Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist Da Vinci]

Creatures in DF currently tend to get "bled to death" when set on fire or bathing in magma. This is due to the melting body fat-related tissue bleeding.

If you remove the ability to bleed (or creature has no fat?), creatures tend to get "died in the heat" when exposed to high temperatures, or "frozen to death" when exposed to low temperatures. This happens when the creature's THOUGHT body parts (i.e. brain) accumulate damage (tracked through unit wounds) due to temperature relative to the brain material's HEATDAM_POINT or COLDDAM_POINT. Creatures that don't have or don't need a THOUGHT body part can't die this way, but can die if their head/upperbody/lowerbody is melted. In theory the game should kill gas or liquid creatures that condense/solidify/boil, but most of those creatures have fixed temperatures.

If you remove the ability to bleed and give brain materials [HEATDAM_POINT:NONE], but still have an IGNITE_POINT, creatures should get "burned to death" when the brain accumulates fire damage. Please note that fire damage != heat damage in DF. Heat and cold damage can grow very quickly, depending on the magnitude of the temperature difference, but fire damage grows over time after the body part has ignited.

DF ought to kill creatures that lose heart function (i.e. frozen solid), but as-is the heart is simply a weak point for bleeding to death. DF does not model heatstroke/hypothermia, and it may be difficult to implement in the current system. Water boils at 10180 U, and the brain doesn't take heat damage until 10250 U!

I suppose some modders can find interesting ways to use this information.

EDIT:

When taking heat damage you are:
blistering
burning
being incinerated

When taking cold damage you are:
freezing
being frozen solid  <= (this has nothing to do with the melting point!)
freezing to death

When taking fire damage you are:
on fire
burning alive
burning to death

[scamtank]

You do good things. Props.

As an aside, have you ever really really looked into what infections do to a dwarf? I think it's still kind of a mystery system.

[Roses]

Are there any numbers you feel us modders should change to more accurately represent what would actually happen? (e.g. can we lower the temperature at which the brain takes damage?

[Deon]

Yes we can. Also changing bleeding and heatdam rates of all tissues is needed. I did it to some extent in all of my mods, but the numbers are arbitrary there. If someone did some math or testing to represent it better, it would be cool.

[Igfig]

One interesting point is that large creatures like elephants tend to burn or melt properly instead of bleeding to death, if I remember correctly. I wonder why that is? All I can think of is that the square-cube law is making the skin on their heads proportionally thinner than that on their bodies, allowing the heat to reach their brains before it pierces their body skin layer.

Would you be able to share the details of your changes, Deon? I tried to fix heat-bleeding in the Modest Mod by decreasing SPEC_HEAT values for skin and fat, and, while it did work, the realism factor took a bit of a hit.

[Urist Da Vinci]

One interesting point is that large creatures like elephants tend to burn or melt properly instead of bleeding to death, if I remember correctly. I wonder why that is? All I can think of is that the square-cube law is making the skin on their heads proportionally thinner than that on their bodies, allowing the heat to reach their brains before it pierces their body skin layer.
...

Blood amount is proportional to creature size.
Blood loss rate is proportional to number of body parts, but NOT in any way to the size of the body parts (same as pain!).

Therefore large creatures bleed out longer, and die of the other causes first.

[Putnam]

By "proportional to creature size", btw, he means the total blood volume of a creature is literally its body size in centiliters.

[Igfig]

Ah, that makes perfect sense.

[Urist Da Vinci]

FUNCTIONAL tissues enable the organ loss flag and lose function (i.e. cyan eyes => blindness) under any of the following conditions:

1. The part or layer has been severed/is missing/gone.
2. The layer has been damaged or penetrated to 25% or more of its thickness.
3. The layer has a wound strain of 25000 or more.
4. The layer has 100 or more in the "impaired" syndrome.
5. The layer has been bruised/burned/frostbitten/melted/frozen/rotted/blistered by 75% or more.

Also interesting is that people who are "winded" because their brain has been rotten by Giant Desert Scorpion venom can be Struck Down by a single punch to the foot. This happens because the game does not constantly run the combat death code. The combat death code assumes that a lack of functional THOUGHT body parts means that the creature has been shot in the head, and instantly kills it. These winded people also tend to "burn to death" instantly upon contact with magma for similar reasons with the temperature death code.

EDIT: if it isn't clear, having your brain torn in DF by a weapon will set it to "organ loss " for a brief period of CPU time before the instantaneous death. If you can survive without it (such as due to having multiple brains or being a husk), this is easier to see.

[FallenAngel]

I can attest to your last point - in vanilla games, it's quite possible to see an organ-loss-labeled brain part on an Ettin or a Hydra.
On another note, it's possible to deal enough damage with a "bruising the brain" attack that the brain part is labeled as "broken", while still being described as "bruised".
Interestingly, when viewing the status screen of a dead citizen in Fortress Mode, it always prints "His/her/its upper body is gone".

[Urist Da Vinci]

...
Interestingly, when viewing the status screen of a dead citizen in Fortress Mode, it always prints "His/her/its upper body is gone".

That's only because ALL of the body is missing, and the upper body is the "root" body part. If you chop off someone's right hand and then their right arm, the game only tells you that the right arm is missing.

[scamtank]

Blood amount is proportional to creature size.
Blood loss rate is proportional to number of body parts, but NOT in any way to the size of the body parts (same as pain!).

Therefore large creatures bleed out longer, and die of the other causes first.

I'd like to add a little caveat here: the massive bleeding of major arteries seems to be to the order of 20-30% of the total blood maximum, every tick. It's nearly instant death for anything, from shrews to giants.

[GavJ]

By "proportional to creature size", btw, he means the total blood volume of a creature is literally its body size in centiliters.

nitpick: 1 cm^3 (which is what the size value is supposed to be, at least according to the wiki, and it lines up well with real world animals) = 1 milliliter, not centiliter

Centiliters would mean they have 10x more volume of blood than they have volume of everything.

[Putnam]

By "proportional to creature size", btw, he means the total blood volume of a creature is literally its body size in centiliters.

nitpick: 1 cm^3 (which is what the size value is supposed to be, at least according to the wiki, and it lines up well with real world animals) = 1 milliliter, not centiliter

Centiliters would mean they have 10x more volume of blood than they have volume of everything.

Nope. A creature with BODY_SIZE:70000 will have, on average, 7000 blood, so the body size in centiliters.

[Urist Da Vinci]

By "proportional to creature size", btw, he means the total blood volume of a creature is literally its body size in centiliters.

nitpick: 1 cm^3 (which is what the size value is supposed to be, at least according to the wiki, and it lines up well with real world animals) = 1 milliliter, not centiliter

Centiliters would mean they have 10x more volume of blood than they have volume of everything.

Nope. A creature with BODY_SIZE:70000 will have, on average, 7000 blood, so the body size in centiliters.

The in-game base size of a creature with the BODY_SIZE:70000 token is ... 7000. This is demonstratably true in 0.34.11 if you use DFHack. So their in-game blood volume is the same as their in-game base volume. I am not sure what that means for this argument.