v0.34:Forgotten beast

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In the deep, there are beasts so fell and terrible, that only they know what they are, for none who have met them have lived to tell of it... they are the Forgotten Beasts, born of the chaos from before the world's birth... they have waited, brooding in the dark places of the world... and now... by digging too deep... we have awakened them.

Forgotten Beasts are large, monstrous, procedurally generated creatures that spawn in the caverns beneath your fortress, pathing through to your fort and seeding destruction amongst your dwarves. They are the subterranean equivalent of titans.

Forgotten beasts are attracted by wealth and population size. Additionally, one may randomly appear when you reclaim a fortress. When a forgotten beast becomes visible onscreen, the game automatically pauses and displays a message.

Generation

"Aril was a forgotten beast. It was the only one of its kind. A towering skinless cobra. It has wings and it has a gaunt appearance. Beware its poisonous bite. Aril was associated with water, jealousy, and caverns." (post).

Forgotten Beasts are procedurally randomized, and may be of any form, and be made of any sort of material. Forms range from gigantic skinless cobras, to shelled blobs, to humanoid golems. Materials range from flesh and blood, to flimsy things like ash and steam, to truly scary monsters of pure rock, gem, or metal. After tossing in some limbs and extra bits for variety, they then get a special attack; including anything and everything between venomous stings, poisoned blood, powerful dust clouds and flame breath.

If a forgotten beast has a venomous attack of some sort, it is randomly generated as are the resulting symptoms. The beast's breath attack is also randomly generated, if it has one. Venom attacks come in a variety of forms, from boiling ichor to trailing dust, and the effects can range from mild pain to complete and instantaneous necrosis or paralysis. Some forms of venom can spread from spatters and contact with your dwarves, eventually infecting your entire fort. Decontaminating your soldiers in shallow running water is one way to deal with this problem. Some beasts breathe fire or shoot web in lieu of any syndrome-bearing attacks. Web-shooters are immune to the effects of webs they, or any other creature, create and will shoot web even at targets they lack a proper path to. Forgotten beasts based on spiders may be capable of shooting webs in addition to any other special abilities.

The number of forgotten beasts cannot be controlled directly, but is influenced by the size of the world. They dwell most often in caverns. All are building destroyers, and are almost entirely immune to traps (they are trapavoid and nostun but non-webspinners will trigger a trap that has been webbed). Bridges are also less useful, as they cannot be raised or lowered as long as the beast is standing on (or under) them, preventing the traditional magma pit / dwarven atom smasher designs from working. This is probably one of Toady One's ways of making the encounters even more fun.

Death and application

Shedim the forgotten beast.

If you need to kill a Forgotten Beast, order your military to attack. Some beasts, however, are content not to path to your fortress and will stay dormant underground. Most "fleshy" forgotten beasts can be butchered; some are quite massive and may leave you with hundreds of meat and bone units and dozens of prepared organ units. Forgotten beast shells may prove valuable during a strange mood, particularly on a map without other sources of shells. Unfortunately, all forgotten beasts have a value multiplier of 1.

Some Forgotten Beasts whose bodies are made of liquid, gas or fire will die or lose limbs on the first hit. Other Forgotten Beasts are extremely difficult to kill due to some body compositions, such as being made of very hard materials. When confronted with such near-invulnerable creatures the only option is usually to use your brain and try to lock it away somehow. Walls and raised draw bridges stop them. Since they are building destroyers you can used installed furniture to lure them to a particular location. If you can put it in a pit, a clever trapmaker can feed it invaders. If a near-indestructible beast isn't in a position to threaten your dwarves, it can be used to train marksdwarves.

One method of defeating nearly combat-invulnerable Forgotten Beasts (those whose bodies are made of rock, for instance) is to cause a Cave-in on top of them. They'll be killed by dropping either natural or constructed walls or floors on them. It is also possible to capture some forgotten beasts in cage traps by using giant cave spider webs (or similar).

