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[Squidpalace]

I am on the brink of my first ever unintentional, non-fps related, vanilla loss in more than two years of playing. In the 6th year of Fierycities a twisted chameleon sprayed frozen extract all over my military causing widespread rot. Most of my military had surgery to restore them to active duty, though with some permanent vision impairment. Some, including my 33 notable kill Militia Commander, required full-body splints and have not yet woken up. Some, mostly those susceptible to disease, died of infection. Soon afterwards I noticed a lot of the fort children had no shoes and their feet were also rotting off from treading in frozen extract. After more deaths and surgery I managed to butcher the chameleon bastard's remains and clean all his filth with a bathtub.

End of year seven, another notable beast appears. A feathery tick who proceeds to spray poison on four or five soldiers who soon complain of a fever, numbness and eventually paralysis. The paralysis leads to the suffocation of four more soldiers which starts a few tantrums amongst their fellows. One of these soldiers hacks the bone doctor in the face, killing him. Another chops the arm off of my weaponsmith who is now almost dead.

As the tantrum spiral begins, yet another beast arrives. Some kind of squirming alligator who runs into my fields and literally self-destructs, blowing himself apart and leading to the bleed outs of three or four soldiers, knocking almost all the others out of commission with fractures.

Now I am trying to get a replacement bone doctor, while the handful of functional, but miserable soldiers are slicing my civilians to death. As well as these problems, a child is now running to the hospital with his two year old chameleon rot "spraying blood" all of a sudden.

What can I do apart from walling myself off to guarantee safety from these beasts??? Have many other people experienced such horrors of the underground?

[Supercharazad]

Dwarven Foot Baths.


Seriously, they work.

[Di]

Cleaning trench at the entrance to cavern or wherever you fight beasts and do not let healthy soldiers into your fortress.

[Pan]

I'd say anyone who were unwilling, too lazy, too careless with their walling off of the caverns have experienced them.

[Marthnn]

I've had some fun with contaminents recently. My conclusion : be systematic.

Every entrance needs a cleaning trench (3 deep water), wether it be to the outside, caverns, dining hall, statue garden, butcher shop... the more the better.

Now, for this to work, you need to clean those baths from time to time. While you can be lucky enough to have regular cleaning jobs on some of them, chances are your dwarves won't clean every single one.

A trench with syndrome-inducing contaminents in it can be very dangerous. Even tho it won't spread, dwarves walking into it can still get affected. Solution : dfcleanmap.

So when you get the visit of a naughty forgotten beast, kill it, butcher it, the trenches should prevent its blood from spreading inside your fortress, letting your hospital do the rest.


Also, if you don't want all your military in bad shape, send 2 or 3 soldiers take care of the beast. 1 is not enough since he can be pushed around all the time, and 3 experienced ones can probably take care of any single beast.

Edit : If you can manage to use a 3-deep water flow in your trenches, contaminents should follow the flow and get gradually washed away.

[parlor_tricks]

Wow, thats... a pretty cool description of how dangerous contaminants can be.
Armok we need to advertise this game more. Heck one paragraph asking for help has more drama inherent in it than some bad books I've read.

[Squidpalace]

Wow! So the filthy bathtub has been infecting everyone! My settlement crumbled to it's end just a moment ago. Ironically it was a three eyed bull with curly light-blue hair who killed the last dwarf in the hospital. Most of the damage was done by a single unstoppable, berserk, axe-wielder who dropped his weapons and bit the limbs off of everyone. The second highest fatality list was racked up by the captain of the guard I think, who kicked a lot of heads in. The new combat system sure is brutally effective.

On another note, would marksdwarves be effective in the cramped space of a cavern? I like the 2-3 suicide squad suggestion. I had previously bum-rushed them hoping for no casualties, but now I will settle for minimizing the damage rather than negating it.

Also to the person who suggested it may have been incompetence who let the FBs in, it was not. I leave the caverns largely open for the sake of challenge, which was clearly effective. I do know how to make a wall.

