40d:Wound

Creatures with severe wounds will flash with a yellow or red + icon; see status icons for a full list of status and injury indicators. A creature's injuries can be seen by pressing w while viewing creature info in Fortress Mode, or by looking at a creature and selecting their letter in Adventure Mode. Wounds are listed by body part and described by color, as displayed in the following table.

unhurt

lightly wounded

moderately wounded

broken

mangled

lopped off

Wounding

This section is incomplete; much about the combat system is unknown.

If an attack connects, the target will be wounded in some part of the body. The severity of the wound depends on 1) the strength of the attack, 2) the protective value of any armor or other protection available for that body part, and 3) a (large) random factor. Wounds are cumulative: when an already wounded body part is hit the wound will worsen, even if in adventure mode it produces the same message about the condition of the body part more than once.

The mathematics are at present pure guesswork. However, we do know that armor value does not simply subtract from damage; you can be wounded (usually lightly) by an attack substantially weaker than the protective value of your armor. Armor is vital to survivability, but it can't make you immune. Creature size is also vital; larger creatures hit harder and can endure more base damage. Attacks, especially piercing attacks with critical boosts (e.g. arrows), can damage vital internal organs located in the area of that body part.

Effects of wounds

When a wound is inflicted, no matter how lightly, it will usually bleed (even if only for one turn). In Fortress Mode, wounded dwarves receive various unhappy thoughts, but also some positive thoughts from the rescue and recovery process (see next section).

A wounded limb or organ becomes less effective. A severe wound to an arm or hand causes held items (weapons, shields) to be dropped from that hand. Wounds to either leg often cause the target to topple over, greatly slowing it down. Pierced lungs make it easier to become Winded. Damaged internal organs often cause the victim to periodically become stunned or unconscious until they heal (which in some cases never happens).

Death from blood loss will happen quickly whenever wounds to major internal organs occur, like the heart being pierced or "entrails shooting out through the wound". In Adventure Mode, a "Mortal Wound" status indicator will appear when this happens to your adventurer. There is no way to avoid this. A pierced lung doesn't always result in bleeding to death, but it may eventually cause suffocation. Toughness may be a factor in helping to prevent this.

Other effects of wounding (for most creatures) include pain, which can cause temporary paralyzation due to fainting ("giving in to pain"), vomiting, and stunning (slowing), especially if the creature is not very Tough.

On organs

When a creature is attacked with a piercing weapon or projectile, organs might take damage. This table shows most major organs, their functions, and what happens when they are damaged.

Organ	Function	Lightly/moderately wounded effects	Broken/mangled effects	Lopped off effects
Heart	Circulatory Organ	Not possible	Fatal Heavy Bleeding when pierced	Not possible
Brain	Movement	Bleeding, possibly becoming Winded. Usually not fatal	Paralysis. Weapons get dropped, limbs become useless, inability to stand. The only attack possible is 'Push'	Decapitation, naturally, causes instant death.
Throat	Breathing	Bleeding, possibly becoming Winded	Heavy Bleeding and becoming Winded. Lethality depends on Toughness	Fatal Heavy Bleeding and/or suffocation
Lung(s)	Respiratory Organ(s)	Not possible	Heavy Bleeding and becoming Winded. Possible suffocation depending on toughness and number of lungs pierced	Not possible
Eye(s)	Throwing/Shooting (no effect on [l]ook?)	Bleeding	Not possible	Heavy Bleeding. Possible extreme pain depending on Toughness and number of eyes removed. Destroys accuracy
Guts	Not known	Not possible	Fatal Heavy Bleeding as entrails spill out	Not possible

Wounds in Fortress Mode

Dwarves with yellow or red wounds will attempt to get to a bed to rest, if possible. Civilian dwarves with the health care labor will drag severely wounded dwarves to a bed and bring them food and buckets of water as they recover.^[Verify] A severely injured dwarf will stay in bed, and occasionally cancel tasks to rest their injury. Dwarves with light or moderate (medium grey to brown) wounds do not need to rest.

Generally, light or moderate wounds will heal in about a week. Broken body parts will likely take some months of bed rest to recover, and a mangled part takes an indeterminate amount of time to heal. Severed limbs will not grow back.

Yellow or red wounds have a chance to heal on season changes. The likelihood of yellow or red wounds making a recovery is quite variable, and the process appears to be somewhat buggy (although it has improved in recent versions). Limbs are more likely to eventually heal than internal organs. It may take several seasons to recover - in some cases, a badly wounded dwarf will not recover at all.

