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[lazyname]

How many of you out there tried to create a sustainable fortress in an Evil region? How successful was it and what entertaining situations came from it?

[steel jackal]

i tried an evil biome once, died upon unpausing.
it may have just been bad luck that i spawned surrounded by hostiles, but that one time has put me off from doing fully evil embarks

[anewaname]

One biome was reanimating and had snot rain that stunned living things. Routinely, birds would fly into my region, get stunned while flying, crash and die, then reanimate. Every new bird was a source of amusement. The fort could have been successful just by keeping the gates sealed but where is the fun in that?

[StarWars1981]

Oh yes, Terrifying surroundings are fun. Main issue is the evil weather syndromes, I've had a husking syndrome and a flesh-rotting one. One was a dust cloud, the other a fog or something. No evil rains though ... no raining elf blood or whatnot that burns tissues off slowly or anything.

They're not hard, they can be entertaining as you watch unfortunate dwarves melt or such, at least until it's your military or metalsmithing brigade that dissolves in evil goblin-blood rain.
They're a nice challenge for any player; recommend you understand what you're getting into first.

[Pirate Santa]

They can also be really disappointing. I once decided to challenge myself with a terrifying glacier.
The goblin blood snow freaked people out, but nothing else.
The local wildlife was a pain in the arse for a year or so until I got a militia going, then no challenge at all.
I did smooth & engrave a road directly into the ice though which was neat.
In the end I got bored and cracked open the HFS just to watch everything burn.

[Immortal-D]

There are varying degrees of Evil, although RNG is definitely a factor, as was mentioned.  My current Fortress has a Haunted Ocean bordering a Joyous Grasslands.  Anything which dies along the coastline returns as a zombie, creating an interesting dynamic when trying to mark the borders underground (a region's alignment is completely vertical, extending all the way down to magma).

[gchristopher]

Once you've handled reanimation and evil weather (mostly by limiting corpses, good garbage handling, turtling, decontamination trenches, and defense checkpoints as fallbacks), then your primary problem will be FPS-death from cavern zombie accumulation. That's what eventually kills all my forts, most of which have at least 50% interesting evil (reanimation, husk) area.

[PatrikLundell]

The main problem with evil reanimating embarks is the unkillable head (skin/hair), which keeps me from it until that's fixed. Evil rain/mist is another major issue, as it will wreak havoc with caravans and migrants alike. Clearing out caverns of their FPS eating hordes of reanimated remains is quite a task as well.

vjek provided a really messed up embark which was quite a challenge to manage:
- Reanimating
- No water anywhere
- The only trees were blood-thorn in the 3:rd cavern.
- Lethal surface temperatures. When something was touched by the blood rain they bleed to death with a delay so they'd frequently get at least some of the way inside.
- Caged animals brought by caravans frequently died from melting body fat (leaving blotches on the ground), and teleported out of the cages on reanimation (which frequently happened quite a few days later, so the dorfs were busy hauling stuff to the trade depot) when it happened).
- I think there wasn't any metal either, although the caravans provided that.
- Bugged pathing, so regardless of traffic designations, the idiots insisted on walking on the surface rather than in the tunnels when trying to provide new entrances for quick underground entry, even when the tunnel access was a straight line without level changes.

[joeclark77]

Re-animating undead corpses are fun for a while, but it gets old fast, so when I've done this I've usually put my dwarves on a border between biomes.  Build your fortress (at least the gate) on the non-reanimating part.  That allows you to fight plenty of zombies but eventually kill them.  You can keep it going for several years if you have a heavily fortified gate with lots of marksdwarves, and cage traps.  I also like to build marksdwarf "pillboxes" for these maps with underground access, so you can fight invaders or wildlife without having to leave the fort.

[NonconsensualSurgery]

Here in Cog, zombie attacks are a fact of life. Please collect your silver warhammer, bite-resistant leather armor, metal helmet, and wooden shield at the door. Practice regularly.

Do not leave corpses unattended. All garbage, dead pets, and fallen comrades are to be brought to the volcano for disposal. Don't be a drag, engrave a slab!

In the event of zombie attack, don't show them your back. It can take several valuable seconds for the heavy militia to arrive and until they do it is up to you, Urist McPotash, to hold the line. Running in circles screaming is not a valid military strategy and will get you killed faster.

In the event of zombie skin attack, listen for changes in burrow assignment. This is directing you to a safe zone protected by cage traps.

Life expectancy is quite long in Cog ever since the caverns were purged with magma and walled up. Once upon a time before we had good armor it was a bit of a meatgrinder but these days you could live long enough to die of old age or a workplace accident instead.

[King Kitteh]

My first attempt, instantly got murdered by zombie ogres.

Shrek wasn't having any of it.

[Vomitmaster]

First attempt, Frozen haunted volcano, was like "aw yeah, i can do like that hall of fame fortress" so i immediately dig down.

The whole peak i was on collapses in on itself, kills everyone but one guy, he's crippled and now giant bone eagles show up. Well that was quick.

[Lordhermitcrab]

I got absolutely wrecked in v34.01 by zombie crows. There's a whole fortress dedicated to killing HFS with zombie crows on here somewhere; perhaps that puts into perspective how demonic these bastards were before things kinda got patched.

[SebasMarolo]

I once embarked on the coast of a terrifying ocean. I wanted to catch sea monsters, ok? Thing was, the ocean was frozen, and some Urist decided the middle of the ice was the perfect spot to park the wagon. Most dwarfs drowned a couple of seconds after I unpaused, only two survivors, with no resources and no tools. All dead to zombie ravens. Also, the coastline had obsidian cliffs and it had started raining goblin blood.

[Fleeting Frames]

That might be slightly worse than parking your wagon in the middle of a pack of zombie hydras.