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[nekoexmachina]

I want to set up the defense mechanism using thralls as main killing method. This will require some micromanagement (lotof micromanagement) to make thralls less harmful for my own dorfs, but that will provide me awesome undead militia.
Plan is as follows.
1) up to 15 dwarfs are 'normal' guys that provide survival inside of the fortress.
1.1) Dig up the 'lure' closeable facility with a restraint to bring some kitten or other innocent being + means to prevent access inside/outside of this facility.
2) All migrants except for 15 choosen ones get metal armour & some weapon. They get outside, waiting for cloud to come by.
3) Seal all exits with magical drawbridges!
4) Elves come to trade & get kicked. Hardly.
5) When elves are killed, poor kitten is placed into the trap from 1.1. Facility opens up. (May require more then 1 kitten, but whatever.
6) Thralls go for the kitten & kill it. Shutting them with drawbridges so they don't get back while not needed(while they can do some harm to my dwarfs).
7) New migrants arrive, choose most useful & take inside, others get weapons&armour & become new guardsmen.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

10) Open hell & let thralls fight with clowns.


Questions.
1) I've seen thralls fighting each other. was this some bug or do they really hate each other too? This could provide unwanted casualities within my army.
2) Do I need to memorize the dudes who became thralls? Will they ghostify themselves?
3) Will the kitten part work? Thralls do not path to my open fortress in most cases (something like 70/30 without me noticing why did it happen & why did it not.)

[coldmonkey]

@ Q#1: My experience in Adventure Mode suggests that if a Husk targets a living being it'll keep attacking it after it's been Husked. Just a guess, but it should be fairly simple to test.
@ Q#2: No idea, but it sounds like a cool double-edged sword situation to have the ghosts of those poor unfortunate souls haunting you for your misdeeds while their nigh-immortal corpses remain in mindless slavery.
@ Q#3: Perhaps traits are maintained, such as quick to anger and grudges. I haven't seen any research about the topic, but if you did some simple testing it could potentially increase the efficiency of your defenses.

[PDF urist master]

Q#3: thralls should act like every other enemy, meaning that if the kitten is too far away from it, it won't bother chasing it.

[Sutremaine]

Thralls aren't dead. They're still alive, but they have many, many new tokens attached to them. Apart from the lack of breathing, emotion, pain, etc, they have tokens that make them aggressive to anything living, and remove their status as living creatures.

I'm moderately sure that a vampire or necromancer wouldn't be attacked by a thrall, and that dwarf thralls will eventually become more sluggish due to their retained alcohol dependency token.

[McDonald]

There was something Girlinhat wrote about thralls, gimmie a second...

Edit: Here it is:

Thralls are living creatures, minus everything that makes them a creature.  They are alive, they are not undead, they are truly living creatures, except all the things that distinguish a creature from a corpse, they lack.  They feel no pain, they do not breathe, nor bleed, nor tire, nor thirst, nor hunger, feel no pain or sorry, no joy and take no pleasure even in such things as mist.  They suffer no order and no chaos.  They are, truly, neither alive nor dear, nor really undead.  A Husk is, at its core, a void.  A sin against god in the purest form.  Not simply a blight like a dwarven fort will be named "a sin against nature" but in every sense of the word the Husk is a sin, something which defies nature and embodies everything that should never be.

A Husk will never breath, eat, rest, or suffer fear.  They make an ultimate killing force which simply cannot be stopped.
A Husk ignored all orders, they will not don armor nor remove it, and cannot be controlled except by extremely physical means of walls and locked doors.
A Husk is NOT undead.  It is not a zombie.  It still counts as a living creature, and as such will eventually age and die - perhaps the only true way to defeat a Husk is simply to wall them off behind the bowels of the mountain and try your best to forget that they sit there staring at the wall and craving your death.  Never stopping, never tiring, never becoming distracted, the Husk has one, single, universally persistent thought - to kill that which lives and remove life from the world.  Even as they sit sealed behind the walls, they only linger there.  Only a layer of piled rubble and their forgotten ability to remove constructions keeps you safe as they spend decades, centuries, screaming thoughts through their (possibly torn) brains of all the ways in which they would end your life.

