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[Rastaphanu]

I just embarked to a nice lake with a volcano in the background and my two "free" pack animals were both yak cows. I hate yaks. They starve rather quickly so I usually just butcher them on the spot anyhoo, but feeling a bit dwarfier than usual, I decided to kill them with style.

My first method was to drop them from the cliffside into the lake. I watched them fall & get stunned from hitting the lake bottom, but they weren't drwoning and just swam out of the lake moments later. Next, I dropped them off the cliffside to the meadow a good 7 z-levels below, thinking this will surely kill or injure them. It didn't. So I dropped them with their four broken legs back into the lake. They still lived. So now I thought to drop a whole floor several z-levels into the lake with the yaks on it, but they STILL survived!

The final trial of the yaks was dropping them straight into the volcano (a true dwarf would have probably done this from the start) so I dropped them from a whopping 18 z-levels above the surface of the lava. I waited several seconds thinking, "I didn't drop them from THAT high, they should have splashed by now..."  and then I get the message "You have struck almandine!" "You have struck cobaltite!" etc. so I zoomed to my lovely yaks, realizing they had made it halfway through the volcano with no injuries from either lava or magma crab, awestruck, I watched them descend deeper into the volcano, discovering things deep underground for my dwarves. When I found the long overdue, dying yaks, I couldn't believe it! They had made it all the way to semi-molten rock before they even started to acquire injuries!

Can anyone explain what/why this happened?

[Nidokoenig]

Yeah, when things are being flung through the air, they're immune to damage until they actually hit something(flying creatures, on the other hand are just standing on the air). So the fact that they were falling is what protected them. Throwing a cat or chicken into the magma at the first opportunity is standard practice for some for this very reason. "Praise the cats! You've discovered adamantine!"

[Rastaphanu]

Oh ok... so when I dropped them in the lake several times did the water cushion their fall?

[Girlinhat]

The "flying" tag marks creatures as "invincible to everything".  Things only happen to an item in flight once they've stop being in flight.  This is normally never visible, unless you throw a creature in a volcano or you build floating weapon traps.

There's also a small quirk, where falling through a liquid causes that distance to be ignored.  If you drop a creature from Z50 and they hit water at Z48, then when they hit Z0 it'll only count 2 levels of falling damage.

[Rastaphanu]

I see... my seriously overpowered yaks are have just been nerfed...

[acetech09]

Wot?

I just tossed  yak into a volcano in a new fort next to a volcano...

It died from DROWNING at the bottom of the magma sea. DROWNED. Is that normal? Don't things melt before they drown in magma?

[Girlinhat]

Yaks are very well insulated?

Now I'm waiting on a lame MS Paint doodle of a yak drowning in magma with thick fur coat.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Yaks are very well insulated?

Now I'm waiting on a lame MS Paint doodle of a yak drowning in magma with thick fur coat.

Arena testing reveals that creatures drown in the same amount of time regardless of size, whereas death due to bleeding from magma exposure takes longer for large creatures. If completely submerged in magma, small creatures bleed to death quickly, medium creatures also bleed to death seconds later, and large creatures drown while burning.

[Corneria]

All this can only lead me to believe magma isn't hot enough. It must be made hotter.

[Nidokoenig]

Would that be to do with surface area to volume ratio? The smaller an object, the more surface area it has relative to its volume, which would mean that the amount of blood relative to the bleeding skin would be higher in larger animals, so it would take longer for it all to drain out, similar to how smaller creatures tend to have faster metabolisms because they lose heat faster.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Would that be to do with surface area to volume ratio? The smaller an object, the more surface area it has relative to its volume, which would mean that the amount of blood relative to the bleeding skin would be higher in larger animals, so it would take longer for it all to drain out, similar to how smaller creatures tend to have faster metabolisms because they lose heat faster.

No, it seems to be that bleeding rate is proportional to the number of body parts that you have (so most humanoids bleed at the same rate regardless of size), and larger creatures have more blood to lose. It looks like they only bleed to death when they lose all of their blood, which is certainly not realistic.

[AWdeV]

... Why don't you simply pasture them?

[Geen]

Because, !!SCIENCE!!.