Print

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

[Lemunde]

So my current fortress is doing great.  I got several industries going.  Booze is flowing freely.  I have an effective military and I'm on my way to having high quality rooms for all of my dwarves. 

Unfortunately the successful defense of my fortress comes at a price, with blood, guts and vomit covering a large portion of the surface areas of my fortress.  A lot of this gore has been there for several years and the occasional rain causing dwarves to track it inside doesn't help.  Now for underground areas dwarves will simply grab a bucket of water and wipe up any gore they come across.  But they won't touch the surface areas.

While I was amused at first I'm getting a little tired of the top half of my fortress looking like Diablo had a hand in it's construction.  I know in 40d this stuff would go away on it's own at the start of the next season but now it seems to want to stay there indefinitely.  Outside of flooding the top half of my fortress is there anything I can do to clean this mess up?

[Vercingetorix]

I think the stuff goes away outside on its own, but inside it won't go away.  Cleaning is pretty bugged so dwarves won't really ever clean it up; it might happen but it probably won't.

You're basically stuck using a method like DFhack's cleaning tool in order to get rid of it.

[Lemunde]

I don't suppose there's any way to mod blood and vomit so that it...evaporates faster or something?  Ima go glance at the raws.

Edit: Nah, forget that.  I just realized that this is stuff that like, flows through dwarf veins.  I don't need dwarves randomly turning into skeletons.  Although that might be entertaining just to see if it happens.  Anyways I did glance at the blood template and it does have the ROTS tag.  I guess this means that it does go away, it just takes it a VERY long time to do so.

[iceball3]

If you do that then your dwarfs will promptly explode. But all the gore will evaporate anyway, so it all stays clean.

[Skelodwarf]

Flooding is a bad idea, according to the wiki this only spreads it everywhere, instead of cleaning it.

[Arekis]

If you're lucky enough to have lots of rain, a tile will be cleaned of various blood/liquid if it gets hit with rain.  Otherwise the dwarves will not clean blood outside.

[FleshForge]

There is a "clean liquids" tool included in DFHack that clears all of these out, if they get on your nerves.  It only touches blood/pus/barf and leaves all other stuff like mud alone.

[lolghurt]

Or pave it with a floor or a road and watch your dorfs hoover it up with their beards

[Sphalerite]

The dfcleanmap tool in the dfhack tool set will clean up all blood, pus, vomit, goo, and other contaminates on the ground.  It will not remove mud from the ground, so you won't have to re-irrigate your farms.  It also won't touch blood that your dwarves and animals are wearing, so you will likely have to use it repeatedly as they keep dropping pools of blood every time they clean themselves.

I have found that animals are a major culprit in spreading pools of blood.  Wandering animals never properly clean themselves, pick up contamination every time they hit a pool of blood and spread it everywhere.  Restraining or butchering all your stray animals will help contain blood contamination.

Having a well helps, dwarves will clean themselves at a well given a chance.  Having soap does not help.  If you have bars of soap not in a hospital, a dwarf who wants to clean himself will go and pick up a bar of soap, then get confused, drop the soap, spam cancellation messages, and then forget what he was just doing.  Forbid all soap that isn't in your hospital.

I have experimented with automated wash rooms, with mixed results.  Moving water will remove blood from dwarves.  This will create pools of blood which may contaminate anything which steps in them.  Moving water will push pools of blood around, possibly duplicating them if the water spreads out and evaporates.  Pools of blood will not fall through grates in DF2010, so having a waterfall falling into a grate will just result in a big pool of blood on the grates that contaminates everyone who steps in it.  I'm still trying to figure out a design for a self-cleaning wash room.

[KojaK]

I've heard magma does a great job at cleaning contaminants up.

... but DFHack is probably safer. XD

[FleshForge]

The thing is, if there is any blood in any kind of traffic area, then it will eventually spread EVERYWHERE anyone walks, even up stairs.  It never tries, and while idle dwarves to occasionally clean a bit up, in my experience they never clean it up faster than it spreads.  It's a bit silly, although it doesn't usually bother me all that much.

[melomel]

Dwarves will promptly clean constructions and smoothed surfaces that are inside and/or dark and/or subterranean.  I'm not exactly sure what the requirements are.

So far I've noticed them cleaning dirt floors--but not dirt walls--and constructed walls, both inside/dark/subterranean.

Earthen ground that's outside/light/above ground will never, ever be cleaned, and rain does absolutely nothing.  Or maybe makes things worse, I'm not sure.

[Ithicar]

DFhack works great. Dfcleanmap wipes out everything that spreads minus mud, and hasn't caused a single issue for me. My forts main entry and surrounding walls would be awash in blood without it, which would be fine if it didn't likely cause FPS issues.

[Arekis]

Earthen ground that's outside/light/above ground will never, ever be cleaned, and rain does absolutely nothing.  Or maybe makes things worse, I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure rain cleans up blood.  I've seen this in my current game and the wiki concurs:

"Rain also cleans any tile it lands on, removing blood, vomit and other bodily fluids on contact."
Source: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Rain#ixzz0ydO83FgO

[Lemunde]

I too have seen this happen.  However I also believe that rain allows blood to be picked up by anything that walks on it so it does get tracked all around.  So some gets cleaned up and some gets added.

Personally I liked the old system better.  Just wait a month or three and the blood would magically disappear.  I think I'm going to add something to the suggestions for a fast-rot tag that makes some items rot a lot faster than others.  This way blood should disappear in a few months rather than a few years.