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[sal880612m]

No, but just before I saw your post I got attacked by a thrips woman corpse. Which brings me to my next question do evil biomes re-animation effect only matter on the surface or will it still resurrect things beneath ground?

[doublestrafe]

They go all the way down.

[weenog]

I got reanimating biome and husking clouds in the same embark once.  Still play that place on occasion but it's kind of like being trapped in a mall waiting for death.

[joeclark77]

Re-animating biomes are tough. You always want at least some part of the map that's not re-animating, or the living dead will just accumulate until they eat your computer's brain (so to speak).

Best strategy is embark with at least one pick, channel down one tile right next to the wagon, go horizontally a couple tiles and dig out a room for storage.  Build stockpiles one at a time in order of priority (not just a general purpose stockpile) so your dwarves will haul food first before tools, weapons, etc, and haul wood and stone last.  When danger appears, wall up the 1-tile-wide entryway and build better internal defenses such as cage traps and multiple drawbridges before you re-open it for the first migrants.

[blue sam3]

dfhack command "prospect all" gives a summary of all available stone types.

Sorry if it's noob question but isn't command like this cheating?

It's a single player game. There's no such thing as "cheating" in a single player game.

[ShadowHammer]

dfhack command "prospect all" gives a summary of all available stone types.

Sorry if it's noob question but isn't command like this cheating?

It's a single player game. There's no such thing as "cheating" in a single player game.

I disagree; you can cheat in solitaire, can you not? However, because there are no generally accepted standard "rules", it's up to you to decide what's cheating and what isn't. I personally view danger rooms and infinite metal replication, among other things, as "cheating", but other people probably don't. It's entirely up to you.

Sorry for being argumentative and off topic; back on topic, terrifying can range anywhere from "oh noes it's raining blood and there's a scary zombie bunny" to "RUN!! RRRUUUUNNNN!!!! THE RAIN INSTANTLY FREEZES YOUR HEART, AND THAT HUSK RABBIT LITERALLY JUST TORE THAT GUY'S HEAD OFF!!!!"

[gchristopher]

Remember that "Terrifying" means two things about a biome: that it is Savage, and that it is Evil.

The Savage part just means it's eligible to spawn a few more interesting creatures and plants.

The Evil part means the same thing whether it's Terrifying, Haunted, or Sinister: evil plants and animals, plus 0-2 Interactions.

There are three kinds of Interactions that an Evil biome can have: (or so I gather from decoding the world.dat file)

- Reanimation
- Evil Rain
- Evil Clouds

I think a biome is limited to only two interactions, total, but I haven't played in a while and my memory is hazy. Here's what each one does:

Reanimation: This is the familiar phenomenon of body parts rising as undead. The exact properties can vary a little bit by biome, since a typical game will have a few different undead curses.

Evil Rain: This is something icky that falls from the sky, blood, ichor, etc. It may or may not carry a curse. These curses range from pain and blisters to rapid bleeding out. I've never seen a rain that creates husks, though. That seems to be reserved for clouds.

Evil Clouds: These are the creepy clouds of icky stuff that crawl over the terrain, and usually carry a much nastier curse than the evil rain. These are where you get husks/thralls, which is a much nastier curse than plain undead. The material it chooses for the icky stuff determines whether it sticks to the thralls and they can carry it with them and infect victims outside the cloud. (Which is one of the nastier things the game can throw at you.)


If you carefully mess with the world.dat files, you can manipulate these curses to put the desired level of evilness in your biome. That's insanely tedious, since no one's completely decoded the file structure.


I've seen one evil Interaction a couple times that I can't artificially reproduce: biomes that instantly husk/thrall any creature that enters them. Birds fly in, and whether or not there's a cloud, they get thralled, no matter how high they're flying. Dwarves wearing boots also get instantly husked. Maybe it's a material type that floats in the air, or becomes a property of the tile?

I'm not sure how that last effect happens, but it's one way you can have the game end instantly on unpausing on embark, as all the dwarves get thralled on the first tick, and you go straight to the defeat screen. As far as I've seen, that's the fastest way to lose.

[Arcvasti]

Terrifiying biomes can be really terrifying.

