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[VerdantSF]

I recently had a dwarf that was too close to a cave-in.  She suffered a broken skull.  I was surprised, since I've never seen a head injury that bad on a living dwarf.  She made a full recovery without any complications as far as I can tell.  Did she get really lucky, or are skull injuries from cave-in debris less lethal than weapon headstrikes?

[Zammer990]

Weapon headstrikes do sometimes only shatter the skull, about 1/20 or so. Lucky, but not extraordinary.

Then again I play with a modded thicker skull, but if I recall the shatter rate isn't disimilar

[Blastbeard]

What probably happened is that the dwarf's skull brain was left unharmed despite the skull fracture, as opposed to the usual event of skull fragments or silver carving knife a foreign object piercing/bruising/tearing the brain.
As long as the brain is left intact, a subject can survive all kinds of cranial trauma. Even then, brain damaged isn't guaranteed death. It's been said that there's no set in stone factor that causes death in Dwarf Fortress, just a long and excruciating list of very imposing suggestions.

[KingBacon]

Skull injury is a function of toughness and luck. I've head many a dorf survive a broken/dented skull. Cave-ins tend to be quite varied in terms of damage as opposed to Goblin Hammerlords. You can have dust propelling dorfs into walls, boulders crashing into skulls, fall damage. These all are quite varied in the amount of damage that can occur (velocity and mass of the objects in interest vary much more than as with weapons.)

Also, in my experience, children seem to be more resilient with regards to head trauma.

[itg]

Broken skulls without torn brains are definitely not common, but not unheard of, either. I'd agree with Zammer's estimate: about 5% of severe head strikes break the skull but don't kill. Of course, due to the circumstances generally surrounding severe head strikes, many of those dwarves will end up dying anyway.

I seem to remember reading that due to some oddities in how skulls are modelled, weak blows to the head are more likely to tear the brain, and powerful blows are more likely to just break the skull. That might explain why your dwarf survived.

Somewhat relevant: I had a kid survive a broken skull and a dented brain, once. Year's later, he's alive and well, and he's my militia commander.

[VerdantSF]

Somewhat relevant: I had a kid survive a broken skull and a dented brain, once. Year's later, he's alive and well, and he's my militia commander.

Wow!  What's the lucky dwarf's name?

[itg]

Solon InchedDike The Dank Year. The brain injury never healed, by the way, but it doesn't seem to affect him.

[Parsely]

Ooh. Makes me light-headed imagining head injuries. XC

[ImagoDeo]

Solon InchedDike The Dank Year. The brain injury never healed, by the way, but it doesn't seem to affect him.

Well, that beats my story of a legless militia commander who still managed to get ten or eleven kills over the course of eight years...

[Hetairos]

It's rare, but it happens. I think it immediately knocks out the dwarf/goblin/animal/whatever.

[klefenz]

Solon InchedDike The Dank Year. The brain injury never healed, by the way, but it doesn't seem to affect him.

Probably because dwarves don't use the brain that much.

[Larix]

It's probably still just a faulty analogy, but the best explanation i've heard is that for "jamming the skull through the brain", the skull is basically modelled not as a sphere but rather as a pointed bone spike, which is propelled through the brain, which it's modelled to sit on top of, by the force of the blow. It doesn't take much force to do irreparable damage this way. If the force of the blow is strong enough to _shatter_ the spike before trying to drive it, it won't be wedged through the brain and is less likely to kill - shrapnel will often still cause damage or death, but it's no longer a guaranteed instakill.

I've experimented a bit with it in arena mode, and dwarfs wearing _no_ helmet against a hammer-armed force would suffer a fair number of non-fatal "broken skull" headstrikes, whereas helmeted dwarfs would always get their brains or upper spinal cord ripped whenever a blow didn't just bounce off the hat. It's still better to equip your dwarfs with a helmet, because that makes them safer from punches and edged attacks to the head.

[Khorinis]

Solon InchedDike The Dank Year. The brain injury never healed, by the way, but it doesn't seem to affect him.

how did he get the injury?

[Dirst]

It's probably still just a faulty analogy, but the best explanation i've heard is that for "jamming the skull through the brain", the skull is basically modelled not as a sphere but rather as a pointed bone spike, which is propelled through the brain, which it's modelled to sit on top of, by the force of the blow. It doesn't take much force to do irreparable damage this way. If the force of the blow is strong enough to _shatter_ the spike before trying to drive it, it won't be wedged through the brain and is less likely to kill - shrapnel will often still cause damage or death, but it's no longer a guaranteed instakill.

I've experimented a bit with it in arena mode, and dwarfs wearing _no_ helmet against a hammer-armed force would suffer a fair number of non-fatal "broken skull" headstrikes, whereas helmeted dwarfs would always get their brains or upper spinal cord ripped whenever a blow didn't just bounce off the hat. It's still better to equip your dwarfs with a helmet, because that makes them safer from punches and edged attacks to the head.

From what I've seen, bodyparts are modeled as cubes, with tissue layers one atop the other obeying the relative thickness given in the raws, with internal organs underneath the tissue stack.  The size of the cube is based on the bodypart's relative size in relation to the rest of bodyparts, scaled by the creature's size.  Blood and blood vessels are present in an abstract way based on how "vascular" the tissue is.  I believe a strike that gets to the bottom of the tissue stack strikes a random organ, with the probability governed by the relative sizes of the organs.

[Dirst]

I recently had a dwarf that was too close to a cave-in.  She suffered a broken skull.  I was surprised, since I've never seen a head injury that bad on a living dwarf.  She made a full recovery without any complications as far as I can tell.  Did she get really lucky, or are skull injuries from cave-in debris less lethal than weapon headstrikes?

By the way, did the Chief Medical Dwarf put her in a cast?