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[Detros]

One thing to watch out for since it may not have been fixed in the new version is that your own dwarves can sometimes get stuck in cage traps if they fall asleep or are otherwise incapacitated while on top of them. I lost a God tier legendary axelord that way once. It was truly sad to find such legendary dwarf starved to death in one of my own cage traps.

AFAIK it works still that way and I don't see what is there to fix. Units that can otherwise go around traps (your dwarves, pets, liaisons) will be caught by them if they are immobilized (unconscious from cave-in, asleep, caught in webs). Better to check periodically what has been caught in cage traps and in case you manage to unintentionally capture one of yours leave them out in time.

OP: See how Roomcarnage dealt with zombies with combination of doors, pits, cages and magma.

[Skullsploder]

You can butcher things, like in Roomcarnage, by surrounding the butcher shop with cages. The reason youshouldn't butcher things is that it's unnecessary risk: it will create a skin that, when reanimated, is as bad as the full creature. A really fun exploit in a reanimating biome is buying animals from the caravan, butchering them in the middle of a bunch of cage traps, then selling the hair, skin, and assorted reanimated bits back to them for the same price as the full animal each.

Another excellent way of dealing with reanimating biomes, especially if you've had a few sieges, is to draft everyone into squads that don't need any armour but do have "individual choice, melee." That way your dwarves will dogpile anything they see inside the fort and maybe even win.

Consider equipping them with crossbows as well, so that they will first shoot for a bit instead of immediately dogpiling everything they see.

[Vyro]

Okay this seems like a right thread to go to.


Game, this is bullshit. Unadulterated bullshit. I used to like reanimating terrifying embarks a lot for the way they force you to think. That everything, even your own dorfs, can suddenly end you if you relax just a bit. The real challenge, however, laid in maintaining FPS reasonable while eliminating swarms of undead and piles of junk inevitably covering the surface in thick layer. I was creative, I built cunning contraptions, and it was genuine DF fun. Then something seemed to change.

I was doing great, maintaining sizable population and pretty clean surface (meh, thank the lack of invaders for that) when FPS counter took a hit. I checked the readings and noticed the start of what I call the "undead plague" sweep. You see, in terrifying places cavern layers are your safe heaven with all you need to live and more. Cavern critters are well alive and don't bother you much. That is, until something hits something on the head too hard. Usually a runaway FB, a crundle. Which starts a powerful cascade of reanimations that sweeps through the entire cavern layer, turning it into an extra hell plagued with eternal combat reports. Ironically, the FB that caused this nonsense is usually among the first to join the undead ranks. My natural response to that is setting up extermination facilities to keep the numbers low. I rarely have enough forces to overtake the caverns entirely with how reanimation works.

I went about my usual business while FPS kept plummeting down. When it hit 15 it was all too late. Excruciatingly slowly built grinders immediately went out of order, the traps got overwhelmed, and I sent in the hammerlords as a last ditch effort. With a really curious result. An entire squad has failed to knock out *one single gorlak corpse* ten on one while loosing two men in the process, who I might add were wearing full iron with silver hammers.

I cringed and unfolded DFHack. This is not my way of doing things, but the situation was hilariously dire. A quick exterminate undead command yielded nothing. Like, literally nothing. The FPS upped from 6 to ~10 and that's it. Autodumping all ~1k+ crap assortment into the smasher did the same - Jack Didley. And that one made me put on my thinking cap after I abandoned.

So, the old hippie way of "you don't bother them they won't bother you" doesn't work anymore - the plague sweep starts without you. Cage traps eliminate undead slower than they multiply and drain your workforce a lot. Weapon traps are effective but tend to clog up on extreme numbers and drain your workforce a lot too. FBs outright ignore them, and those are *undead* FBs too. Not to mention I haven't tested weapon traps against new tougher undead. Head-on approach turned out absolutely horrible with everyone dying. Copper bolts seem to be bouncing off zombie crundles too, their damage got fixed recently (civil defence plan is ditched now). Smashers don't work either with the abundance of bigger creatures in lower caverns. Installing a "pre-mincer" just multiplied the threats - apparently a living blind cave ogre finger still breaks the bridge just as well as a whole ogre did. FBs again. Undead still don't burn in magma. Cheating doesn't work too.