Spoiler: Personal example from my second fort in a Terrifying Desert (click to show/hide)

A desolate waste of red sand, the sun a blood red eye watching day and night. The entire landscape moves, tentacles and eyes writhing from sand dunes in a macrabre dance, waiting for unfortunates to walk into their clutches. Great billowing clouds of death cover the site in a gyrating curtain of yellow dust. A party of dwarven merchants run through the duststorm towards an stone gate concealed in one of the sand dunes. A husk waits for them, a grinning corpse encrusted in blood, dust and sand. The dwarves standing on the summit of a nearby tower can only watch helplessly as it dashes their brains out against the blood red sand. Deeper, in the corridors of the hidden fortress, a door is left unlocked... In a few days, the once orderly fortress is a tableau of mayhem and destruction: Both children and adults stalk its labyrinthine halls, ripping the throats out or infecting everyone they come across. Some survivors lock themselves in their chambers and waste away scratching crude engravings into the walls. Most are just torn apart by what is left of their friends and family, now ravening for blood and death. The empty corridors echo with the unholy cackle of husks and the shrieks of the dying. The walls are painted the same blood red as the glaring malevolent sun and the sand above. In time, all that is left are the wall-etchings of the starving, the bones of the vicims and the tower on the surface. That tower, the only visible part of the fort, juts out over the flat expanse of blood red sand as a monument to the dead.

THAT is what a Terrifiying Biome is.

Not all are like that though. Husking clouds are nasty, but manageable. My favourite evil weather when I embark in evil biomes. Reanimation makes it WAY harder and can often lead to vast armies of the dead occupying the surface. Those are usually completely impossible to dislodge and make the fort boring or short-lived. Evil rain can either kill things or just inconvienience them, but its usually accompanied by undead wildlife. A pack of undead grizzly bears makes for a VERY short-lived fortress indeed.

EDIT: Ninja'd by huge post. I think the "Insta-lose" is caused by husking dust lying on the ground already.

[gtaguy]

Not as bad as a good biome with assloads of unicorns.

I gained a giant hooved cow with a horn and a thirst for dwarven blood, and that's a unicorn.

[Arcvasti]

Not as bad as a good biome with assloads of unicorns.

Two7 words: UNICORN HUSKS. Or maybe Giant Sponge Husks.

[gchristopher]

As long as I'm delurking for a random info dump, here's a sample Evil Cloud pulled out of an uncompressed world.dat.

First it creates a material, some "vile dust." It makes vile dust thralls. Eww.

Code: [Select]

[OBJECT:INORGANIC]
[INORGANIC:EVIL_CLOUD_19]
[GENERATED]
[SPECIAL]
[STATE_NAME:ALL:vile dust]
[STATE_ADJ:ALL:vile dust]
[STATE_COLOR:ALL:YELLOW_GREEN]
[DISPLAY_COLOR:2:0:1]
[MATERIAL_VALUE:1]
[SPEC_HEAT:4181]
[IGNITE_POINT:NONE]
[MELTING_POINT:NONE]
[BOILING_POINT:NONE]
[HEATDAM_POINT:NONE]
[COLDDAM_POINT:NONE]
[MAT_FIXED_TEMP:10000]
[MOLAR_MASS:1]
[TEMP_DIET_INFO:SLIME]
[ENTERS_BLOOD]
[SYNDROME]
[SYN_NAME:vile dust sickness]
[SYN_AFFECTED_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON]
[SYN_INJECTED]
[SYN_CONTACT]
[SYN_INHALED]
[SYN_INGESTED]
[CE_FLASH_TILE:TILE:165:3:0:0:FREQUENCY:2000:1000:START:0]
[CE_DISPLAY_NAME:NAME:vile dust thrall:vile dust thralls:vile dust thrall:START:0]
[CE_PHYS_ATT_CHANGE:STRENGTH:300:1000:TOUGHNESS:300:1000:START:0]
[CE_ADD_TAG: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:START:0]
[CE_REMOVE_TAG:HAS_BLOOD:TRANCES:LIKES_FIGHTING:MISCHIEVOUS:START:0]

Then it needs a way for the vile dust to show up in the world. That's a Regional Interaction. (Evil Biome)

In this case, it's a WEATHER_CREEPING_DUST. I think that's probably worse than WEATHER_CREEPING_GAS. I bet it sticks to the thralls.

Code: [Select]

[OBJECT:INTERACTION]
[INTERACTION:REGIONAL_12]
[GENERATED]
[I_SOURCE:REGION]
[IS_REGION:EVIL_ONLY]
[IS_REGION:SAVAGE_ALLOWED]
[IS_REGION:ANY_TERRAIN]
[IS_FREQUENCY:100]
[I_TARGET:A:CORPSE]
[IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_REGION]
[IT_AFFECTED_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON]
[IT_REQUIRES:FIT_FOR_ANIMATION]
[IT_FORBIDDEN:NOT_LIVING]
[I_TARGET:B:MATERIAL]
[IT_MATERIAL:MATERIAL:INORGANIC:EVIL_CLOUD_19:WEATHER_CREEPING_DUST]
[I_EFFECT:MATERIAL_EMISSION]
[IE_TARGET:B]
[IE_INTERMITTENT:WEEKLY]

Notice the "IT_TARGET:A" and "IT_TARGET:B" sections above. This interaction layer (REGIONAL_12) only has the creeping dust, but does not reanimate corpses.

