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[arkhometha]

Extensive research has been done on the effects of heat on tissue and bones on the Grim Grimoire Mod Thread.  As a unintended consequence, it was discovered that dwarf fortress doesn't handle heat transfer realistically, leading to some strange behavior like an undead on 1/7 pool of magma and one in a 7/7 pool of magma melting at the exact same time, creatures getting away with minor injuries when in rapid contact with magma and creatures generally bleeding to death before melting (though this makes sense somewhat). So the first suggestion is to put a variable in the raws that dictates how fast a material heats up (how fast it can transfer heat) and take into consideration it's structure (metal vs living tissue) and size. Don't know how feasible this is but letting things heat up faster than others could make things more feasible, like skin melting/being pretty damaged not necessarily meaning blood loss/fat melting on one person, or a creature having a limb melt off before dying of blood loss. Maybe SPEC_HEAT already does this but it doesn't seem to do it very realistic. Or maybe I just don't understand it.

The second suggestion was also an unintended discovery. It seems bone density (SOLID_DENSITY) and in fact a lot of living materials density are wrong or simply have the same density as wood. I don't fully understand how much this affects DF. The suggestion consist of correcting this, and we do have source on that. Additional data may be found here. Data have sources and are as explained as they can be.

The third and final suggestion consists of adjusting some raw parameters to reflect reality more closely, nominally SPEC_HEAT, IGNITE_POINT, HEATDAM_POINT, MELTING_POINT and BOILING_POINT in material_template_default.txt. The values of these are either incorrect or absent in living tissue/material and extensive research has resulted in bibliography on these values and changes that could be made, besides practical tests. The results are presented here, here as a final version and complementary data here. The results are divided into real life one values and values balanced to come close to real life in DF physics.
The advantage of this would be fixing the undead not melting side feature and some improvement in the injury system by heat.

Implementing suggestions 2 and 3 should be easy and fast to implement. The data is there for anyone to verify, test and contribute and I encourage people to do so.

The objective of these suggestions is to help DF to become more realistic or more close to the authors vision without taking away Toady's coding time, fixing some weirdness of the game mechanics in the process. No credits are necessary for any part of the research (I'm not referring to the papers cited and used as a source, though). Any suggestions are welcome.

Thank you for reading all of this.

[Bumber]

...creatures getting away with minor injuries when in rapid contact with magma...

I think this might actually be realistic, due to poor heat conductivity of molten rock.

[fricy]

Thx for all the !!science!!, will be testing this.

[10ebbor10]

...creatures getting away with minor injuries when in rapid contact with magma...

I think this might actually be realistic, due to poor heat conductivity of molten rock.

It really depends on how molten to magma is. If it sticks to you, you will have some decent burns. If it's mostly solid, you can walk over it with only small burns and smoking socks.

[arkhometha]

...creatures getting away with minor injuries when in rapid contact with magma...

I think this might actually be realistic, due to poor heat conductivity of molten rock.

Magma temperatures range from 700 °C to 1300 °C, and can even reach 1600ºC. Magma temperature in DF is set to 1200ºC. That means it's reasonable the air close to it should reach at leat 300°C (more in closed spaces like mines), sufficient to do a 3rd burn degree and damage the muscle or set fire to paper and even maybe cloth. The problem is the timescale in DF. It's unknown, so we can't precise the distribution of heat (or variation in temperature) in a given region over time. We need to know that to know how much damage in time someone should take when exposed to heat.

It really depends on how molten to magma is. If it sticks to you, you will have some decent burns. If it's mostly solid, you can walk over it with only small burns and smoking socks.

We don't have a lot of that, but there's that hypothesis of people being able to walk over magma due to how dense it is. Since we can't experiment on humans using magma, the closest we have to it is this. I think cooling magma should be walk-able if it's rock already, but it should be very hot if there is still magma nearby.

Would be cool if magma cooled to rock, so we could fill mined areas, but that suggestion is probably already given.

[Bumber]

It really depends on how molten to magma is. If it sticks to you, you will have some decent burns. If it's mostly solid, you can walk over it with only small burns and smoking socks.

Armor would help with the sticking part, if you can get out of it quickly. My geology teacher told us about a guy wearing an asbestos suit who fell waist-deep into lava (was pulled out a few seconds later) and survived with second degree burns. It should then be possible to survive, with minor injuries, shorter contact with 1/7 or 2/7 lava (or lava mist) wearing sufficient layers of flame resistant clothing/armor (or perhaps a coating of water.)

The problem is the timescale in DF. It's unknown, so we can't precise the distribution of heat (or variation in temperature) in a given region over time. We need to know that to know how much damage in time someone should take when exposed to heat.

You can infer a bit based on move speed.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Armor would help with the sticking part, if you can get out of it quickly. My geology teacher told us about a guy wearing an asbestos suit whom fell waist-deep into lava (was pulled out a few seconds later) and survived with second degree burns. It should then be possible to survive, with minor injuries, shorter contact with 1/7 or 2/7 lava (or lava mist) wearing sufficient layers of flame resistant clothing/armor (or perhaps a coating of water.)

You can infer a bit based on move speed.

Imagines decking a dwarf out head to toe in dragon scale armor... Magmanauts!

[10ebbor10]

Well, while dragonscale is fireproof, it's not a perfect heat isolator. Nethercap would work, I suppose, as it's temperature is magically kept at zero degrees Celsius. Then again, nethercap can somehow burn, so ...

Probably a dragonscale armor with nethercap inside would work.

[Deepblade]

wouldn't you also need an insulator for the nethercap so you wouldn't freeze to death?