A Husk is not something to weaponize.  Not yet.  Nothing short of bringing the mountain down atop their heads will stop a Husk.  They need no lungs, no limbs, they don't even need a brain.  Reduced to a bleeding, fractured torso they will crawl forward, possessed of otherworldly hatred and fueled by the purest of rage, these beings of raw terror will gladly and effortlessly bring the largest of dwarven mountainhomes to a smear of dust in the time that it takes them to crawl from one end of the entrance to the lower part of the forges.

Perhaps one day we'll be able to utilize them.  They are something of raw power, and we are not ready for that quite yet.  Dwarves who harness the power of magma and upheave heaven and earth itself falter at the strength and single-minded purpose of the Husk.  We are not ready.  Dare I say it but... we are not depraved enough, not ingenious enough, not brave enough to rally the Husk.

This being of unadulterated terror remains the only thing that the craziest of dwarves will avoid.

[coldmonkey]

There was something Girlinhat wrote about thralls, gimmie a second...

Edit: Here it is:

This being of unadulterated terror remains the only thing that the craziest of dwarves will avoid.

Sounds like elf talk to me. That they age is news to me though, guess I just never thought of it.

[Urist McVoyager]

Few forts last long enough for that to be an issue. Or even noticeable.

And times are changing. Not the game itself, so much, but that sort of thinking. No weaponizing?  Puh-lease!

[BlackFlyme]

I believe it depends on the syndrome inflicted by the mist/fog. Since they are randomly generated, it is likely that at least some of them will not apply NO_AGING, just like how some slow down the victims while others get speed boosts.

Though I have no idea how to weaponize something that can take out demons without a sweat. The only thing I can think of would be to trap it in a cage, then restrain it somewhere where it can be a distraction for invaders. Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

[jcochran]

I believe it depends on the syndrome inflicted by the mist/fog. Since they are randomly generated, it is likely that at least some of them will not apply NO_AGING, just like how some slow down the victims while others get speed boosts.

Though I have no idea how to weaponize something that can take out demons without a sweat. The only thing I can think of would be to trap it in a cage, then restrain it somewhere where it can be a distraction for invaders. Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

Well, how about a webbed cage? That ought to capture it.

[BlackFlyme]

I believe it depends on the syndrome inflicted by the mist/fog. Since they are randomly generated, it is likely that at least some of them will not apply NO_AGING, just like how some slow down the victims while others get speed boosts.

Though I have no idea how to weaponize something that can take out demons without a sweat. The only thing I can think of would be to trap it in a cage, then restrain it somewhere where it can be a distraction for invaders. Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

Well, how about a webbed cage? That ought to capture it.

I don't believe [TRAPAVOID] can be applied through a syndrome or interaction in the first place, so the web shouldn't be necessary unless the husk is a gremlin or kobold thief or something else that is normally immune to traps.

[coldmonkey]

Will Husks attack inorganic non-living enemies such as Bronze Colossi?

[nekoexmachina]

Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

That is a question btw, which I did not have a chance to test (yet).
What I remember is that there was some mechanism preventing traps from working on human sieges if human diplomat seen them.
I hope that if dwarf never visited my main fortress & never seen the traps, he won't be trapavoid.

[BlackFlyme]

Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

That is a question btw, which I did not have a chance to test (yet).
What I remember is that there was some mechanism preventing traps from working on human sieges if human diplomat seen them.
I hope that if dwarf never visited my main fortress & never seen the traps, he won't be trapavoid.