Then, somewhere way down in the region section of the file, the interaction gets associated with the biome. I spent a few weeks on it, and never found exactly where. With DF2014 and a way more complicated world.dat coming, trying now is probably pointless. Aaand, you get an Evil Cloud!

Here's a region that gets both a Creeping Gas and Reanimates! Whee!

Code: [Select]

[OBJECT:INTERACTION]
[INTERACTION:REGIONAL_11]
[GENERATED]
[I_SOURCE:REGION]
[IS_REGION:EVIL_ONLY]
[IS_REGION:SAVAGE_ALLOWED]
[IS_REGION:ANY_TERRAIN]
[IS_FREQUENCY:100]
[I_TARGET:A:CORPSE]
[IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_REGION]
[IT_AFFECTED_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON]
[IT_REQUIRES:FIT_FOR_ANIMATION]
[IT_FORBIDDEN:NOT_LIVING]
[I_EFFECT:ANIMATE]
[IE_TARGET:A]
[IE_INTERMITTENT:WEEKLY]
[SYNDROME]
[CE_FLASH_TILE:TILE:165:3:0:0:FREQUENCY:2000:1000:START:0]
[CE_PHYS_ATT_CHANGE:STRENGTH:300:1000:TOUGHNESS:300:1000:START:0]
[CE_ADD_TAG:NO_AGING:NOT_LIVING:OPPOSED_TO_LIFE: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:START:0]
[CE_REMOVE_TAG:HAS_BLOOD:TRANCES:LIKES_FIGHTING:MISCHIEVOUS:START:0]
[I_TARGET:B:MATERIAL]
[IT_MATERIAL:MATERIAL:INORGANIC:EVIL_CLOUD_11:WEATHER_CREEPING_GAS]
[I_EFFECT:MATERIAL_EMISSION]
[IE_TARGET:B]
[IE_INTERMITTENT:WEEKLY]
Evil rains are similar, only with a WEATHER_FALLING_MATERIAL tag instead of a WEATHER_CREEPING_WHATSIT tag. Yeah, so you get Evil Rain OR Evil Cloud, but not both, as the B Interaction, and you may or may not get reanimation as the A interaction.

And that's really all there is to evil biome curses!

[FallenAngel]

I once had a terrifying glacier whose worst aspect was the fact it was a glacier.
No zombies, and the local clouds made things dizzy and numb for a few days, with no long-term ill effects.

[ZzarkLinux]

For Terrifying areas, I find Pain Rain to be worse than Evil Clouds because you can stop Evil Clouds with construction.

If your area has reanimation, then you need hills of some sort at your embark. That's right, hills. Zombies tend to add up, and unless you plan to die a fps death then you will need to "drain" the surface of zombies. The easiest way to do this is to build a Trap Hall on the same Z-Level as the zombies. Without a hill, you have no way to get At-Or-Above the surface, so choose your embark carefully.

Two7 words: UNICORN HUSKS. Or maybe Giant Sponge Husks.

Sponges basically designate that part of the map "No Man's Land" due to AI. I tend to avoid embarking with them on the map.

[sal880612m]

dfhack command "prospect all" gives a summary of all available stone types.

Sorry if it's noob question but isn't command like this cheating?

It's a single player game. There's no such thing as "cheating" in a single player game.

I disagree; you can cheat in solitaire, can you not? However, because there are no generally accepted standard "rules", it's up to you to decide what's cheating and what isn't. I personally view danger rooms and infinite metal replication, among other things, as "cheating", but other people probably don't. It's entirely up to you.

Sorry for being argumentative and off topic; back on topic, terrifying can range anywhere from "oh noes it's raining blood and there's a scary zombie bunny" to "RUN!! RRRUUUUNNNN!!!! THE RAIN INSTANTLY FREEZES YOUR HEART, AND THAT HUSK RABBIT LITERALLY JUST TORE THAT GUY'S HEAD OFF!!!!"

lol.

I think that danger rooms are sort of cheat-y. I have no problem with dfhack prospect and startdwarf because sometimes the default just doesn't work for what I want to do, and I don't want to waste time finding that out. I have come up with my own view on infinite metal replication, it's dwarven magic.


Thanks everyone for the answers.

[Skuggen]

The last two terrifying embarks I tried had above-average dangerous wildlife and rain of blood, but nothing else. Disappointing, really