So, to sum it up we have exponentially multiplying by themselves undead monsters that can't be smashed, trapped, burned, hammered or shot, that cause a permanent FPS drain even if you do. That seems like an overkill to me. Okay, I still haven't tried the two last options. Bum-rush cavern wall-off and cave-in traps. But where do I get enough workforce to make it work so fast?

[Sadrice]

People in this thread claimed that burning undead works now.  Have you actually tried it to confirm that it doesn't?

[Skullsploder]

I've heard lots of reports of undead burning now. A magma flood should solve your cavern problems. Weapons traps work well if you have a crapton of copper. I had 70 spiked balls in 7 weapons traps before I got my military and civilian militia up and running, and stationing the small military I had at the end of the trap corridor succeded in killing a 30 unit undead siege with very few casualties. And those are undead with arnour and weapons and most importantly shields. The pre-mincer may not work for bridges but it certainly helps your soldiers.

Oh yeah and don't bother with hammers. Utterly useless against the new undead - far too little contact area. About 50/50 blades and maces is how I do it, and it seems to work well. The blades chop the undead up until the pieces are small enough that the macedwarves can pulp them in 1 hit, and naturally the maces occasionally get a pulping hit on the head or upper body of a fully functioning undead.

Main problem with that approach though is the gore fountain you get. Swords and axes run in first and fingers and hands and legs and feet and teeth and heads and suddenly there are 400 new pieces of refuse to dump.

[Slogo]

In 2014 burning undead does work you can test it in arena. Though I didn't try submerging undead in magma; just dropping magma on their heads. The cavern undead plague is quite real and quite dangerous. At the peak of my struggle with it I was seeing 50-100 undead zombies being created in a season. This was actually for a fortress Tuftedstockades I am writing about here: http://imgur.com/a/eWDgH . I did find a solution accidentally, but it's a bit of a one off thing I suppose.

The only real way to deal with it is somehow stave off the growth and get to a manageable number, then stay on top of it with military and traps as the fortress develops. I actually like that setup, it adds a new sort of interest to the renanimating embarks. Not only do you need to watch out for undead, but you have to proactively combat them to stay alive.

[enolate]

I don't bother with zombie biomes anymore because this bug makes zombies unkillable. I wish it would get fixed, because it ruins a good feature.

I hear you. Zombies have had one annoying bug or another for years. There needs to be a balance between repeated part regeneration and permanent destruction. It just gets annoying.

[utunnels]

I use cage traps near the entrance of the refuse and butchery area. I thought undead wil chase the fleeing workers/haulers and got caught.
Problem is, sometimes dorfs don't flee from the undead and decide to fight.

As for the bug, it also happens to normal creatures. For example, if a dorf got his hand cut off, he will still strike with that hand (or probaly receive blows to that part), resulting a "pass right through" effect. A zombie feather/hair can miss ALL its body parts, making them impossible to kill.

[Reelya]

Funny that my last thread was about terrifying embarks being too weak in some cases. Well, I found one that has reanimation, thralling clouds, etc, and I'm not really sure how it would be possible to beat it without never slaughtering anything. The reason I say this is because my dwarfs slaughtered a horse before it starved due to having nothing to graze (any suggestions?) and then I had horse hairs menacing all of my dwarves. No matter how many times I took them down, they jusy kept attacking. They couldn't hurt my dwarves but they did this until dehydration started killing, at which point the resulting undead dwarf made quick work of everyone else. Has anybody overcome this? I really like the challenges of an undead biome but this seems excessive. I remember in a previous version that evil biomes were much more like a haunted forest than a writhing wasteland of eyeballs and tentacles where you get attacked by hairs.

Drop the animal down a pit with a locked hatch before it dies. Don't butcher it. Evil biomes are tough. I've had ones with clouds that turn dwarves into husks. You basically have to get underground asap, and build up a small above-ground fortress when you're able, being careful to get everyone underground when possible. They're very hard biomes to get control of, but you get that feeling of satisfation by getting into a position to dominate them. Trying to protect caravans on maps with deadly clouds could prove tricky though.

One thing I'd do on re-animating maps is to make the fortress as a number of divided sections, and build trap systems between the sections. This will help prevent your whole fortress collapsing from within if a dwarf dies and is reanimated.