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[Driverman]

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.

[vjek]

Make your garbage dump a 2Z+ deep hole, and drop everything in there.  Even if it re-animates, no big deal, they can't crawl out.  Then, later, you can drop magma down there and vaporize them, if you want.

At least, that's how I've done it.

As far as the clouds go, get underground immediately, as the very first thing you do, dig a down stair, excavate a small room in the first soil layer (5x5), designate the entire room as a stockpile to hold everything/anything, deconstruct your wagon, designate the 5x5 as a meeting area, and voila; relative safety.

Use a wagon log to build a carpenter shop, and use another log to build a wooden door between your up stairs and the 5x5 soil room, and you should be good until your first migrant wave arrives.

[Sadrice]

Throwing stuff in a hole works, but just a plain hole will cause problems.  When something reanimates in the bottom of the hole, it will terrify dwarves on dumping duty, who will just drop their hauled corpse at the lip of the hole and run screaming.  Repeated attempts to dump can eventually get it in the hole, but it has good odds of reanimating first.  You could use blind dwarves or vampires for corpse hauling duties, or just dig a new hole every time you have problems, but that's a pain. 

Putting magma in the hole will clear out corpses and parts, but not actual zombies, which are immune to heat, so you need a way to rekill the zombies first.  Atom smashing works well, but will fail for large zombies (will work on large corpses, though).  Putting traps in the bottom of the hole also helps, but some zombies are trap avoid, such as zombies of dwarves that had previously seen the trap.  The best solution that I know of is to use a dumping track stop to drop boulders down the hole, killing any zombies within so they can be incinerated (I got the idea from FurnaceClans).  You could dump the boulders by hand but you will have the same problem with canceled dump orders.  If you are dumping into magma, make sure to do it from at least 4 Zs up, as magma mist can extend 3 Zs above the surface when large corpses are dumped.

If you're interested in survival on terrifying embarks, read the single pick challenge threads.  Nothing is impossible, just very difficult.  Here's the first one, which was kinda short, and the more recent one, which was very long and very educational.

[RocheLimit]

I agree that a pit would be the easiest solution.

In DF2012, when butchering your pack animals gave you one skin and one hair each, you could roll the dice and Spin the hair into thread.  This thread, as I understand it, could only be used in the hospital, but spinning it removed its ability to reanimate.  In DF2014, however, you have a stack of hair from each butcher job, that requires repeated Spin Thread jobs at the farmer's workshop.

Long story short,
easy solution: dump both hair and skin down a hole. 
medium solution: dump hair down hole and tan skin. 
hard solution: tan skin and mass spin hair into thread.

The danger posed by reanimated skin and hair diminishes rapidly once you get your fort going and have a military, traps, magma, etc.  I've also used cage traps and retracting bridges to separate the reanimating bits from the rest.

[vjek]

Hm, I thought I built a 0.40.x+ fort that had a magma hallway that melted zombies...

Yeah, it was fixed in 40.01.

As far as the cancellations from dumping, I found two things help.  First, put the dump designation diagonally to the hole, rather than orthogonally, and/or have them dump through a diagonal 2-wall gap. 
Second, make the hole more than 2Z levels deep, and they can't see the bottom, so they can't be afraid.
The diagonal 2-wall gap also prevents magma mist from vaporizing them, even with shallow garbage dumps.

[gchristopher]

If it's still a problem, maybe put magma-safe upright spears down in the pit to kill undead so the magma can burn up their remains?

I'd probably just leave a perpetual motion minecart grinder down there.

[peridot]

Deep dumping - 4+ z-levels is probably a good idea - not only keeps undead from crawling out, it keeps your dwarves from being shocked to see body parts. And if you later pour magma in, it's deep enough to avoid magma mist problems (I think). And if something does reanimate, simply designating stones to be dumped will dump them on its head. If you access it only through a diagonal crack, miasma stays in too.

