/clouds from entering.

How do you roof over? doesn't some one have to be up there to do that?

[higgypig]

deconstruct the wagon, channel a 4X4 area around where the wagon was, set that ditch as a meeting place, everyone goes into there, remove ramps, construct ceiling to prevent rain/undead/clouds from entering, dig.

surviving migrants will be hard to come across, and a zombie apocalypse isn't out of the question. one zombie kills a guy, they're ressed, they kill some more, those guys are ressed until the surface is a mass of living limbs.

do not butcher ANYTHING! the hair and skin produced can come to life, and no matter how many times you kill them, they WILL come back. only, however, if you embark on an undead evil area. you can tell if it's one of those, because the non-cave wildlife will be undead.

Cool, but will ANYTHING that dies come back? or only if a cloud hits it? and whats the deal for underground caverns too?

[Clover Magic]

deconstruct the wagon, channel a 4X4 area around where the wagon was, set that ditch as a meeting place, everyone goes into there, remove ramps, construct ceiling to prevent rain/undead/clouds from entering, dig.

surviving migrants will be hard to come across, and a zombie apocalypse isn't out of the question. one zombie kills a guy, they're ressed, they kill some more, those guys are ressed until the surface is a mass of living limbs.

do not butcher ANYTHING! the hair and skin produced can come to life, and no matter how many times you kill them, they WILL come back. only, however, if you embark on an undead evil area. you can tell if it's one of those, because the non-cave wildlife will be undead.

Cool, but will ANYTHING that dies come back? or only if a cloud hits it? and whats the deal for underground caverns too?

If your biome is reanimating, any full bodies, hands, and heads (things with GRASP and such) will reanimate forever no matter how many times you kill them, unless you destroy them through magma/bridge-smashing/processing them.  This effect extends to all parts of your map that is a part of the reanimating biome - no matter how far into the caverns you dig, if the surface above reanimates, the underground will too.  I once accidentally started a zombie apocalypse in a cavern this way by dumping two dead bodies down there - they reanimated endlessly, slowly killing off the animal people and even a forgotten beast.  All casualties would then also raise up, adding to the horde.

You can butcher things, but you have to be fast and efficient about it.  Have a talented butcher, tanner, and spinner, disable all of their jobs besides those, and don't have a refuse stockpile to put skin and hair in.  Make sure all workshops are next to each other.  Butcher the animal.  The tanner and spinner should immediately grab the skin and hair, respectively, and start working on them.  Once tanned/spun into thread, the hair and skin will be gone and not reanimate.  Of course, if your dwarves get it done before it reanimates is the big question, so if your dwarves aren't very good at the job it's best you don't butcher, or only do so with your military stationed around the workshops.  Therefore I wouldn't recommend butchering until you have a sizable amount of dwarves with some sort of militia going on.

An upside is that if it does reanimate and your military chops it up, every new bit of skin/hair can be processed individually, so a clever player could maximize upon this and get a lot of leather and thread from one butchered animal.

[Hans Lemurson]

Yeah, if you have a tanner and a spinner ready, then you can butcher animals safely.  Making the Tanner be the Butcher as well works nicely, since the tanning job is automatically created so your grabs the skin and rushes it over to be tanned.  In my experience, Reanimated Skin is more deadly than Hair, which falls to pieces after one solid dwarven punch.  I had a spinner preparing to spin up some Yak Hair and it reanimated while at the workshop.  He punched it, and it broke apart into 6 pieces, each spinnable into their own unit of thread!

Fun fact: Yak Nose Hair is not spinnable, but will also not reanimate.

Also, make sure you have barrels or pots available for your food.  There's nothing sadder than having a 20 unit Yak Meat Roast rot in your dining room when it'll be your only food source for a long time to come.  (Tundra challenge)

[Caz]

I've never had a fort that didn't immediately spiral into chaos that was in a reanimating zone. Weird goo rains and huskifying clouds I can deal with, but if your drake scales are reanimating as they're sheared and attacking your dwarves... just becomes too much to handle really. Also it seems like every item reanimates continously so the only solution is laborious dumping into magma. Until it becomes more 'automatic' that dwarves have an idea of how to take care of undead pieces, I'd stick to non-undead zones.

