Will this be updated? I want to know how exactly pulping works...
So would I, but at the moment we don't have structures or DFHack for 0.40.01
My gut feeling is that body parts seem MUCH weaker, like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfmM59S_5EESome things may need to be reverified for 0.40.01 considering that two years of Toady's coding have occurred. I can confirm that the dependance of edged damage on the SHEAR values has not changed.
Attack momentums/velocities are likely different after the combat/movement speed split.
FAKE EDIT: preliminary pulping testing suggests that body parts and all their contained parts will be broken (red) if dealt a body-part-size related amount of blunt damage. However the system is not balanced as small parts burst easily. My arena martial artist kicked someone repeatedly in the lower body until it exploded in gore, which instantly killed them. The corpse was in one piece.
Relevant Toady quote:
Toady One There have been a lot of DF Talky, pressy and taxy things going on (with all the events scheduled for later, this may end up being one of the busier months on record non-programming-wise), but I managed to get most of the way through pulping as well as making some strides toward the definitive hydra test. For pulping, I just need to hit a bunch of things in the arena now to get the numbers to feel correct. Once a key body part is pulped, associated corpses won't be able to be re-animated. If a dwarf gets hit enough times to have a part pulped and still survives, which is reasonably extreme, they can still recover, since pulping isn't actually a state of being, just an accumulation of enough serious wounds -- if enough of the serious wounds heal, the dwarf can recover, but it's likely to be a mess of multiple horrifying fractures and nerve damage and so on. The "hit points" for animated creatures that were a band-aid for the damage problem have been removed.
Also throwing liquids has been nerfed, so "water guns" are possibly obsolete. The creature just gets splattered on a body part. This is likely due to the implementation of spitting.
ACTUAL EDIT: Giant Sponges can be pulped to death (i.e. their single body part "collapses")! This is probably a good place to start in understanding pulping.