Bay 12 Games Forum

(Warning: Long post follows!)

After being frustrated with having to resort to cage traps to deal with husks and wanting to find some way to beat them more directly, I decided to test some husks in the arena. You can't normally create husks in arena mode, but with some easy modding you can simulate them.  To simulate husks, use this custom interaction:

The syndrome is copied from generated husk-clouds in world.dat, and RESURRECT instead of ANIMATE ensures that they'll have no arbitrary damage thresholds like zombies.  I pitted the husks against dwarves first with Competent military skills (what most migrants have), then Great ones, all wearing steel armour and wielding steel weapons of different sorts.

Small husks like cats and foxes easily go down to a single swordsdwarf or an axedwarf.  They do take inordinately more damage than a non-husk would have, and occasionally even land bruises and scratches, obviously because of the huge increase in strength and toughness.  A pack of creatures, which is more usual, is much more challenging.  You might get lucky and get the dwarf into a martial trance, but don't count on it.  Generally it's best to match their numbers at the bare minimum, and outnumber them at least twice whenever you can.

Anything with a blunt attack can give you trouble.  Punches from even a small animal-man can collapse skulls through steel helmets.  Anything the same size or larger than a dwarf will probably kill you, at least one-on-one.  Axe Lords and Swordsmasters fare much better than regular soldiers, of course, and two dwarves fighting one husk are much more likely to win than one fighting one. This is why bringing more soldiers than there are husks in a group is important.

I've found that contrary to what's often said (and my worst fears), it's actually quite possible to beat husks in combat.  You just need lots of dwarves, really good equipment and a bit of luck.  And a danger room.  And something to wash them off if you need to.  I personally like to run Spartan war-fortresses in some husk biomes (with gas, not dust) so every dwarf can defend himself should he need to.  Might be overdoing it, but this is husks we're talking about.  (Of course, if you get something like elephant thralls, or dust in a freezing biome, you're better off not even trying)

Watch out for your soldiers getting tired.  Husks are EXTREMELY durable and especially larger ones will take hits for weeks on end before its head finally gets chopped off.  Sometimes it's better just to walk away from it once it can't stand anymore.

When the dwarf wins, always, the husk is either decapitated or cut in half.  Those are the only ways to directly kill a husk.  This means blunt weapons are completely useless against them, unlike zombies.  Spears aren't very good either.  And, unfortunately, marksdwarves won't even make a tiny scratch on them.

Please bear in mind that I didn't replicate syndrome-causing dust here.  Just to reiterate what many of you might know, you need to make sure there's not a single speck of dust on them before you take them on.  Otherwise dust will rub off on your dwarves, infect them, and leave you with a band of dwarf husks with all its armour and weapons on.  Normal rain will clean it off if it rains, otherwise you need to do drastic things like flood the map from an aquifer.

Some other fun facts about husks:

• Husks indeed heal damage.  It's possible that your squad will beat down on a crippled husk for days straight while it heals all its wounds.  On the plus side, this is a great way to train melee soldiers if it's free of dust.
• Husks keep the combat skills they had in life.  Terrifyingly enough, husks of sentients are still capable of learning.  Any of your dwarves who got enthralled can and will get stronger with each kill.  Watch out.
• Husks can get enraged.
• Trapavoid creatures that get husked are still trapavoid.  Kobold husks are probably the worst of the lot.
• It's quite common to see one husked animal attacking a non-husk of the same species, before they all get turned as well.  There's usually heavy damage which tends to result in crippled husks.  This can make things a lot easier to handle.
• Invaders who turn into husks will break the invasion and leave.  The same goes for merchants.

One other option is to make a copy of the save, abandon, and look the guard up in Legends Mode to see if he had a close call with some named animal or other. He might have been bitten by a rattlesnake or helmet snake during World Gen.

I just get the starting seven and the outpost liaison at the bottom of the historical figures list and other dwarves who settled in the fort elsewhere.  I'm not sure if merchant guards are drawn from historical figures, though if they do, that does sound plausible.  Still have yet to slab him, since I'm waiting for DFhack .06.

From my experience, GOOD and EVIL plants don't always appear all the time.  I generated two different worlds, both with good shrublands, and one grew good grass and the other didn't.  Evil biomes were similar, with glumprongs sometimes appearing and sometimes not.

Can you slab him, then check the slab?

I'll try that and see what happened (if both my engraver and mason weren't taking a break for A MONTH ARGH)

I forgot to mention that this is the second time it's happened.  The other time, when I was playing an earlier fort, I didn't even notice it until miasma was mysteriously pluming up from the trade depot.

Now I'm kind of worried that this sort of thing would happen with the human merchants...

As in, I found him dead just now in the middle of the trade depot, with blood spilled from his body.  There were no combat logs and the only dwarf who noticed it was the broker, who says he's "witnessed death".  But I can't see anything that could have caused him to die, and I can't really imagine how this turned to be. 

Has anyone else had something like this happen?

Shrubland/mountain embark encompassing all three alignments, all savage.  The Terrifying side with the zombie dust is the mountain on the other side of the brook from where I've started, which is a Joyous Wilds biome.

I'm in my second spring now and just survived an unicorn thrall attack.  I'd just gathered a heavily armoured squad before to take them out and all but one of them died.  And all with just three thralls. At least they killed the unicorns and it's raining out.  Apparently, successfully killing three thralls with a full squad is a lucky outcome.

Specifically when I go back to the title screen after having exported worldgen info.  This even happened once before I saved the world... :/

Has anyone else had this happen?

Quick question: Anyone know where the file that specifies things like fireballs and dragonfire is? I've checked a bunch of different material folders and can't find it.

I believe fireballs and dragonfire are hardcoded as breath attacks.

[CDI:FLOW:DRAGONFIRE]