Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PatrikLundell]

What are the criteria for when a (formerly) sapient creature's remains are eligible for burial?
The wiki page on Coffin (as redirected to from Death), seems to indicate citizens, caravan guards (and presumably merchants?) should be available for burial once the body has been discovered "officially". It also seems to indicate dwarven visitors from other civs would be eligible, although that may just be wordings remaining from before visitors were introduced. Also, diplomats are not mentioned on the wiki page (and I don't know if they can be buried or not).
Basically, I look for rules that can be applied to determine if someone would be eligible for burial or not.

The second question is about cause of death. As far as I can determine, there are two ways for a unit to die:
1. Being a domesticated unit that's slaughtered. This is indicated by the "killed" flag being set as well as the "slaughter" flag. No incident report is generated, so the time of death cannot be determined.
2. Anything else. This is indicated by the "killed" flag being set and the death cause field referencing an incident report containing the details.
3?. Is there any case where no incident report is generated for a killed unit that wasn't slaughtered? Given that units away on raids are removed from the fortress set of units, ones killed on raids might not get any incident reports either, but they don't produce any bodies (at least not at the time this is written), and so cannot be buried.

[Saiko Kila]

The second question is about cause of death. As far as I can determine, there are two ways for a unit to die:
1. Being a domesticated unit that's slaughtered. This is indicated by the "killed" flag being set as well as the "slaughter" flag. No incident report is generated, so the time of death cannot be determined.
2. Anything else. This is indicated by the "killed" flag being set and the death cause field referencing an incident report containing the details.

I had slaughtered three bunnies recently, during a siege. To my surprise I was able to engrave slabs for them, though it wasn't the first time I could do so (but first in current game version). The slabs give year of death, and lists them as slaughtered. Somehow they became historical figures during slaughtering, and that's why the cause of death and year can be determined. Only historical figures have it, but what causes a figure to become historical is fuzzy. I mean there are obvious ways, but the example of my bunnies shows there are other, mysterious ways.

As for the burial eligibility (and the same goes for engraving rights) I have no idea. It seems too random. When zombies kill a bunch of visitors, only some of them are eligible for burial, and some are not eligible even for engraving. Finding the bodies usually unlocks engraving, but often not burial. None of my buried people are from other civs, I checked that. They can be from other population (like monster slayers), but the Civ ID is the same.

[PatrikLundell]

@Saiko Kila: Thanks for those pieces of the puzzle.

Interesting that the slaughtering of a hist fig animal leaves a time of death behind. It sounds like something that ought to be investigated.

I have one visitor who's buried in my 0.44.X fortress, for some unknown reason. Since I'm playing a civ that's truly dead, this visitor can't be from my civ. However, the hundreds of killed infiltrators haven't led to additional burial, nor has any of the rather significant number of visitors that have been killed by goblin invaders.

In the past I have seen the discrepancy between those that can be slabbed and those that can be buried, but I haven't seen a pattern in that either. I'm playing with culling of unimportant hist figs, and that might possibly have something to do with it.

[Saiko Kila]

Interesting that the slaughtering of a hist fig animal leaves a time of death behind. It sounds like something that ought to be investigated.

It seems only historical figures have place for storing cause of death and details. Certainly "deathcause" script requires that (won't work with non-histfigs). I don't know why animals can rarely become historical figures without a reason (the bunnies were just born, and I dispensed of them almost immediately). They got their histfig status somehow, so all events related to them could be stored.

I have one visitor who's buried in my 0.44.X fortress, for some unknown reason. Since I'm playing a civ that's truly dead, this visitor can't be from my civ. However, the hundreds of killed infiltrators haven't led to additional burial, nor has any of the rather significant number of visitors that have been killed by goblin invaders.

Have you checked his civ id, pop id or other ids, from body part? Maybe he is a silent survivor, generated in some way as a gift from gods.

Anyway, it seems that for now I cannot cause foreigners (other Civ ID than mine) to be buried.

[PatrikLundell]

As far as I can see from the deathcause script (not being familiar with ruby), it can determine the death cause of a unit if a unit is selected, but requires it to be a hist fig if an item (such as a corpse [part]) is selected. Thus, it ought to work from the dead units list even for non hist figs if the death cause isn't slaughtering.

For a non hist fig unit, death info is extracted from an incident report (and there isn't one if the unit was slaughtered), but for a hist fig a history event is located instead, and it may well be that those can contain slaughtering as well (I haven't checked).

I suspect the script would fail to print anything (rather than "is not dead yet") in the case of examination of a lopped off body part from a hist fig that left the map alive, as the script incorrectly uses the unit.flags1.dead field (which has been misidentified: it's really something akin to "inactive") rather than the "killed" field (I think that's under flags2).

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

You might be able to fiddle with announcements.txt in order to generate slaughter reports.

[PatrikLundell]

You might be able to fiddle with announcements.txt in order to generate slaughter reports.

I'm not interested in seeing reports of slaughters. I'm interested in extracting information from DF's data structures, so announcements are of no help to me.

[Saiko Kila]

As far as I can see from the deathcause script (not being familiar with ruby), it can determine the death cause of a unit if a unit is selected, but requires it to be a hist fig if an item (such as a corpse [part]) is selected. Thus, it ought to work from the dead units list even for non hist figs if the death cause isn't slaughtering.

For a non hist fig unit, death info is extracted from an incident report (and there isn't one if the unit was slaughtered), but for a hist fig a history event is located instead, and it may well be that those can contain slaughtering as well (I haven't checked).

I'd say it's quite limited info, because death cause is always absent (printed as "none") for non-histfig, no matter the actual cause. For histfig slaughtered, the proper cause of death is listed as "cause: slaughter". For non-histfig, it has to be interpreted.

Also for histfig sometimes the mechanism involved produces funny "info". For example I have a troll, who died because of infection. But still it says it's killed by some dwarf. Said dwarf was not a bacterium or a virus, but a baron consort who himself died properly bleeding to death after being mauled by a beak dog.