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[mross]

Is this reincarnation or something? No message of this message on the wiki and I don't see the name anywhere in unit list.

[Shonai_Dweller]

What version are you playing?
What mods are you using?
What message did you get?
What happened on screen?

A little information might help someone answer you. Otherwise most people will assume you made a mistake and a ghost standing over a regular dwarf just wandered off through a wall.

[StarWars1981]

What is this dwarf? Any special traits, his history, how he died, whether he was a WEREBEAST may help, vampirism/necromancy etc. Everything that may be related. Plus this should be an interesting story if you haven't just missed a trick lol. I mean, it's not like there's much going on, but you might've missed something.

[mross]

@Shonai
43.03
no mods

unknown, this happened a little while ago, had to go back through the logs to find it. probable this was shortly after loss of a few dwarfs to a night creature attack

@SW1981
expendable immigrant, no special qualities. died from an injury caused by early attack before hospital could be set up

[mross]

New problem, I just noticed I have a guy haunting my fortress, and he's already been buried. free coffins available. will try engraving slab.

E: never mind, it says he's the owner of that coffin, not that he's entombed there. weird.

[klefenz]

E: never mind, it says he's the owner of that coffin, not that he's entombed there. weird.

that would mean he had the coffin assigned to him but his body was never actually put there

[mross]

can dwarves claim ownership of coffins like they do with beds?

[muldrake]

can dwarves claim ownership of coffins like they do with beds?

I don't think the one using it can claim it, for obvious reasons, but I've certainly seen people end up buried in tombs in my nobles' suites if I made it a tomb but didn't assign it to anyone.  So dwarves can and will certainly bury dwarves in unclaimed coffins.  This might have been under the influence of an autolabor or auto-something in dfhack.

[PatrikLundell]

In order to bury a dorf a coffin has to be assigned, which is typically done automatically by vanilla DF when free coffins are available. Once a coffin has been claimed/assigned, it's a matter of hauling the remains there (as there's now a target for hauling tasks). However, the body (parts) may not always be accessible (drowned dorfs tend to leave bodies at the bottom of whatever body of water they drowned in, for instance), so it may require an overseer intervention to allow the retrieval of the body, and may take long enough for a ghost to appear, so having a slab ready is prudent (and you can slab them anyway, if you want to ensure no ghost will rise).

[Shonai_Dweller]

Discussion of coffins is nice, but does anyone actually know why the ghost transformed into a dwarf? Has anyone seen this before?

[FantasticDorf]

If you have a save it'd be valuable to upload this to Mantis if you haven't already.

The only other place i have seen something like this happen is with DFhack, where a GM edited creature will change back into its original form (for some unknown reason often crashing the game & being persistent instead of just changing) in addition, this would be a ghost (a "living" unit) experiencing a similar conversion bug & transforming back into its prior form which is now alive because the ghost was actively "living".

Very strange, did the burial go smoothly?

> There are some corpse bugs going around at the moment, including that corpse burying is inconsistent (like patrick mentioned, slabs are safer)

> The messages for 'Being Struck Down' were omitted from the ver 42.XX string dump so if its anything related to death we'd know.

> After you've saved your game, could you make a backup (copy & paste region folder in 'data - save') and then read out the historical links for that dwarf to get some death/life dates? (if you haven't been using DFhack to just read data)

[StagnantSoul]

Wondering, was this person a were? There may be some random bug going about with them and their ghosts transforming back to their regular selves, Toady breaks things silently in odd fashions at times.

[silhouette]

Wondering, was this person a were? There may be some random bug going about with them and their ghosts transforming back to their regular selves, Toady breaks things silently in odd fashions at times.

This seems like the most likely cause, seems like some SCIENCE to be done, potential immortality for dwarfs if this is the case?

[steel jackal]

Wondering, was this person a were? There may be some random bug going about with them and their ghosts transforming back to their regular selves, Toady breaks things silently in odd fashions at times.

This seems like the most likely cause, seems like some SCIENCE to be done, potential immortality for dwarfs if this is the case?

lets assume that this is true, that a werebeast that dies and returns as a ghost will transform upon a full moon.
two questions, why did the ghost change directly into a dwarf, rather than a werebeast? and if a dwarf is revived in this manner more than once would they return as a murderous ghost?

a possible theory is that the ghost came during a time when a werebeast should be transformed and then when the transformation period was over they were reverted to normal.

[mross]

I think I've figured out the likeliest cause: he was infected by a werebeast that attacked the fort, then later turned. Military killed him while he was in were-form. Since this was very early in the fort's life, I didn't even have any coffins yet, so he started haunting, and must have been in were-form as a ghost. While haunting, he turned back into dwarf-form.

Regarding the burial: I think, "this coffin is owned by so-and-so" may actually just be the regular message you see when Q-ing a coffin that has been tagged for burial, but the body hasn't been interred yet; the only reason I hadn't seen it before is that I don't keep a close eye on my coffins, and dwarfs usually get buried quickly. I ended up engraving a slab for this guy, and that put him to rest as normal, then later his body got buried in the coffin.

Just to be extra clear: these were two separate dwarfs. The burial thing and the ghostly were-chef were independent incidents. Also, the ghost didn't actually transform into a physical, flesh and blood dwarf. Just changed states. I laid him to rest as normal with no problems.

Completely unrelated, but this isn't really worth making its own thread for: is there a way to see the name of your group (not your fort) after embarking?