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[cancel.man]

Running 0.31.18

So a few seasons ago I lost a lot of soldiers after battling a forgotten beast. They bled out and finally suffocated. Then the syndrome/symptoms spread to a bunch of the population- I learned that anything not wearing shoes (pets, kids, nekkid dorfs) would contract the illness and eventually die (bleeding and puking more contagious fluids all over).

Eventually everything infected died and the blood was cleaned up (I gave in and used the dfcleanmap utility in order to lessen the spread). There have been long periods where no one shows symptoms or dies of symptoms.

But things continue to get infected by the syndrome from time to time. Particularly newborn animals (if I don't cage them in time), migrants, and anything without shoes (even shoeless dwarves who survived the initial outbreak).

So my questions...

1. What exactly was the cause originally? Forgotten beast poison breath/blood/something? What specifically gave my dwarfs the syndrome?

2. What continues to spread the disease if there's no blood on the floors of the fortress? What else should I look for as the cause of more infections? My refuse stockpile is outside the fortress and not in a common path- do bodies/parts spread venom?

3. How does one identify something carrying a syndrome that will get my dwarfs sick in the future? There's gotta be something in the fortress that's continuing to spread the syndrome- is it on the floor or what? How would I know?

And while we're at it- is there any to get my dwarves to wear shoes?! I made a ton of them but they still go barefoot!

[Hans Lemurson]

Blood spatters on clothing can cause blood to remain "in play" even if it's all cleaned up off of your fortress.  Same with other contaminants.

You need a "Dwarf Dip".  Dig a small pool in your main thoroughfare (like the entrance to your dining hall) and fill it to about 3/7 water (4/7 blocks paths).  Your dwarfs will wade into it and then come back out again and the contaminants will be left in the pool.

I think that once contaminants are washed off they won't affect dwarves any more...otherwise you might end up with a toxic pool.  Oh well, fun either way.

[shmelse]

Contaminants in the pools don't spread, but if you're worried about them you can easily remove them with dfcleanmap.  I've found that once the initial rush is over with (all the blood *ever* on the ground is now on your dwarves' shoes, so initially there's lots of blood in the water), the dwarves tend to keep things clean on their own. 

As Hans said, you want the dips crossing major traffic areas to get lots of dwarves through them.  I also find it helpful to have them at my entrances to the caverns, since that's the source of any FB ichor. 

[shlorf]

My experience has been that while contaminants in the pool don't spread anymore, dwarfs who are exposed to said puddle by walking through the pool without clothing can still contract a syndrome. So you want that pool smoothed and engraved (which seems to increase cleaning priority) and possibly near a place where dwarfs will end a job (to increase cleaning frequency or just run dfcleanmap a lot).

[cancel.man]

Super helpful, thanks all!

I forgot to ask in my initial post- have blood splatters/coverings on inventory been linked with crashes? I get a lot of crashes when I attempt to view a dwarf's inventory (v - i) especially on those who are covered in blood and/or dieing from the syndrome.

Now to construct a wading pool...

[shlorf]

I get crashes when a dwarf is infected by a rot syndrome and the surgeon gets stuck in an endless loop removing rotten tissue at a speed slower than the new rot spreads. If I then examine the dwarves wounds 90% chance for crash. I think i also had the game crash once on checking an item that had lots a pages of contaminants on it, so yeah.

[cancel.man]

My crashes come a lot more simply than that- even a perfectly healthy and relatively clean dwarf can crash the game if they have a little bit of blood on them (at least I think it's the blood causing the crash). I also get crashes when examining tiles containing blood (just happened again...).

Follow up- In case anyone else is curious about whether this works-

The wading pool is SUPER effective at cleaning my dwarves. I converted a (constructed) waterfall in my main thoroughfare to a wading pool. It's uncontrolled flow off a brook so the level isn't a constant 3/7, but that seems to make no difference- blood is coming off in 1/7 pools. I had no idea how much blood was on my dwarves until it was being washed off of them...

At least one infant was contaminated after being exposed to the blood filled wading pool (at least I assume that's how it was exposed- I saw it in the pool) but otherwise incident of syndrome seems to be under control.

As an added/inadvertent bonus there's mist filling the vertical thoroughfare (up/down stairway for several z-levels) so everybody's too happy to worry about their dead kids The downside of the water running down the shaft is that it's carrying blood with it that may be contaminated.

[Hans Lemurson]

As an added/inadvertent bonus there's mist filling the vertical thoroughfare (up/down stairway for several z-levels) so everybody's too happy to worry about their dead kids

Thus solving the problem once and for all.

The downside of the water running down the shaft is that it's carrying blood with it that may be contaminated.

ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!

[shmelse]

ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!

excellent futurama reference, well played, sir!

[nil]

I've been using dfcleanmap routinely for probably several game years now because of this issue.  The culprit is the one-eyed monster extract (ha ha but seriously that's what its called) the goblin leader left after his death, and anything more than the slightest contact causes blistering and, eventually, paralysis culminating in death by suffocation.  A year or two after the last reported case sleeping sicking I decided to make some clear glass blocks for my barracks' skylight.  I cued up some potash and pearlash and forgot about it--until I saw the dreaded "Potash maker cancels job: Paralyzed" pop up.  I zoom to him and see that he's standing in an entire pile of the deadly extract along with several pages worth of other contaminants.  Not only that, but instead of having blistered feet as the dwarves who went down to this stuff usually did, he had blisters on his mouth and hand.  He died pretty soon after that.  I has able to repeat this a couple times, although quick use of the clean map tool prevented any further deaths or injuries.  Somehow, the start (not the completion) of the make potash job is releasing a large amount of a variety of contaminants, despite the lack of any on the ash.   The amount varies as I repeat it; while the first looked like least 3.5 pages of pools of different liquids (I can't be positive it wasn't two combined), the last two together have only two pages of smatterings and a few pools of pus, ichor, and various bloods that didn't even include the dreaded extract. 

Has anyone else ever seen anything like this?

[Nathan_]

Blood spatters on clothing can cause blood to remain "in play" even if it's all cleaned up off of your fortress.  Same with other contaminants.

You need a "Dwarf Dip".  Dig a small pool in your main thoroughfare (like the entrance to your dining hall) and fill it to about 3/7 water (4/7 blocks paths).  Your dwarfs will wade into it and then come back out again and the contaminants will be left in the pool.

I think that once contaminants are washed off they won't affect dwarves any more...otherwise you might end up with a toxic pool.  Oh well, fun either way.

I killed all the cats in my fortress once doing this.

[Sutremaine]

Has anyone else ever seen anything like this?

Nope.
Do you think there could have been some contaminated liquid in the bucket? That's the only thing particular to a potash-making job.

[cancel.man]

I killed all the cats in my fortress once doing this.

The syndrome killed all my cats before I got a chance to drown them