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[Sutremaine]

Based on the fact that gauntlets, boots, and helms don't do a good job of protecting fingers, toes, and facial features, I did a little messing around in the arena. I don't really have the patience to do exhaustive testing, so instead I'm going to leave some initial notes.

Method: alter raws, make macro to clad a dwarf in steel helm, mail shirt, gauntlets, boots, and legging, and either let ten fire imps use the dwarf as an archery target or take control of the dwarf and send them for a dip in the magma.

Make each finger and toe internal: Seems to work, prevents fingers and toes from being targeted directly.

Make facial features internal: Doesn't do all that much -- the real killer is the fingers and toes.

Edit vertebrate tissue layers to remove fat (ARG2) from fingers, toes, lips, and other body parts that are exposed to magma: This is more interesting. The dwarf I allowed fire imps to fire at remained completely healthy for nine months, but was quickly set ablaze and killed once I took control and removed one of her gauntlets. Testing on the magma dwarf was inconclusive, as fat from the upper legs and arms bleeds enough to kill the average-stat arena dwarf.

Edit fat tissue to have a vascular value of 1: With careful shuttling between the magma and the water, I was able to get a dwarf who could swim in magma so long as she had a protective coating of water (go Leidenfrost!). Once the water went away she'd be set on fire, which was as fatal as it normally is. Otherwise she'd suffer minor to serious burns, which didn't cause any pain or bleeding even on the rare occasions that bone was suffering burns.

I haven't yet finished even the preliminary round of 'testing' (I need to see if a dwarf with the vascular and fat tweaks can learn to swim in magma without armour), but the most promising thing here is the immunity to fireballs and, perhaps, clouds of flame produced on the death of some creatures.

[Meph]

Interesting. I'll be following this. Good luck with the experiments.

[Deon]

Why do ypu think gauntlets don't protect fingers? They certainly do.

Oh, you mean fire protection? That's interesting.

[Sutremaine]

Some more quick testing:

Armour doesn't really matter for magma swimming -- a naked dwarf can burn all their fat off as easily as an armoured one. The only thing that matters is the dwarf not bleeding out from melting fat. With the default blood supply for fat, this is very difficult because finger and toe fat tends to start melting and bleeding all at once. If you get over this by removing fat from those parts, having the fat on more than one major limb melting causes massive blood loss.

Timing may also be important. Normal-speed dwarves in the arena must spend multiple ticks in the magma, getting a thorough bath in the stuff. The fire-protected dwarves in the fire imp test often had their upper and lower body fat melted after a lot of heavy bombardment, but bleeding was limited to a single pool of blood for each half of the body. This is promising -- if the untraumatic melting was caused by numerous quick blasts of heat and not sustained immersion, it may be possible to use a pump stack in Fortress Mode to introduce fire-proof dwarves to a steady drip of magma.

Melting damage appears to be cumulative, and once a particular body part's fat melts fully its bleeding stops instantly. Not really a huge surprise, but may bear noting.

For fire protection, making parts internal is as good as removing their fat. A more thorough list of body parts exposed by default would be a useful thing -- there are very likely parts which are exposed but have no fat, and if any mod should add fat to them (or add fatty novel parts that are exposed for the same reasons facial features, etc. are) they'll be always vulnerable to fire.

For combat, a few opportunistic stabs showed that hitting these new internal fingers with a shot to the hand is no guaranteed thing. Perhaps the relsize of each finger could be increased.

Making fingers, toes, and facial features internal removes a lot of options from the attack list for dwarves and other humanoids. Fingers and toes occupy 20 'slots', facial features 6, and everything else 27. I don't know what effect this would have on AI combat, but the lack of knockouts from chipped toe bones is likely to make some difference.

[Deon]

Oh, I believe another good side effect is that wrestlers stop grabbing fingers and toes which is funny but extremely silly.