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[Bohandas]

I would like to comment in regard to Toady's most recent announcement on the Bay 12 Games main website. For ease of refrence, however, I will first reproduce Toady's announcement

The first of the test interactions is underway, recreating the animated dead that are already in the evil regions, with the additional effect of intermittently raising any corpse that is in its area of influence during regular play. I suppose without a specific flag, it'll reraise defeated corpses that are still intact after a while, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In regard to the last thing about how defeated yet unmangled corpses might occasionally be re-raised, I have to agree that this would indeed be acceptable. In nearly all modern zombie movies the only way to be sure that a zombie is permanently dead is to "cut off the head or destroy the brain", (and additionally if I recall correctly many vampire novels (at least the older ones with non-metrosexual vampires) stipulate that a vampire must be both staked through the heart AND decapitated in order to be destroyed permanently) the so to me it makes perfect sense that any corpse in a condition that would not be an automatic kill in the DF combat system (ie. head, upper body and lower body  not seperated)  should be able to come back no matter how often it has been killed.

That said, I would not be specifically opposed to a flag that keeps killed undead permanently dead, but any such tag should be ignored by a certain percentage of any given world's undeath-curses.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, I just got done posting something about this in another thread, but whatever...

The problem I have is one of general game entropy...

This game creates creatures for you to kill - it is a "fountain" of enemies that pours out into your fortress, and with undead that keep the same dead in play even after destroying them, you are essentially stopping up the "sink" that drains out the things that are coming from the fountain.

Having a fountain without a sink (or a sink without a fountain) causes serious imbalance in a game - it means that things are constantly being added, but never removed from the game, until it hits some logical limit.

DF already has some serious entropy issues, especially in Adventure Mode, where there are "sinks" for the number of living creatures but no "fountains" to replace the killed ones, so that the entire world is on a path to entropic decay of an entirely dead world the longer you play. 

Creating a game where it is functionally impossible to remove undead from play would create the opposite problem (like with ghosts when they were introduced), where every new hostile goblin permanently chews up more memory and FPS as they are constantly brought back to life, and more goblins keep pouring into the system from the siege "fountain".  If there is no way to destroy them totally, (such as by atom-smashing the corpse only resulting in a goblin ghost that goes through walls and tries to kill your dwarves, and soaking up FPS while doing THAT, too,) then you create the conditions where entropic decay means that no fort can be played for more than about 5 years or so, no matter how much the player may want to continue a fort.

That's the entire opposite of the sort of game we should really want - where we want to keep playing in the same world, and keep exploring it in fortress after fortress and adventurer after adventurer, so that it becomes our individual world.

[Jeoshua]

I hope that re-undeads are only for corpses that aren't buried correctly.  Possibly if one is buried, say with a memorial plaque and not a coffin, it could be possible for them to be killed.  In the meantime as they are re-dead, it should be possible to perform some kind of consecrated burial such that the dead stay that way, or at least make it MUCH more likely they stay dead.


Also, as far as entropy re: creatures, I'd beg to disagree.  There is a font for these creatures, and it is the womb.  New critters are born naturally and the game keeps track of them all through worldgen.  Only at the real-time stage does this effect disappear.  Plans are already set in motion to put worldgen simulation things into effect globally, so I'd venture to say that we shouldn't worry about this either.

Sometimes tho, creatures come to a fort or to the adventurer already pregnant, as can be seen when egg-laying critters used to claim a box as soon as they came across it, and numerous examples of single captured critters giving birth while in captivity.  This suggests some portion of this code is already running in-game during gameplay and not just for worldgen.

If you check the numbers, there are quite a bit more carnivores right now than their prey species would otherwise support.  Fairly soon I expect Toady to put carnivorous behaviors into the game during worldgen (and hopefully in caves as well).

So the dead comming back to live may make evil areas more nasty, but they'll also have a "negentropic" effect on the amount of creatures there are to fight.  And if these undead act like they normally would in the game already, they'll attack anything that isn't undead itself.

This seems like it would be a good thing for the game and the amount of chaos in it's dynamic system... which is good.

Because the only True order in a dynamic system is death.

[Dr. D]

Or players will just have to atom smash all the corpses or dump them in magma.
 
I bet one of the first bugs to come out of this will be that bone crafts will come to life.

[NW_Kohaku]

I bet one of the first bugs to come out of this will be that bone crafts will come to life.

I highly doubt that, as you are changing the type of item in the game when you change a bone into a stack of bone bolts. 

You maintain the material type (goblin bone), but it stops being "Ulspa's arm bone" (Ulspa being "dagger"/"Urist" in goblin) and becomes a "goblin bone bolt", instead. 

You can also see this in things like fish - capturing a fish in a trap changes it from vermin into an item, and hence, if you catch and release a fish, it will simply sit in the pond and eventually rot, because it isn't a vermin fish anymore.

Also, as far as entropy re: creatures, I'd beg to disagree.  There is a font for these creatures, and it is the womb.  New critters are born naturally and the game keeps track of them all through worldgen.  Only at the real-time stage does this effect disappear.  Plans are already set in motion to put worldgen simulation things into effect globally, so I'd venture to say that we shouldn't worry about this either.

This doesn't happen nearly enough, however.

Aside from the protected livestock creatures, how many creatures are actually born in your fortress?  How many die or are butchered?

Or, more to the point, how many dwarves die in your fortress?  How many dwarves are born in a fortress, and then last long enough to hit adulthood?

How many creatures manage to live through worldgen, and about what is the stable rate of birthrate and deathrate in the worldgen right now?  Compare that to how fast things die when an adventurer is around.  If we have cities with crypts filled with zombies that regularly have a random zombie pop up in the middle of the street and gnaw on a random few peasants when they are just close enough to the player to be active and attacking things, how do things work?

