Concerned About Graves

I was hoping for this. Just built a laboratory for the first time, on a hill outside of town surrounded by ravines and flanked by graveyards. Then I was just...going...to look elsewhere, for a while....

 

I'm not a fan of having to bury hostile foreign troops.

Also I think if we choose not to bury bandits then their skeletons should slowly sink into the ground and eventually disappear.

 

Even better would be if various factions wanted those skeletons for various reasons, and made off with them. Scientists could get bonuses to research, fishpeople could use them in rituals that would grant them powers over humans, cultists could animate them and use them as guards or soldiers. That sort of thing.

Presumably the spirits of the dead bandits would be angry about this and other horrible things would happen as a result. Six of one and all that.

 

Add voodoo to the game.

Problem solved.

 

I'm actually noticing a problem with my graveyard ... I have been attacked fairly relentlessly by the Republique in my current game and so we have a lot of corpses, theirs more than ours (yay) but these are laying around and causing negative thoughts for my colonists. They fill the graveyard up as fast as I make new rows. I think my current one has 24 or so ... yeah. Getting crowdy esp. since it's surrounded by land I'll have to flatten to use further way out on the edge of town.

 

Today I was thinking that perhaps we could bury bandits and foreign soldiers in unmarked graves. They could be carried either to the nearest graveyard or into the woods and buried, with nothing left behind. No headstone, no marker, nothing. With nothing to lose from burying them this way, then you can have the weird fantastical penalties if you don't bury them like skeletons rising up, etc.

On a separate note, it would be really good for graveyard tiles added adjacent to an existing graveyard to expand the existing graveyard, rather than creating a separate one.

 

Why not follow the real-world solution and create an "Ossuary" building where remains could be placed after some amount of time? Of course someone would have to do the disinterment and secondary burial; I suppose that could be the vicar, or someone could be assigned as gravedigger.

 

Would be interesting if it was actually a colony decision what to do with the dead.

Do you make it colony policy to enforce burials of all the dead?

Do you make it colony policy that the dead should be cremated?

Or do decide it's not something there should be a enforced policy for and instead it's up to each individual colonist to decide how they wish to be treated after they perish (and also for family/friends that deal with the remains to decide if they wish to honour those wishes)

 

I hate everything about the current implementation of graves. Except when the undertaker hoists and hauls the limp body, I freakin love that part. The rest is unintuitive. Why does it even LET you select an area smaller than what is possible to use? 5x5 is silly for a single grave. It's not even a space issue, it just doesn't make sense.

Scrap the area selection for a cemetery, and just allow the player to place individual plots. That way the player can at least have some control of making their collection of graves visually appealing.

Here's a start:

• make all graves 1x4 - this would match the size of a cot and allow a headstone.
• they should be rotatable like modules.
• they need to be deletable like farm plots - not because of space, but because in the current implementation my mouse can wig out or the selection lags and I end up with some retarded ass shaped layout with headstones hanging off the side and it pisses me off.
• make all skeletons buryable, even if you didn't cause or see the death...once you find it, you should be able to bury it.
• deleted graves should pop out a skeleton that can be reburied.
• not sure your plans with headstones, or if you're going to store entity-related info with them, but if so, each group of person should have a different headstone (one type for civilians, one for cultists, one for bandits, etc.), that way the player has the power to layout their "cemeteries" (collection of graves) how they see fit. If the grave is deleted, at least the type should attach to the skeleton that's popped out so it can be appropriately reburied.

The Queen demands it.

 

That is an unbelievably simple solution, Brassbucket and I absolutely love it. Because if means you can have VARIED APPEARANCES for Gravestones! The appearance of a gravestone could reflect their class, the way they were killed, what killed them, what their traits were, who their friends/family were and if those friends/family are still alive (i'm thinking they leave tributes there) and you can fit this in with a Crypt building which can inter bodies of those who are extremely important or those who are resting in multiple pieces, or bodies that were never recovered at all! Like memorials and plaques!

YES! YES! LET'S HAVE MEMORIAL PLAQUES. BENCHES. MEMORIAL BENCHES. PEOPLE WILL SIT ON THE MEMORY OF ENOLA BRONZECOTTER.

 

To ease us into this world of ornate and varied burialstones, perhaps the existing ones could be made clickable, and we'd get their name, cause of death etc.

Based on the deceased's traits perhaps they could throw in a line like "Cogs Cogswright, Beetle Lover" or "Carl Mud, Accursed Communist". Bandits, foreign soldiers etc. would have simpler writeups. Skeletons would be some equivalent of John Doe, or whatever the generic unknown name is in the Empire.