You can prevent Forgotten Beasts from appearing by editing d_init.txt to change [INVADERS:YES] to [INVADERS:NO], though that will also prevent ambushes and sieges.

Bugs

• If a beast has a dust attack, the dust will behave like it was from a cave-in, flinging dwarves away (causing further damage if they hit a wall) and knocking them out. ^Bug:3133

Forgotten Beast Threat Analysis

If you do not want your fun spoiled, do not look below !

Forgotten beast pose different levels of threat to your fortress, based on their composition, body shape, movements or special attacks.

Of course, general threat must be appraised after all categories

Material Composition

• Water, Grime, Filth, Salt, Steam, Smoke, Snow : Incredibly fragile. Unless paired with a dangerous attack method, these should not be a threat at all.
• Fire: While very fragile, fire is incredibly !!fun!!. This type of forgotten beast will usually stay at the edge of the map and may burn large parts of the cavern when it first enters. Engagement should be avoided if it does not path to your fortress (and into a trap) as it could cause casualties with fire spread, contact, and fireballs (passive ability). Dropping an unarmed goblin or 2 or a ceiling on top of it should kill it as it will die as easily as any other gas beast.
• Flesh: Most forgotten beasts are fleshy. It's about the standard level of threat for a forgotten beast.
• Rock or Mineral: Tough, but nowhere near unbeatable. Metallic weapons should do the trick.
• Glass or Gem: Dangerous. You may want to eschew melee combat, unless you've got sufficiently good weapons and dwarves.
• Non-weapon grade metal: Not so hot for an inorganic FB. Shouldn't be much of a threat.
• Copper/Silver: Eh, it should be beatable if you've got a halfway decent military and weapons.
• Iron: It's quite possibly more dangerous than a bronze colossus, so be on your guard. Do not send anything against it that has less than steel weapons. Magma does nothing against these.
• Steel: That is official, the RNG hates you. These can be beaten only with cunning traps (magma won't do anything) or adamantine weapons.
• Adamantine: Run away. Seriously. Or use a cunning trap. But a forgotten beast made from adamantine is the absolute worst you can expect. You can kill it with cave-ins, obsidian encasing, but not much more.

Body Shape

• Quadruped, Humanoid: about the average for FB's. Try and use cutting weapons to cripple them.
• Insect, Spider : Obnoxious because of the large amounts of redundant limbs.
• Blob : Possibly the worst body shape to fight. Has only a blunt push attack, which at a FB's size is deadly. Cannot be defeated by any instant kill blow (such as decapitation/bisection). Most blobs made of stone and metal will make your life miserable. Fleshy blobs can only be killed via blood loss.

Movement

• Walking: Normal movement.
• Flying: More dangerous than walking, for obvious mobility reasons. Be sure you only have one entry for your caverns.

Special attack

• None: Consider yourself lucky. But beware, some beasts have passive abilities in addition to this, like fire balls for a beast composed of fire, or webs for a spider-based beast.
• Hunger for warm blood: when the creature stabs the opponent, some blood will be drawn. Not dangerous.
• Poisonous bite/sting: Not dangerous by FB standards.
• Solid glob spit/Liquid blob spit : Generally not dangerous, unless you forgot shields and shield use on your military for some reason.
• Fire breath: Unthreatening if you have shields and decent shield skill. Can start cavern fires, so be careful.
• Toxic blood/toxic vapor breath/toxic gas breath: Threat depends of the syndrome's effects. Can be harmless or kill your entire military. You may want to sacrifice something for seeing what the FB's extract does.
• Web spitter: Webs are incredibly deadly in melee, but do not help much in range. It will slaughter your whole melee squad with incredible ease, but not your ranged squad as long as the ranged squad is out of reach. Engage it with marksdwarves or kill it with a cunning trap.
• Deadly dust: Possibly the most fun attack a FB can come with. Deadly dust acts like cave-in dust, plus syndromes. It can be used against the beast if the material the FB is made of is weak (like flesh) and/or it has articulations or organs to be damaged, considering it will use the deadly dust and harm itself, however if it is strong enough it will be immune to his own deadly dust. Deadly dust is generally a very effective defense against melee and marksdwarves, but is a liability if the FB is fleshy and not a blob.

