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[nomad_delta]

The Fortress of Ghostsilver was facing not one but three Forgotten Beasts coming up from the Caverns all at once, so my group (The Halls of Craziness) sent our valiant Hammerdwarf squad out the airlock to fight them off, aided by a mob of War Dogs and our crack squad of Marksdwarves firing from behind the fortifications...  after a pitched battle, they were victorious!

However, since the last Forgotten Beast we dealt with sprayed an Extract all over everyone that caused fever shortly followed by suffocating-death and which rapidly caused the complete collapse of my entire fortress, this time we made a tactical decision to leave the poor Hammerdwarf squad quarantined outside the airlock for a while to see if they had any symptoms before we let them back in...

The War Dogs got it first -- they all started rotting all over and spreading miasma everywhere, and after a while they "succumbed to infection" and died.  I checked the Hammerdwarves and found that they had started to rot all over as well and were spreading miasma themselves... we briefly considered opening the airlock to let our doctors examine them, but remembered all to well the fate of the last fortress.

Instead we set the Hammerdwarves to "cleaning" labor to make themselves useful before they too succumbed to the infection, as well as having them collect all of the rotten War Dogs and body parts into a pile... they did a pretty good job of it, but eventually they collapsed in a pile of miasma.



So here's where we're at.... the room itself is pretty clean from what I can see, as the Hammerdwarf squad actually managed to clean up most of the free-standing pools of blood and Extract on the ground...  but the Forgotten Beast bodies themselves, the dead war dogs, and the dead dwarves still have Extract on them.

My question is this: how should I handle trying to reclaim the area without allowing the Extract to infect and destroy all of Ghostsilver?  I do have a Magma Chute for destroying things, but it's wayyyyy far upstairs and they'd have to carry the parts all the way through the fortress to get there.  I also have a Dwarven Bathtub of 3/7 water that the dwarves have to pass through on their way into/out of the cavern airlock, but that might actually help spread the extract as far as I know because it will get in the tub and stay there happily infecting every dwarf that walks through it from then on.

Any suggestions?  I'm happy that I've managed to contain this outbreak so much better than the last one, but I'm scared to open that door without a really good plan to keep it contained.

--nomad_delta

[NecroRebel]

Magma will burn away any extract. This isn't necessarily a good solution, since it's often impractical to apply magma and you may have to apply magma many times in rapid succession, but it is a solution.

Do note, though, that most extracts only affect on contact, so the dwarven bathtub will limit damage to just the feet, causes only very brief contact which means it doesn't cause as much damage, and just generally makes it far safer. Basically, the dwarven bathtub makes it so that bad syndromes are actually survivable with medical care.

The best solution, though, since dwarves only rarely, if ever, actually clean polluted tiles, is to simply use DFHack's cleanmap function.

[Loud Whispers]

Without cheating, there is no safe way beyond building walls around it, filling that chamber with magma, draining and de-constructing.

[NonconsensualSurgery]

The airlock and the decontamination pool were smart, but the best thing to do is lock the forgotten beast in a room and then flood it with crossbow bolts followed by magma. Wash, rinse, repeat.

For your current situation it might be easiest to construct a new room unless the magma is handy. You can make a dwarf clean a small area by telling them to build something on it and maybe with burrows you could clean it out, but it's difficult and you don't quite have enough control to do it safely and easily.

It helps if the decon pool has flowing water that goes off the map or into a flailing atomsmasher. Contaminants begone!

[Loud Whispers]

Quarantine and burn.

[Chilton]

Burn it.

If thats too much trouble, Quarantine it and make it look like a Pillar surrounded by Statues or something.

[Funk]

im thinking that a breath attack was what kiled the dwarfs.

send in a dwarf in full leather hazmat suit to clean up the area.
as long Extracts stay on the ground,the hazmat dwarf should be fine.

[i2amroy]

Do note, though, that most extracts only affect on contact, so the dwarven bathtub will limit damage to just the feet, causes only very brief contact which means it doesn't cause as much damage, and just generally makes it far safer. Basically, the dwarven bathtub makes it so that bad syndromes are actually survivable with medical care.

There is a way to remove contaminants completely from a given area though, and one that works extremely well with a dwarven bathtub. That method is the creation of a mist generator. Mist will permanently clean contaminants from the tiles that it hits over time, much similar to the way rain functions. If you then take a mist generator and position one of the output tiles (the ones with the statues on them) directly over your dwarven bathtub, then it will work against forgotten beast extracts. As you dwarves walk through the bathtub all contaminants will be washed off, at which point the constantly falling mist will purge the bathtub of them.

Also I'm fairly certain that you can greatly increase a dwarf's chance to clean a tile if you set its only jobs to be masonry/cleaning and then order it to construct a floor near where you want to clean.

[FuzzyZergling]

You can also increase the chances of a tile being cleaned by placing a meeting area near/on the unclean tile.

[Babylon]

You can also increase the chances of a tile being cleaned by placing a meeting area near/on the unclean tile.

That'll also greatly increase the chance of dwarves walking on it.

[Sphalerite]

Mist will permanently clean contaminants from the tiles that it hits over time, much similar to the way rain functions.

This does not seem to be the case, at least in my fortress.  I have built a mist generator that encircles my entire hospital, with the output tiles of the pumps directly over the patient beds.  The patient rooms have filled with mist repeatedly, but the splatters of blood are still there.  All the mist generator seem to be doing is adding mud, which makes the blood appear to vanish as it covers it up, but if you inspect the tile the blood is still there.

[Loud Whispers]

But wouldn't that still work? In experiments involving gnomeblight, gnomes were able to walk over gnomeblight that was covered underneath snow and blood without injury.

[Sphalerite]

Further experimenting has shown that mist generators will eventually randomly push contamination around.  This may make it appear to vanish, but can also make contamination that had been hidden underneath mud to reappear.

[i2amroy]

Hmmm... Maybe they changed it from 40d when we moved to 31.x but I do know that it used to work back then and I haven't had any problems with it working when combined with a bathtub. I guess its possible that my dwarves are cleaning the tub when I'm not looking, but so far it has seemed to work for me. Further tests will need to be done to even the matter out eventually I suppose.

[Crashmaster]

When I make wash pits I always have floodgates set into one of the the sides. This allows you to smash the water if needed to empty the pit. One thing I've noticed and used to my advantage is that when the floodgate is opened most of the time ALL of the contaminates move with that little bit of flow and concentrate themselves on the tile and walls of the floodgate tile leaving the ramps of the wash pit as just muddy - flow is weird.

seems similar to having retained flow patterns (from earlier greater depths) in a large non-flowing but randomly moving field of 1/7 to 2/7 water tiles. Dwarves walk through it and their contaminates flow away over the field of 1/7 - 2/7 waters in the direction that the water used to flow in. This makes the best dwarf-cleaning solution (excepting magma) in my opinion since contaminates move away from the tiles the dwarves are on without washing dwarven babies to there deaths in a blood-filled pit like my first high-powered dwarf wash., however it could be hard to set up a reliable maintenance-free operation. In this example 10 years of filth is washed from the entire population and ends up concentrated on the dry tiles in the lower left.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also I've been using a large room filled to 3/7 with water to fight all FB's that make it past the marksdwarves in. It seems to prevent any contaminate spread to dwarves, items or neighboring tiles (that weren't spattered with the original blood).