The trap glitch is different. What I meant is that when you build cages/restraints, you cannot assign dwarves to them. Because of the way Fortress logic works, you cannot assign a creature to a cage or restraint if they are the same race as your fort inhabitants, even if they aren't from your civilization. This same logic is why dwarves who come in goblin sieges are buried in coffins instead of being brought to the refuse stockpile.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Husks:
- Are best described as "The Corruption", as they gain most of the same tokens as undead but retain their soul, skills, ability to learn, and equipment. A husked dwarf can't come back as a ghost until the husk is destroyed. I imagine this soul-trapping business is quite unpleasant.
- Have a randomly generated name, referring to the fog/mist/etc. that corrupted them, and one of the words: "Husk", "Thrall", "Zombie".
- Because they don't use the undead hitpoint system, they can only be killed by: decapitation, bisection, cave-ins, frozen in ice, encased in cooling magma.
- If the husk or its gear is coated with the evil dust/etc., they can create more husks via. melee attacks.

Animated corpses:
- Some people on the forums might call them zombies, but they can be skeletons too. They always have the name "XXXX corpse".
- They use the undead hitpoint system, so they will collapse after a few hits. They don't need a complete body, and might be only an animated hand, or survive decapitation.
- These are the things animated by necromancers or evil regions.
- The game gives equipment to some of the ones that you encounter at towers in adventure mode, but all locally-animated corpses will not have any equipment.
- They are soulless, so they have no skills and can't learn. An dwarf can come back as a ghost even while his corpse has been animated, because the soul is not trapped.

I believe it depends on the syndrome inflicted by the mist/fog. Since they are randomly generated, it is likely that at least some of them will not apply NO_AGING, just like how some slow down the victims while others get speed boosts.

Though I have no idea how to weaponize something that can take out demons without a sweat. The only thing I can think of would be to trap it in a cage, then restrain it somewhere where it can be a distraction for invaders. Though that may not work if the thrall is a dwarf, since you can't cage/restrain creatures that are the same race as your fort.

Most of the tokens are not randomly generated, so all of them are: NO_AGING:NOT_LIVING:OPPOSED_TO_LIFE:STERILE:EXTRAVISION:NOEXERT:NOPAIN:NOBREATHE:
NOSTUN:NONAUSEA:NO_DIZZINESS:NO_FEVERS:NOEMOTION:PARALYZEIMMUNE:NOFEAR:NO_EAT:
NO_DRINK:NO_SLEEP:NO_PHYS_ATT_GAIN:NO_PHYS_ATT_RUST:NOTHOUGHT:
NO_THOUGHT_CENTER_FOR_MOVEMENT:NO_CONNECTIONS_FOR_MOVEMENT

Also all of them have these tokens removed: HAS_BLOOD:TRANCES:LIKES_FIGHTING:MISCHIEVOUS

I have never seen anyone attempt to obtain husk dust/etc. and use it to contaminate a well, like the "vampire blood well" that CAN turn water-drinkers into vampires. Turning isolated people into husks could be interesting. One thing I did with the vampire blood contaminated well was to assign waterskins to soldiers, and then forbid the waterskins after being filled. I then unassigned the waterskins from the soldiers and had the contaminated waterskins taken to a secure room.

Husk water would be an interesting treatment option for critically wounded soldiers in the hospital. Hopefully the nurse can run fast!

[Sutremaine]

There's also a small difference between animated dead raised on-site and animated dead that appear on the map that way.

Locally-animated dead
* Are named as 'corpses'.
* Lack some special attacks (don't know the mechanics). For instance, GCS corpses will no longer shoot webs.

Migrated animated dead
* Are named as 'Corpses'.
* Retain special attacks. GCS Corpses are capable of webbing.
* Can be affected by thralling weather, resulting in things like 'Human Corpse vile dust husk'. I don't know how the dead-ness and the thrall-ness interact.

Thralling weather sometimes leaves a coating, sometimes doesn't. Sometimes it can be rained out of the sky, leaving piles scattered on the ground.