Right now, we have the game protect megabeasts just so that they'll be alive for the player to kill himself. They don't respawn at all.

The difference in the equilibrium of worldgen mechanics and adventure mode mechanics means that an adventurer actually playing and being near things, so that random animals and monsters and humanoids can see each other and kill each other means that an adventurer is a walking mass extinction event, even without the player actively trying to be one (and they probably will). 

The population is simply too small, and the player, simply by being there, and hence running a different type of simulation than the worldgen-type simulation, has too much of an impact on the global population levels to really be sustainable.

(And because I am suddenly reminded of it...)

806. My character cannot have a noticeable impact, positive or negative, on a town's population.

[drkpaladin]

HAHAHA!!!! My #1 most desired thing for dwarf fortress! The dead rising from the grave! Undeath being spread as a syndrome.  Fallen soldiers on both sides of the battlefields rising up before the fight is even over!  Random worldgen created undeath syndromes!

But don't you know it.... as soon as you get the thing you desire most you end up wanting a little bit more.

I hope he gives them a civilization tag too!  Or have a few intellegent undead/evil leaders who can go 'journey' to tame the various types of undead.

Oh yeah! I hope he doesn't forget to make FB and MB corpses/undead magma proof.  We don't want anyone taking the easy magma way out by trying to dispose of those.  Oh, and I hope that slicing up enemies into every component part creates about 20 small undead monsters.

I'm just so excited.

Oooh, i just realized that this would be great for adventure mode, clear out every city/town twice!

[sockless]

It probably wouldn't happen in adventure mode because this will happen in evil zones and humans don't inhabit evil zones.

Anyway, the dead re-rising would be fine, but as has been said, there needs to be a way to kill them permanently, like lopping their head off. We need to be able to order dwarves to do this though.

[Angel Of Death]

I think puncturing the brain should be the way.

It would be awesome to be chased by severed heads.

[Wyrm]

Two solutions to the eternally resurrecting dead:

1. An undead creature gets only a limited number of chances to reanimate after being killed. This number is reset (or not) every time the creature successfully reanimates. Thus, every corpse will eventually go extinct as it gets killed. This can be complicated by penalties for severe damage, age of the corpse, and time after last being struck down.

2. Fighters fighting undead wise up and go in for a coup de grace after downing an undead creature. More creatures deaded, more chance of killing the damn thing for good.

[Pilsu]

"Destroy the brain to kill the undead" is not only a tedious, tired cliché that makes them pitifully easy to defeat, it also ignores the fact that half the undead creatures have no flesh left on their corpses. The creatures are clearly magical and thus should not be held back by mere structural damage to an arbitrary part of their husk. Personally I feel the undead should never stop getting back up until beaten to such tiny chunks that the reanimated parts are simply unable to move anymore. Those bones you fashioned into a tasteful lining for your dresser would still be very much alive, just unable to act in any way, making them harmless. Disposing of the bodies isn't as big of an issue as people make it out to be. We can already dump them into magma, additional features such as corpse pyres would only serve to make that easier. Might want to station some guardsmen to take care of the burning zombies that inevitably result though.

[Bohandas]

"Destroy the brain to kill the undead" is not only a tedious, tired cliché that makes them pitifully easy to defeat, it also ignores the fact that half the undead creatures have no flesh left on their corpses. The creatures are clearly magical and thus should not be held back by mere structural damage to an arbitrary part of their husk. Personally I feel the undead should never stop getting back up until beaten to such tiny chunks that the reanimated parts are simply unable to move anymore. Those bones you fashioned into a tasteful lining for your dresser would still be very much alive, just unable to act in any way, making them harmless. Disposing of the bodies isn't as big of an issue as people make it out to be. We can already dump them into magma, additional features such as corpse pyres would only serve to make that easier. Might want to station some guardsmen to take care of the burning zombies that inevitably result though.

The cliche is "cut off the head or destroy the brain". And as I said in my original post, I feel that in Dwarf Fortress this should in fact be expanded to any automatic kill injury: ie. cutting off/destroying the head, cutting off/destroying the upper body, or cutting off/destroying the lower body.

[blizzerd]

i dont think a body cut in half should reanimate

only like complete bodies from guys that died from bleeding to death or being stabbed in the chest should reanimate

[NW_Kohaku]

Heh... In Steve Jackson's Munchkin card game, there is a card called "Mutilate the Bodies", where you gain an extra level by "winning combat" against an already-dead monster.  It can be played on a monster that someone else killed, at that. 

Urist McOverkill: "I was just checking for zombies!"

[Uristocrat]

I would approach the viability of unlife by assuming that the corpses were possessed by incorporeal, evil entities under the control of some caster.  Therefore, the corpses are only useful as a means for those incorporeal entities to affect the real world.  The practical upshot of this is that for a corpse to be useful to them, it needs to be mobile, capable of sight or other senses, and able to attack.

That very probably means that decapitation is enough (it could bite + sense, but isn't meaningfully mobile), while a head barely attached to one arm *might* just be enough to keep on going, assuming that allowed it to move.

The main worry would be that one could have a corpse of something where one part could perform three functions and make it unkillable.

Also, what NW_Kohaku said about entropy is relevant:  where you have a source, you ought to also have a drain, otherwise, you get a flood.  It's as true of magma as it is of stonecrafts.

[NW_Kohaku]

The main worry would be that one could have a corpse of something where one part could perform three functions and make it unkillable.

Undead floating guts say hi!

EDIT:
Actually, it's something more along the lines of "blaaharugharula"