Applications

Forgotten beasts are hard to catch, being both [TRAPAVOID] and [NOSTUN]; however trapping them is not impossible. All webbed creatures become vulnerable to traps, except for the ones that have a webbing attack of their own: building cage traps on existing webbed tiles or having a giant cave spider shoot web on your cage traps will render them into perfect FB-proof nets. Your new prizes can be put to various uses; the most obvious ones consist in dropping them onto various invaders - forgotten beasts are neutral toward each other, but will attack any [[wildlife or civilized creature they may encounter - but with careful micromanagement, the opportunities are limitless.

Silk farm

Web-shooting forgotten beasts are notoriously hard to catch and you'll only get your hands on one of these through very careful micromanagement, such as building a 'trap room' with retractable bridges with some random animal at the center to attract the beast. The set-up is otherwise the same as that of a silk farm, except that forgotten beast silk is worth much more than mere giant cave spider silk. Note that some beasts have special attacks in addition to their web-shooting ability (due to them being natural spider thingies or something); you don't want your dwarves to be clothed with necrosis-inducing silk.

Weapon coating

Syndrome-bearing poison can and will affect any creature it can spread to and infect. While there is no formal job or workshop related to poison coating in vanilla DF (although it does exist in some mods), poisoning your weapons is still possible thanks to the impossibly infinite metabolism of your caged guests. Pit them in a similar set-up to that of a silk farm and put your weapons (and ammo) stockpiles in the farm so your beast will shoot syndrome-inducing dust/spittle on them. Make sure your military dwarves wear gloves when they equip your newly-poisoned weapons, unless you actually want them to vomit or rot themselves in the middle of the battlefield. You also want them to wear cloaks so they don't contaminate each other while sparring. Some poisons can be extremely deadly, so that dwarves equipped with poisoned weapons can one-shot most creatures - well, most creatures with a functioning organism at least - by inflicting them the most superficial wounds - assuming they don't accidentally one-shot themselves.

On The Origins of Forgotten Beasts

This article or section has been rated D for Dwarf. It may include witty humour, not-so-witty humour, bad humour, in-jokes, pop culture references, and references to the Bay12 forums. Don't believe everything you read, and if you miss some of the references, don't worry. It was inevitable.

In the time before time, when Armok himself was not part of the great machine beast framework, the idea itself of ALL-dom, dwarf dom, elf dom, tools and valueless, reamained in the greater unknowable realm of hard possibility called <HARDDISKSPACE>; all was concept data idiosyncratic.

Thence came the being of the <flesh machine> and the <machine beast framework> and thence Armok was, is, and ever will be.

Armok hands moved, and invoked the commands of the ur-<plane/realm?>, and raised the possibility of all worlds that can be, of the-blessed-who-can-know-Armok.

Thence Armok exhaled his vaporous breath and said "CREATE NEW WORLD" and the <machine beast framework> began his dire task.

Legions of empires, batillions of timelines, and civilizations of worlds were born, lost, and discarded, as the will of Arm0k angered in wait.

Finally World Acceptance was allowed.

Yet, the <Flesh Machine Beast Framework> has failed Armok. For Armok knows of the world behind the worlds, of the Intent of his dimension, of the destination of the unmoving stone.

He knows that the beats of <null result un-parseable>, those ideas from the time before the rules, exist not.

The Pen-Factor of Armok, the Toady one, foresaw this failure. He knew that the Armok transcended the very power of the universe vessel, the <Machine Beast Framework>, and to please our God, to let him revel in the glory that is the knowing of himself, he created forced the existence of the beasts...