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Author Topic: I may have found a way to depopulate vaults  (Read 2297 times)

BruceyBoyo

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I may have found a way to depopulate vaults
« on: April 24, 2017, 01:38:16 pm »

Normally, the nasty inhabitants of vaults respawn instantly when you unload the place, and in legends viewer they permanently show as having 50/25/1 of the appropriate creatures, even if you've slaughtered them before.

However, I've discovered a way of actually pushing down the population numbers. If you're a necromancer, any angel that kills one of your undead will get a name. Massacring everyone in the vault normally won't knock numbers off the population, but once one of them has earned a name, killing it appears to register a -1 to the population. I'm not sure exactly how vault respawning works (Even the wiki disagrees with itself - the page on Angels says "under a month" yet the page on vaults themselves says immediately after each visit) but the vaults do seem quieter after I've knocked some numbers off the official population, so this may be a way to permanently reduce a vault's population.
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Derpy Dev

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Re: I may have found a way to depopulate vaults
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2017, 08:49:22 pm »

Normally, the nasty inhabitants of vaults respawn instantly when you unload the place, and in legends viewer they permanently show as having 50/25/1 of the appropriate creatures, even if you've slaughtered them before.

However, I've discovered a way of actually pushing down the population numbers. If you're a necromancer, any angel that kills one of your undead will get a name. Massacring everyone in the vault normally won't knock numbers off the population, but once one of them has earned a name, killing it appears to register a -1 to the population. I'm not sure exactly how vault respawning works (Even the wiki disagrees with itself - the page on Angels says "under a month" yet the page on vaults themselves says immediately after each visit) but the vaults do seem quieter after I've knocked some numbers off the official population, so this may be a way to permanently reduce a vault's population.

Interesting... science must be done.

Max™

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Re: I may have found a way to depopulate vaults
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2017, 08:54:51 pm »

Once I came across a vault that damn near sat on a hamlet, went up to grab the slab and found out it was sitting inside of a volcano tube.

Since I was a flying magma safe superbuffed campsite building machine I flew down inside the tube and sat on the magma sea so I could drop a minecart of water > clear a tile > enter the build screen > deconstruct the vault.



Worked pretty well.
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Fatace

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Re: I may have found a way to depopulate vaults
« Reply #3 on: April 26, 2017, 02:30:04 pm »

I think this is what happened to mineon my first world, I killed everyone, grabbed the slab, and got out, I returned a year later and nothing respawned.
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I once had a 30 dwarf glacier fortress once.. was going great till the dwarf merchants brought along a WereKoala and killed everyone...

ZM5

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Re: I may have found a way to depopulate vaults
« Reply #4 on: May 14, 2017, 08:43:06 am »

Think it works the same for when there's a glitch that causes criminals in a town to respawn - though in that case you simply talk to every criminal before you kill them.