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[CulixCupric]

what do you do when the number of dead citizens outnumber the number of living citizens?
What methods do you use to dispose of the dead?

[Skullsploder]

Just assign everyone to masonry, build loads of workshops, and churn out coffins. Meanwhile have someone mine out space to put the coffins. In 42.xx taverns and libraries provide enough happy thoughts to prevent everyone from becoming suicidal.

[Findulidas]

Cushion the bad thoughts with something. I usually have legendary dining rooms and go out of my way to make good food and  good living rooms for every last dwarf. Like last post though its not so much a problem anymore.

Making coffins quick enough is usuall not a problem for me, but that might be cos I have 2-3 dwarves dedicated solely to masonry on my average 100 dwarf fort. Doors, stuff for each dwarf room, tables and chairs for the legendary dining room, blocks for my projects... I mean you gotta have masons for that and masterwork stuff makes so many happy thoughts.

[Groeneappel]

I tend to have a tomb prepared with a large amount of coffins beforehand. The bigger issue is dealing with dorfs that don't have a body to recover. I often forget or dont notice that in time and get ghosts.

[Miuramir]

what do you do when the number of dead citizens outnumber the number of living citizens?
What methods do you use to dispose of the dead?

Long before the current version, one of my earlier forts had a serious problem, after a technically successful attempt to counter-attack and break a siege went quite badly.  At one point I was down to two or three functioning dwarves, all of them on the ragged edge of insanity and only cheering up when they snapped for a moment and smashed something.   I had resigned myself to seeing the fort to crumble to its end at any moment, but migrants showed up suddenly and saved the fort. 

The first order of the migrants was building coffins, digging tombs, building doors, and hauling stuff (especially corpses).  Once the danger had passed, I decided that in memory of those hard times, going forward no adult dwarf (immigrant or recently grown up) would become a "true citizen" until they had carved a coffin with their own hands, dug out a few squares of tomb, and carried their own coffin to put it in place.  "Being a Dwarf on the frontier means living life knowing you could die at any moment, and having a tomb carved out of the living rock open and ready for you when your time comes."  (As a side effect, everyone naturally ended up with a few points of masonry and mining in case of emergencies.) 

The extensive tomb quarter of that fort was far from the elaborate vaulted halls full of fine engravings and sculpture I've created in other forts; but it was *personal*.  No matter how many gold statues and gem-encrusted cabinets you had earned over the years, sitting at the center of all that opulence in your tomb was the crude stone coffin you had hacked out with your own hands at the very beginning of your journey as a Dwarf, waiting for you to finish the cycle. 

[smithist]

I tend to have a tomb prepared with a large amount of coffins beforehand. The bigger issue is dealing with dorfs that don't have a body to recover. I often forget or dont notice that in time and get ghosts.

A memorial will still put them to rest, even if they're already a ghost.

OP: Assuming you're talking about citizen corpses, basically churn out coffins and slabs. Everyone else: into the magma they go.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

"You know the key strategic weakness of the dwarven race? The dead outnumber the living."

Everyone else: into the magma they go.

DON'T CREMATE THEM!   

[Crashmaster]

Urist McZombie has been re-elected.

[FrisianDude]

"You know the key strategic weakness of the dwarven race? The dead outnumber the living."

also true for basically every species on this greenish blueish earth

[Henry47]

It was a reference to doctor who, a british science fiction tv show.

[Saiko Kila]

If the dead are not moving… is that really a problem if you have a hundred or a thousand of them? I mean I had issues with transporting corpses of attackers, breakdowns and such, but it was my bad - I wanted to have a clean front garden, so to say. But that was a mistake, automatic cleaning is much less stressful.

Of course it would be disrespectful to automatically burn and clean bodies of citizens unless there's an emergency, but I suppose the sole fact of raising an issue means there's an emergency. So do like they do during plagues in the real world: dig a hole, flush the dead, fill in with magma.
:

[Chief10]

I definitely took OP's question to mean what do you do when there are more zombies on your map than dwarves.

But if it's about corpse disposal, I don't worry too much about it in this version because insanity and even high-stress is pretty rare. If worse comes to worst, I just put all my extra coffins in the dining room for burial, and then deconstruct them one by one as the tomb rooms are carved out.