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[Walkaboutout]

Uh. So. As the title says. I started a fort that's on an untamed wilds biome. There are evil biomes about but not on the fortress site. There is an evil biome like 3 squares away outside of the fortress site bounds, but even so if I got some affect from it, I should SEE it (clouds, rain, etc).

But, apparently something around the area exists such as it turns beings spontaneously into husks on the surface. I had just started a fortress on the site, was starting to dig out farms and a pasture area on the first couple soil levels. Then, I got a message that one of my miners (4 of 5 of them were down on the second level digging out the pasture area) had just assumed the position of expedition leader. It paused the game and I went, "Huh, what happened?"

I zoomed myself up to the surface and everything on said surface had been turned into heinous murk husks. Well almost all. Of the 30 units on the surface (wild animals, domestic animals, and dwarves), 28 were turned into husks. Two emus are sill unhusked. Also, my 4 miners under the surface were spared immediate consequences.

Mind you, this is in a non evil biome, and there was NO evil weather. No clouds coming through, no rains of an evil sort....nothing. Just blam, husks in your face!

Has anyone else had this happen to them on an embark? Clearly I'll be regenning this world altogether. This time around it was not my intent to be making an underground only fortress, and this will make that impossible. It's not even something I could dodge, like evil weather or murky mists, or something.

I've modded a few things in game but nothing beyond creatures and basic stuff, certainly nothing that might cause this. I've played many versions with my personal mods and never seen such a thing. This is however a world gen that has custom settings; particularly high savagery for the world and turned up numbers of good and evil square counts for total world generation.

Again though, those are things I've done for many many versions and I've never seen something quite like this. Easily the most terrifying thing I've ever had happen to a population of dwarves.

(EDIT: After unpausing the two emus that were spared were no longer spared. They husked too. All of the husks are "Opposed to life" and apparently hostile to each other as well. They're now killing one another.)

[DeKaFu]

This sounds almost exactly like what happened to me in my very first fort of the new version.
I ended up posting about it on the bug tracker: Bug 0009344

Based on that, I'm going to throw out a guess that what probably happened to you was that a random husked bird (or birds) flew onto your map covered in heinous murk, and it attacked either a dwarf or animal on the surface, transferring the murk covering to them and converting them into a husk. Then that victim attacked something else and spread it around, which in turn attacked something else, eventually culminating in the full zombie outbreak experience.

I never worked out whether the wildlife arrived on the map already infected or if it was somehow converted after arriving, but it was only ever birds, so it might be related to the bug where you can have embark locations that are good or neutral on the ground but evil a few z-levels up.

Of course I could be wrong and you could be dealing with an entirely different bug, but the end result sounds very similar to what I ended up dealing with.

I was really bitter about having to give up on that embark location, so I tried starting a second one in the same region, but that gave exactly the same results, so it affected the entire region. So yeah, making a new world is probably your best bet if you want to be sure to avoid it cropping up again…