 

Here's another idea that's a middle ground (har har) between Brassbucket's idea and the current zone implementation:

Instead of individual graves (which can get time consuming and nitpicky with layout - this is also a thing in Rimworld too) ... why not make the graveyard a building module the same as others? It could require stone for the headstones, and wood for fencing around it (simple one) or iron for a wrought iron fence (fancier). It would require colonists to flatten the area and dig the graves and would hold a set amount of corpses before full and requiring a new one be built. It would be destructible just as other building modules but the skeletons of the deceased would need to be moved elsewhere.

 

Great news.

Somewhat related but also off to the side, is there any later plans for the contents of graveyards? Such as fishpeople or other strange creatures thinking they're some kind of 'help your self' convenience store, or cultists digging up remains for use in rituals?

 

Unfortunately I'm still finding it annoyingly depressing how easily large graveyards fill up as of 45A. Hopefully there are more plans for this. There are lots of good suggestions above.

 

So I tried burying all humanoids murdered in my town, meaning the local cemetery consisted mostly of bandits and fishpeople. The permanent nature of burial sites can make such a course problematic. You may shout "Well then don't bury the enemy!" but I disagree, burying is what makes us more civil then them. So the solution to our problem is only down the street in the Ceramics Workshop...

Yes, allow us to cremate! Under the "Bury X" job there is a "Cremate X" option where the corpse is tossed into an available kiln and placed in an Urn representative of their faction where they could either be stashed in the cemetery on a holder for multiple Urns or placed as a decorative object (Useful if somebody actually cared about the deceased)

Why yes, I did go to a funeral parlor on a field-trip, thanks for asking!

 

So there are parts of this I like a lot. Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• A separate "Crematorium" module makes more sense. You can't really just stuff a body in a kiln designed for pottery; it's not exposed to flame, just heat. You'll end up baking the corpse, or rendering it down into fat, rather than burning it to ash.
• An "Undertaker's Office" may actually be a useful thing. Putting bodies in coffins (made by the Carpenter's Workshop) and burying them, or cremating bodies in a Crematorium and putting the ashes in a urn (made by the Ceramics Workshop) is a reasonable workflow.
• The "Undertaker's Office" also means the Undertaker and their assistants are the only ones responsible for dealing with the dead. That reduces interruption from burial jobs; but it also means that bodies sit around longer until the Undertaker deals with the problem. As a result, you'd get more madness from seeing corpses, and potentially more beetles, but also less disruption of hauling and other jobs and more control over what happens to bodies. Give and take.
• If family units ever get introduced, families might have specific requests for burial vs. cremation of family members. Barring that, maybe a colonist's friends might have opinions on what should happen to their mortal remains. ("He always said he wanted to be buried, and by the airship mast!")
• With the addition of FIRE! coming up soon, ad-hoc cremation might also be a thing if you haven't got an Undertaker available (or you, or a murderer, simply must get rid of an inconvenient body right away.) Of course, that's bound to cause some hauntings.
• Using something other than a Crematorium to cremate might also work—if it gets hot enough to be believable—but the first thing out of it after it's used for convenient disposal of an inconvenient body has got to be creepy and haunted.
• It would also be nice for graveyards and columbariums near a chapel—or a cult's altar—to take on interesting properties. "Interesting" might simply mean "less/more prone to hauntings", or be more complex and interactive, but certainly there's a relationship. (A columbarium, by the way, is a repository for cremated remains. Here's a picture of the columbarium at my own church, as an example; Each black granite-sealed compartment you see holds cremains.)
• I love the idea of different urn designs for different factions.

 

Didn't coffins show up briefly in one experimental update and then get dropped right away?

 

Along the lines of the catacombs, here in Louisiana we have the old, creepy, above-ground family tombs. There's a space at the bottom of them, so that when it's full up, but it's time to add another occupant, the oldest coffin (and occupant), can be broken up, dropped into the space in the bottom, and voila! Room for the new occupant. It's like a cool magic trick.

 

I think it should be able to bury them out of the graveyard and not leaving a tomb stone. For your colonists, sure, you should follow the church's traditions and honor the dead. But for bandits or even fishpeople, you simply just don't want them to left rotting in your sight. If just dump the corpse isn't enough, just bury them at anywhere far enough.

And after a long time they might became undead perhaps, or will scared your farmer to crazy if you try to farm on it.