[Brandstone]

You could try setting up a ballistae hallway. Basically take a long hallway(60-100+ tiles), and build fortifications so the only path through snakes back and forth width-wise. If the entrance to the hallway is from the side, you can add trenches along the walls to conserve ammo. You do want to invest in decent metal arrow heads for maximum killing power.

[EveryZig]

Can dwarfs clean up FB blood without getting infected? I am considering using the same spike hallway for siege defense and for a main entrance.

[Lemunde]

Relying on your military to deal with FBs is very hit and miss (no pun intended). Generally I wall off any caves I find to avoid having to deal with FBs but sometimes I want some of that cool wood they got down there. I developed a fairly reliable method of trapping FBs using retractable bridges and a chained puppy as a lure. If I decide I want to kill it I can carve fortifications in the room beforehand and have marksdwarves spam wooden bolts at it safely until it dies.

[Squidpalace]

So I really should just avoid them? It was entertaining to have a grotesque mutant spraying pathogens all over my dwarfs, especially when the goblins were such poor sports. But a 90-0 tantrum spiral may have been a little too far. Maybe I will set beasts to medium or low and find another challenging limitation.

Thanks for the valuable input!

[Makigall]

I wouldn't avoid forgotten beasts completely.  I had one fort kill and butcher 7 or 8 forgotten beasts and I never really had a problem with anything.  My current fort, still in .18, has killed 2.  The first had deadly vapors which caused short term widespread blisters in my military and that's it.  The second one I'm not sure what it did, but everyone had severe bleeding from the feet.  So severe in fact that they'd get maybe 10 squares and then fall over dead.  My fort went from 151 to 55 in a week.  And I was pretty sure I had run dfcleanmap before I sent everyone in to collect the corpse.

I think another large deterrent to widespread diseases is to make sure everyone is clothed.  My fort's in its 12th year so nearly everyone is wandering around completely naked.  I think shoes would have kept them from bleeding.

I savescummed afterward mostly because I didn't know what caused the bleeding and I really want to know what it was.  I had a group of cave swallowmen in my caverns who killed 3 forgotten beasts for me.  This 4th one though wiped out their tribe and my fort, at least I think it was this one's extract. 

Is it possible for someone to die to a forgotten beast syndrome and then their blood infects others?  Because everything was going fine for me then I saw the cats start bleeding to death.  Then the children.  Then everyone else.  And after the reload the latest forgotten beast pathed away from my fort so currently I can't do any !!SCIENCE!!  I'll definitely post back if I can figure out the details.

[shmelse]

So I really should just avoid them? It was entertaining to have a grotesque mutant spraying pathogens all over my dwarfs, especially when the goblins were such poor sports. But a 90-0 tantrum spiral may have been a little too far. Maybe I will set beasts to medium or low and find another challenging limitation.

Thanks for the valuable input!

Honestly, I think you got pretty unlucky. It's unusual to have several FBs all with syndromes, especially that early in the fort. In one of my longer forts, my military has killed 10 or so of them, only one with a syndrome, and it just made then nauseous for a bit then went away. I wouldn't give up on FBs entirely, as I think usually they're quite fun. If you enjoy them, take heart in knowing that what happened here was pretty severe bad luck.

The system described by Marthnn, of trenches + dfcleanmap, works wonders at stopping the spread. dfcleanmap is part of the dfhack package. It also does wonders for your fps... it's srsly amazing.

Whatever you decide, good luck!

[JimboOmega]

Forgotten beasts are so inconsistent.  The last one I fought got killed by a child and a potash maker - every hit on him caused him to crumble.

Others though, exhale a cloud that kills every dwarf that touches it.  Others leave blood that gets tracked around and causes all kinds of nightmares.

There should be some way of dealing with these things short of walling off the caverns entirely.  I'm willing to lose a few millitary dwarves in an epic battle, but having their syndromes and what not still haunt me years later... is not fun.  Especially as they are generally untreatable or cause instant death.

[myrkul]

I've found that making the bottom of the dwarf-dip trench an inactive meeting area, results in more frequent cleaning.