Wounds to the nervous system, meaning the neck, brain, or spine, will never heal. If these wounds are not too severe the dwarf will be able to continue his daily routine without any problems. Military dwarves with nervous wounds will never spar, however. If a dwarf has yellow or red nervous damage, he will be a permanent invalid, and you may wish to arrange for his demise so as to prevent him from forever requiring your other dwarves to bring him food and water.

Dwarves have various thoughts from injury, unconciousness, and the healing process. Injuries cause unhappy thoughts, but these are offset by happy thoughts from getting rescued, being able to rest and recuperate (i.e. stay in bed), and being given water and food. Check for unhappy patients, as wounded dwarves have been known to go berserk when unhappy thoughts accumulate (see below). If you cannot insure their happiness, you may have to station armed guards nearby as a precaution, or even lock the wounded dwarf in his bedroom and write him off.

Most emotional breakdowns in injured dwarves are caused by the breaking of the "Rest" task (which prevents an injured dwarf from entering the exhaustion states, e.g. Tired and counts as sleeping preventing Drowsy state) by falling unconscious due to pain. Once an injured dwarf regains consciousness he will not automatically begin resting again; he will therefore quickly become exhausted or very drowsy, and eventually fall into a melancholy mood, since he cannot sleep normally while injured. You can work around this by either drafting the dwarf, since military dwarves are sometimes able to reinitialize the Rest task on their own, or by forbidding the bed the dwarf is on. He'll be re-rescued off of the "floor" and can reinstate his Rest task. This behavior is likely a bug.

Since losing consciousness due to pain can be resisted by dwarves with high Toughness, very Tough dwarves tend to survive injuries more easily. Limbs that are severed, however, can make even the toughest creatures give in to pain.

Wounds in Adventure Mode

Healing is much simpler in Adventure Mode; walking one space on the overland map will heal everything but severed limbs, including hunger and thirst. Your friends spear-catchers will also be healed, as long as they were reasonably close to you when you left the map. If you leave them bleeding and crawling in the cave below, however, they won't come with you.

In the current version, it is observed that beginning to freeze to death during a cold night will produce blood spatters on every surface of your body and inflict minor wounds to every organ and surface possible. This includes your eyes, limiting your vision to a single square around you. This is almost certainly because of wounds in the eyes, as if you [T]ravel away you will retain the blood in your eyes but regain normal vision.

Descriptions

In Adventure Mode, wounds will generate messages when they are inflicted. The following table lists the various messages you'll see when a wound is received. Messages corresponding to immediately fatal blows to the three major body parts (head, upper body, and lower body) are also provided. Most of these messages are displayed for organic beings only, not for skeletal, mechanical, etc. creatures.

Damage type	Lightly wounded	Moderately wounded	Broken	Mangled	Instantly fatal (head)	Instantly fatal (upper body)	Instantly fatal (lower body)
Pierce	"It is pierced!"	"It is badly pierced!"	"It is broken!"	"It is mangled!"	"It is pierced through entirely!"	"It is pierced through completely!"	"It is run through!"
Bludgeon	"It is bruised!"	"It is battered!"	"It is broken!"	"It is mangled!"	"It is smashed into the body, an unrecognizable mass!"	"It collapses into a lump of gore!"	"It explodes in gore!"
Slash	"It is cut!"	"It is badly gashed!"	"It is broken!"	"It is mangled!"	"It is split in half from the crown to the chin!"	"It is cloven asunder!"	"It is mostly cut away from the rest of the torso!"
Gore	"It is torn!"	"It is badly ripped!"	"It is broken!"	"It is mangled!"	"It is torn apart!"	"It is torn into pieces!"	"It is ripped into loose shreds!"
Burn	"It is singed!"	"It is burned!"	"It is cracked by the heat!"	"It is partially incinerated!"	"It is incinerated!"	"It is incinerated!"	"It is incinerated!"

If the major body part was "lopped off", which is different than just having an instantly fatal wound, the message would say "The *Body part* flies off in a bloody arc!"

A creature inflicted with a fatal blow will be announced as "struck down" or, if a ranged weapon was used "shot and killed". Other death messages include "starved to death", "drowned", "fallen into a deep chasm", "burned to death", etc.