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[Graygan]

Ok... I admit it... I'm a bit of a nut when it comes to keeping things clean.

I've got this beautiful white floor of Chalk in my main meeting hall.  It's covered with so many engravings that every sapient being that steps inside is immediately struck with joy at being in such an amazing room.

However...

There's blood all over the floor.  The last invader died a rather messy way in the traps(2 legs, 2 arms, head, and torso all separated).  He apparently bled copiously and now his blood has been spread through many areas of the fortress.

It's an unsightly red stain across my beautiful white fortress.  I even have bloodstains on my pristine white chalk fortress walls.  How can the enemy be blinded by the reflecting sun from my walls if it's all covered in blood?

Some of my idle dwarves will occasionally clean up a bit here and there, but it's never enough. 

Is there ANY way at all to designate a serious cleanup effort in order for all my idle dwarves to focus on major cleanup?

[Urist Imiknorris]

Why? Blood is a glorious thing.

[Graygan]

Why? Blood is a glorious thing.

Blood is a glorious thing, yes...

But it's also extremely unsightly and messy.  It needs to be cleaned up.

Besides, how much more frightened do you think the enemy would be if they kept losing their troops to my fortress, then when they show up, there's no sign that a fight happened?

[Saladman]

Cleaning appears to be bugged at the moment.  If anyone has a reliable workaround I'd love to hear it myself, but for now I'm just waiting for the next update.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Cleaning seems to be a fairly low-priority job for dwarves, so you need a bit of luck to get dwarves who really get into it.

And if you have aboveground areas you want to clean, you are out of luck - no cleaning, and if it is protected from rain, no washing away by the rain either.

On a lighter note, my expedition leaders have a tendency to discover their cleanliness whenever the liaison shows up - just a co-incidence? :) :) :) :) :)

So, nothing we can do about it now.

Ah! Someone did mention using some external tool to obliterate all the blood lying around, but such things are not my expertise.

Deathworks

[Graygan]

A thought occurred to me, but I can't check it until tomorrow.  My gaming time for today is over.

I'm thinking if I go through my hauler/peasant dwarves and disable everything but cleaning on their labor list they'll either clean or party... hopefully they'll clean more than they party, but I have no clue which it'll be. 

The outside walls will be washed away with rain, but I guess I have to live with the bloody floor I laid down in the aboveground fort area.

Oh well.  Perhaps we'll get lucky and have it implemented eventually.

[Lord Darkstar]

I've noticed that after making some soap, the interior of my fortress was cleaned up in very short order, and remains clean. Wasn't true before I made the soap. Of course, in 31.03, you get a LOT of message spam about Clean self cancelled: area unreachable (due to everyone trying to grab a bar of soap that is being used or hauled somewhere).

Outside though--- no hope. I am currently considering building water "sprinklers" in my fortress entrance tower, so I can wash away all the blood inside. Watering it will turn the stone into mud. Then I can clean the mud off.

Outside--- I've read all you can do is smooth it if it is rough stone, or put down a covering road and then remove it.

[none0000]

Flowing water doesnt seem to work too well for cleaning, it just moves the blood around and spread it over walls.

What works for me is designating a meeting area over the place I want cleaned, and disabling all other meeting areas. My idle dwaves then hang around over the mess and some of the more active ones start cleaning it. Dwarves only seem to clean stuff up if they see it close to them and they have nothing better to do.

[Dorf3000]

There's also a bug with blood, mud etc. appearing inside walls, aquifers and so on.  I have dug out channels in soil and found a huge list of blood smears and pools of various random creatures (who never went near the area in question).  It seems to be connected with water somehow, since it happens in aquifers and in corridors that are/get wet.

For the quick and dirty method there are the dfhack tools, one of which does clean up everything inside and outside.  You'll probably end up having to use it more than once though.  I've heard that if you can surround your well with grates, it will stop things spreading when dwarves go to clean themselves.  It might have to be 2 grates wide though.

[Psieye]

If those chalk walls are constructed instead of dug out, then you could just tear down the walls and rebuild. Engraved floors though... yeah no quick solution. Actually, try doing this:

1) Set a burrow around a tiny area of floor
2) Bring Urist McCleaner there and restrict him to just that burrow
3) Disable every labour except cleaning on Urist McCleaner
4) Dump then reclaim some soap bars in that burrow


I'm assuming others have tried this already but I haven't read any reports on a specific attempt to clean engraved above-ground floors. Failing that, dfhack is probably your best bet - something really contrived with raw modding just to boil away all that blood is probably not what you're looking for. Oh wait... can't you just set blood to have a really low boiling point so it all goes away by itself (BACKUP your save, don't know if this would insta-kill every living being on your map)?

[Dorf3000]

Oh wait... can't you just set blood to have a really low boiling point so it all goes away by itself (BACKUP your save, don't know if this would insta-kill every living being on your map)?

Urist McNeo: Whoa, deja vu
Urist McPheus: That happens when they change something.. in the matrix
Urist McEverybody: *boils, dies*

[Graygan]

I'm a semi-retired chef.  I don't go messing around with the code in games.  I play the vanilla versions or some relatively stable version thereof.  So I'm kinda looking for a way to do this without resorting to learning how to tweak the game on my own.

[Psieye]

Out of interest I tested the ultra-low boiling point method of cleaning blood. You still get some splatters, but a lot less. When you wash away those splatters, they instantly evaporate instead of being moved around to another wall/floor. Living things don't die with this change because they only have blood generated when they get wounded, it doesn't care what blood is like while it's still in their veins.

Still, that's a rather tricky work around and more importantly, I see nothing in the raws for changing vomit and mud so it doesn't inherently get rid of the problem. Time for someone to try and clean up with a bar of soap and a burrow I guess.

[dudemauler]

Use dfhack cleanmap.

[Psieye]

Ok, bar of soap and a burrow doesn't solve the problem - fresh fort, no jobs defined after I make the soap and mess, I get no cleaning happening with everyone idle. I even threw someone into a burrow with thta mess and the soap and he wouldn't do it. Until it gets fixed in a future version, there doesn't seem to be a in-game vanilla solution.