But that would be boring, wouldn't it?

[ZzarkLinux]

Is there a trick to embarking in Evil areas?

The trick is to embark, die, and try again.
You keep trying and dying, but it's a reanimating biome so it's okay.
Eventually, you stop dying and have somehow stabilized.
But then you realize that you've become one of them.

[Broseph Stalin]

 Rule 1
GET THE FUCK INSIDE
If you haven't already designated a hole to hide in by the time you unpause you are going to die. If the rain is deadly or incapacitating as soon as it starts falling anything you left outside is going to be hell to get inside.

Rule 2
YOUR MILITARY WILL NOT SAVE YOU
Do not bother embarking with a militia. Focus on avoiding zombies, you can't kill all of them and dwarves that have a career in zombie fighting often go insane because of how awful fighting zombies is. You should create an above ground structure and station marksdwarves on the roof to pick off zombies whenever it's time to get a migrant wave or traders inside, bolts are very effective, don't create more zombies, and don't expose your dwarves to direct combat with zombies.

Rule 3
GET RID OF THOSE CORPSES
Create a pit to hold your zombies, dump remains on a lever controlled hatch over said pit. Make sure the lever is far away from the pit or your dwarves will look down and be too freaked out to pull the lever. Ideally the pit is next to the butcher shop and leather is imported.

[Scruffy]

You can also try to find an embark with a single tile of non-evil biome and the rest terrifying resurrection or what ever you want.
If you are lucky, you will end up with a relatively tiny spot of nonressing biome that you can build your fort in. The rest of the embark will still resurrect so all your mining tunnels, pastures, parts of the fort away from the main stairway etc will be resurrecting.

One of my all time favorite forts was like this.  Still managed to keep it entertaining and have many zombie outbreaks by having large animal pastures in the ressing biome, not sealing the outside world completely (fun little thrall clouds made things interesting) and most importantly, having a big chunk of my fort outside the safe biome.

[GreatWyrmGold]

First off, figure out what kind of evil biome it is. Blood rains? Meh, build an outdoors fortress if you like. Syndromey rains and clouds? Keep dwarves you like inside. Huskifying clouds? Let NOTHING alive outside, seal off the entrance the moment you get a husk. Zombification? Seal off the surface and never look back, avoid butchery and any kind of death. Evil animals are usually scarier and more aggressive than average, but if they don't come back they're typically easier than a goblin thief.

[Noobazzah]

There's a strategy that hasn't been mentioned yet, it should be used as a last resort of some sorts, when you only have 1-2 dwarves left. Get your dwarf a pickaxe, then designate a channel to be dug as deep as you want. The dwarf will dig itself downwards, escaping any non-flying undead with ease. Dig down until you hit the caverns, where there's possible food sources and presumably no undead. Once there, dig a bastion large enough to house necessary stuff like a masonry. You can drink from the cavern lakes (if you have one, better hope so) and fish/hunt for your food. There's also edible plants down there, some of them yield seeds. Once you've ensured your survival, start planning how to get migrants to safety.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Hardly safe. What if you channel into a cavern lake or over a long, hard drop? What if something dead got down there somehow and started a subterranean zombie apocalypse? What if some beast of the deeps shows up and kills your dwarf? What if you hit magma or, Armok forbid, the HFS before you hit the caverns? What if the caverns are barren of food? What if a zombie falls or flies down the pit and kills something?

But yes, it's better than letting those survivors die.

[Noobazzah]

: D Yeah, that's why it's a last resort. In my experience, falling 5 z:s or straight into a lake is indeed very likely. It has happened to me 50% of the time, in fact. Nobody should drop into the caverns, unless there's combat near the hole in the surface. Circus wouldn't really matter, since a dwarf would propably die of dehydration before that. Also, suvivability can be inreased by tossing stuff down the chute or by having the surface dwarves seal it as soon as possible.