since dwarf fortress steam is coming out, it is once again time to tell the story of my favorite DF experience

so a while back (at least a few versions earlier, but that could be years ago in dwarf fortress development time) i created a fortress named inkwash in a "good" biome. now there are "good" and "evil" biomes in DF. evil biomes do fun stuff like have rain that turns your guys into zombies and trees with eyeballs and stuff. good biomes aren't QUITE that fun. the main thing about this one was that there were no animals to hunt for meat/pelts in the biome other than unicorns (which can gore your hunters) and giant mosquitoes, which i think can't be butchered.

ANYWAY, this meant a big early game source of food for the fort was shellfish. specifically, mollusks. i'm pretty sure i diverted my hunters to catch more mollusks because i wasn't about to kill unicorns and eat them. i don't think there's any reason not to eat unicorn meat in game but like... they're unicorns, come on.

the practical upshot of this pescatarian diet was that we had a lot of mollusk shells lying around in a refuse storeroom being unused when a necromancer stealthed into the fortress.

for comedic effect i am going to quote the dwarf fortress wiki's page on undead here:

As long as the remains of a creature contain a body part capable of grasping, be it a hand, or head, or the entire upper half, those remains can be animated. This can lead to animated hands and heads, which seems comical, until you consider the implications of a swarm of such monstrosities and the havoc that they might wreak. Even some parts of creatures which should be incapable of autonomous movement can be raised, such as the hair or skin, or even mussel shells. These are, however, predictably nonlethal, mostly serving as B-movie terror monster 'fodder' to scare your dwarves into running around.

so yeah imagine me getting an announcement that the dead are walking in my fortress, tabbing over to it, and seeing a bunch of little blue ascii m's bouncing around my fortress. which was funny, until i guess one of them went for the fucking jugular or something and suddenly i had a bunch of invincible zombie dwarves running around beating the shit out of the un-zombified dwarves.

and that's how inkwash fell: destroyed by the undead mollusk menace. if you take anything away from this goofy little story, remember this:

ALWAYS HAVE A SHELL CARVER ON HAND BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN SOME JUMPED UP NECROMANTIC JERK IS GONNA TURN YOUR REFUSE STOCKPILE INTO A LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS