So, Let's suppose I make an injectable venom.
Say this venom is extremely hot. Will (or better, how can i make) whatever I inject it into burst into flames?
Tried this myself a while ago. Repeatedly. Didn't work. Probably because venom isn't actually considered "inside" the recipient. Might change "soon," Toady's going to be reworking venom and mucking around with diseases.
Another probably dumb question, but how EXACTLY does item corpse work? I'm really bad at reading the wiki properly. Let's assume I want something that will boil the skin of everything living within a 5x5 area on death.
Possible?
I don't think you can do it like that, but you can give them an itemcorpse that produces a cloud of freezing doom (not boiling doom, but still a form of death). You can't change the size of the gas cloud, as far as I know (if I remember correctly, the cloud extends about 2-3 tiles in each cardinal direction, forming a diamond-shape).
Give it this tag:
[ITEMCORPSE:STONE:NO_SUBTYPE:STONE:DEATH]
And add this stone to your stone raws (matgloss_stone_mineral.txt, I believe, though technically you can put it in any of the four matgloss_stone files; it's the tags of the entries that determine the type of the stone, not the location):
[MATGLOSS_STONE:DEATH]
[NAME:death][COLOR:5:7:1][TILE:'H']
[ITEM_SYMBOL:'*']
[VALUE:1500]
[MELTING_POINT:0]
[BOILING_POINT:1]
[SOLID_DENSITY:1]
Increasing the density MIGHT cause the cloud to expand slower and last longer, but that was a long time ago and I might have just had wildly varying FPS when I tried that.
If you give it an environment, you'll get veins or clusters of it that explode when you mine them out, but caravans (the dwarves in particular) will also randomly explode once in a while. Not that that's necesarily a "bad" thing, but it gets irritating after a while.
You can't make a weapon part of a creature. You can make weapons out of creature parts (especially if that part is a bone), but not the former.