The challenge here, of course, is that at first you risk having an aquifer so shallow you can't actually dig this deep until you get through it. But a shallow hole, replaced every time you have trouble, ought to solve the problem. Unless zombies start climbing out. For that matter, even the deep hole should probably be made of smoothed natural stone or have overhangs (1x1 shaft entering 3x3 room, say) to keep zombies from climbing out.

As for initial turtling, I always (if I can) dig a U-bend and then slap a floor hatch over the entrance, since building destroyers can't get through from below.

[Slogo]

If you do need to butcher and don't have a dumping site setup you can also just use a bunch of workshops and make sure you have dwarves quickly processing the remains while other guards stand on guard duty.

Cage Traps can also work to replace the guards.

If all else fails you can also pen animals behind a locked door or a wall and just leave them to die.

[Sadrice]

Hm, I thought I built a 0.40.x+ fort that had a magma hallway that melted zombies...

Yeah, it was fixed in 40.01.

Huh, I wondered if pulping would fix that, but I haven't messed with zombies in 40.x yet, and the wiki still says they're fire immune. 

I didn't know dump designations could work diagonally, that's really handy.

Has anyone confirmed whether or not zombies will attempt to climb out?

[Skullsploder]

Zombies will attempt to climb out if they see one of your dwarves, but not at any other time. Also, the best solution is probably dumping onto a spike trap linked to a lever set on repeat or a a pressure plate in a frequently used corridor. That way, anything that reanimates will quickly be torn to slivers, again and again, until there's nothing to reanimate.

[Melting Sky]

I'ld just like to add that cage traps and doors are you best friends in a reanimating biome. Try to make sure you put extra cage traps and doors across even your interior hallways particularly those hallways that lead to the dump, butcher or other areas where the dead are being processed in some manner and key areas such as your dinning hall. It seems like a waste of time until years later something goes wrong and you have a bunch of undead moose hair heading for the heart of your fortress terrorizing civilians.

I find simple doors and cage traps to be a very cheap measures of redundancy that can be the difference between a trivial mistake being a minor annoyance and a serious problem. A compartmentalized design with liberal use of redundant doors/hatches can limit other dangers as well such as flooding, defensive breaches etc. Even the accidental discovery of the HFS can generally be held back simply with well placed hatches. They take very little time and resources to make and may just save your fortress someday. The more dangerous your environment is, the important it becomes to build in redundant fall back points. 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.
 

[ZzarkLinux]

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.

For the climbing thing, I have build chambers where the chute drops into the middle, so I guess that would hold them. Side view

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[Ruhn]

I find simple doors and cage traps to be a very cheap measures of redundancy that can be the difference between a trivial mistake being a minor annoyance and a serious problem. A compartmentalized design with liberal use of redundant doors/hatches can limit other dangers as well such as flooding, defensive breaches etc. Even the accidental discovery of the HFS can generally be held back simply with well placed hatches. They take very little time and resources to make and may just save your fortress someday. The more dangerous your environment is, the important it becomes to build in redundant fall back points. 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.

This.  This puts the FORTRESS in DF.

[escondida]

What works for me is to quickly dig a pit, as mentioned by others here, put a hatch over it so that you can lock it if need be and to prevent the dorfs from being terrified, and dump the animals down it while they're still alive. Horrific animal cruelty? Yes, because the first grazers treated this way will starve, and because all future animals will be mauled by zombies. But it does work for keeping the place safeish.

[Sanctume]

A 5-z pit works that even when re-animation happens, the dwarf above does not see and get scared. 
I also build an atom smasher on the bottom.

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z:0 wwh  where w=wall, h=channel, j=stairs down
    jiw             

z-1 wwh
    xww  where x=up/down stairs

z-2 wwh
    xww

z-3 wwh
    xww

z-4 wwh
    xww

z-5 lwB  where l=lever, B=raising bridge/atom smasher
    uCB        C= constructed wall, u=stairs up