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[Di]

Yep. Death cause won't be revealed only if the dwarf has gone missed and hasn't been confirmed dead ever since.

[smjjames]

If it wasn't a vampire, the next most likely causes are non-violent deaths. Has he been injured in the past year or so? It might have been an infection, even if he seemed to make a full recovery. Was he old, and is it springtime? Maybe he died of old age.

What does the time of year have to do with dying of old age? I thought dying of old age could happen at any point in the year.

[Sutremaine]

It only happens on the 1st of Granite, for creatures in your fortress. Creatures from outside your fortress die when they appear, if they're old enough.

[itg]

Yes, New Year's Day is a dark time for Dwarfkind.

[smjjames]

Oh, wasn't sure how the dying of old age mechanism worked. I swear that animals at least, could die of old age at any point in 40d.

[Di]

I've always thought it was any season change not only new year. (Though image of dwarven death deity dressed up like santa and riding sledge pulled by elephants on the new year eve is quite amusing)

[AutomataKittay]

I've always thought it was any season change not only new year. (Though image of dwarven death deity dressed up like santa and riding sledge pulled by elephants on the new year eve is quite amusing)

Same here, I admit I only noticed that natural deaths tend to come in big clusters. I doesn't get enough natural deaths happening at once to notice the deeper pattern.

[Spacespinner]

Oh, wasn't sure how the dying of old age mechanism worked. I swear that animals at least, could die of old age at any point in 40d.

Just like your dwarves they die constantly, they just don't do it in an orderly fashion (old age) until spring arrives =P Sucks if you get a bunch dying at the same time because it's gonna make your entire fort treat it the same as if they got murdered by goblins. All at the same time.

[Larix]

I'm using yearly autosaves and love having _lots_ of tame animals, so that was hard to miss - everytime the "Spring has arrived!" message and saving timeout happen, i can clear up a dozen corpses of stray animals.

Edit: and as to the case - if it's listed as murder in the justice screen, it's an unnatural death, other deaths don't constitute a case. And if there haven't been any other mysterious deaths in the meantime (considering the dwarf had enough time to rot away to a skeleton), chances for justice gone wrong as usual or tantrums look better than those for a vampire.

[Art]

Welp, it is a vampire. Found another one, drained of blood.

Any tips on finding the vile fiend?

[TheDarkStar]

The wiki has a good page on vampires, including how to find them. The way I use is (if you don't have something like 250 dwarves) check every dwarf in the 'u' list for thoughts on sleeping, eating, or drinking (since vampires do none of these). If I find someone without this, I give them a nickname, then check their relations to deities. If it talks about how in year x, someone with that nickname was cursed to be a vampire (not in those words), you've found the vampire.

[edgefigaro]

Also, for large lists of dwarves: Take advantage of how the (u)nit screen indexes. Specifically, it indexes first by job and secondly by date of arrival at fort.

For example, take my unit screen:

Dwarves are grouped by class, first the CMD (though, he sometimes is indexed with the doctors/nobles in my expierence), then the miners. The top miner will be the miner who has been in your fortress longest, in this case, he arrived in 293. The lowest miner will be the most recent miner addition to the fortress, arriving in 307. The rest of the miners will line in oldest to newest, as indicated.

Vampires are generally recent additions to the fortress. As a result, if you just check the bottom members of your job classes, you can generally find them quickly.

[DS]

If you can deal with completely changing your fortress' sleeping arrangements, relocating your only beds to the main hall is simple method which forces a vampire to reveal itself. Once the hunger comes, if the only available sleeping dwarves are in the main hall or some other well-trafficked area, you have a good chance of having several witnesses to the murder.

Of course, all those witnesses will get unhappy thoughts, which could be a bad thing, depending on your dwarves' morale. And you'll lose a dwarf in the process.

[itg]

I always look at new arrivals' 'thoughts and preferences' page to look for dwarves who have extremely long group affiliation lists. You know, the dark blue text that says "He is a citizen of the Permanent Quake, He is a member of the Quiet Silvers, he is a former member of the Shore of Pillars..." Vampires typically have a huge list of affiliations because they have to keep moving from town to town and they're immortal. You can always confirm your suspicions by locking the dwarf in a room to see if he ever gets thirsty.

[Sutremaine]

Less-lethal idea:

Have the room be equipped with a stack of food and a well with a known starting depth. Lock the dwarf in. If you come back after a while and find that the water level's gone down, you don't have a vampire. Also nice would be some statues and things to admire, and maybe a dry pump to keep them busy.

A two-door system would work -- two doors both attached to the same lever, one at the entrance of the room and one in the well's plumbing. When your potential vampire is ordered to pull the lever, they lock themselves in the room and seal off the well refill. That would allow you to have a well that doesn't need to be manually refilled between uses, though keeping a pit filled via buckets is simple enough.

The idea is that you don't have to keep an eye on the dwarf -- if you shut them in an empty room and spend a few months supervising a project elsewhere, you're not going to have a living dwarf at the end of it.