Adds cremation and urns

[Merikona]

Summary

Content "Gives the option to cremate corpses and store their ashes in urns."

Purpose of change

Currently, when a pet or NPC dies, you only have the option to put them in a coffin to honor them. But you still need to bash them before doing so, so they do not re-animate, from a lore, if not gameplay, standpoint. No one wants to bash their friend's or pet's skull in. Giving the player the option to cremate corpses instead is a great addition, for giving players more choice than one for honoring the dead, for its roleplay value, and because it's practical in a zombie apocalypse. Ashes cannot reanimate, and you will often have a nomadic lifestyle and you can take the remains with you in an urn anywhere. It's also less work than digging a grave and crafting a coffin and tombstone.

Describe the solution

This PR allows you to differentiate between the ashes of organic and inanimate objects by creating a new kind of ash, cremation ash. Two types of urns now spawn in houses and mansions, one made of porcelain and the other of crystal. And finally, you can craft your own clay urns, which while not as beautiful as the ones found via scavenging, will serve the same purpose.

Describe alternatives you've considered

My character that I spent hundreds of hours on died to a landmine and I resumed as one of my NPCs. After retrieving their body, I realized all of the current options for honoring them fell short. The alternative would be to bash them then craft a coffin, but I really did not wish to bash them. Or I could stick them in a closet in my basement...or leave them in a random forest somewhere, but neither were great choices either. So I made this PR. I think cremation needs to be added to the base game in one form or another.

Testing

Edit 08-02-22: Seems like everything works as designed! Burning corpses now yields corpse ash, and you can place those in 3 types of urns. The urns are on the larger side (they vary from 200 - 250 cubic inches in real life, but are 250 cubic inches in game to allow for wider range of body masses). The 10th percentile for women weight in the U.S. is 120 lbs and 90th percentile for men 250 lbs. At 3.5% weight conversion to ashes, the urn will be sizable enough to accommodate anyone in that range.

The crystal and the porcelain urns will not be engravable, but you can write on them with markers. The clay urn is craftable and you can engrave those as well as any other clay objects now, as long as you have a knife.

Porcelain urns spawn in houses and crystal urns in mansions with fairly low probability. They may co-occur in the same shelf with items from other item_groups as well, but it's hard to miss them. There will be other items in the memorial, including religious paraphernalia and items from 4 subtypes: child, pet, veteran, general memorials.

Graves sometimes spawn with cremated remains along with other goodies (15% chance compared to 85% for your everyday corpse). The contents will be similar to a memorial from a house, with some items removed. No finding dog whistles and harnesses within a tombstone marked with, "Love you, Dad."

Additional context

[AtomicFox556]

#58800 adds a variant of ash that remains from burning corpses and similar things as well; may want to reuse that variant if that PR gets merged first.

[Merikona]

#58800 adds a variant of ash that remains from burning corpses and similar things as well; may want to reuse that variant if that PR gets merged first.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. From looking at your commits, the main overlaps is that in my PR, only bones and flesh gets converted to corpse_ash at a 3.5% weight ratio. You have biosilicified chitin, mold chitin, cured meat, egg, light chitin, fur, wool, alien carapace, hardened chitin, leather, insect flesh, feces giving ash_flesh on top of that at 1.3%. The inclusion of more sources for ash_flesh makes sense since your goal is to have ashes drop more uniformly across a wide variety of materials for crafting purposes and all of those can be loosely categorized as flesh/living tissue.

Is there a source for the 1.3%? Most references I've read cite the 3.5% (e.g. https://www.urnsforashes.co.uk/what-size-urn/).

I'm also uncertain about the greasy ash name. From what I've read, cremains are mostly calcium phosphate, minerals that accumulate in the bones over a lifetime such as sodium, and carbonate. Most of the oils should be burned off. I like the description though.

I'll keep an eye on your PR.

[Night-Pryanik]

No, not mass grave, but individual graves. You can search for mx_grave.

[Merikona]

No, not mass grave, but individual graves. You can search for mx_grave.

Thanks for the suggestion. I added a 15% for cremated remains (along with items from a new item_group that subsamples from the memorial item_group). Tested in game by digging a bunch of graves too. For a PR that started with me trying to figure out how to honor the dead, not sure how I ended up gravedigging instead.

[evankimori]

Heyo, question on your addition here. Are there any future plans to use this new Corpse Ash item or allow it to be further broken down by extra burning to be used for anything? I've got a buttload of it from burning various meats/spoiled food/corpses etc over a long scenario and it's only taking up space even though I've kept it in my oven hoping it would 'burn down' eventually.

Not a complaint mind you, just wondering if there's an eventual use planned or can I just admin delete it when the pile gets annoying large to save some memory in my save. :)

[Merikona]

I believe some other contributors might have plans in store for it. e.g. #58538 is currently in innawoods, and it might make it to the main game eventually. I do not personally have plans though, so you're welcome to admin delete it. I didn't realize that the corpse ash might accumulate and become problematic over a long scenario. Spoiled food disappears on its own so you don't need or want to burn it. A way you could get rid of items you don't want is to sell it to vendors. With something like ashes (which iirc has 0 barter value), you could sell infinite amounts and it'd disappear in a few weeks.

[evankimori]

Oh? Well I learned something new @ the Vendor option but I'm playing Lonely Cave-Innawoods so that's not an option for me right now. XD But thanks for that!

As for option usage: I'm not skilled in programming the items but I have ideas but feel really self conscious to just submit an idea and be unable to work on the back end of making the feature reality. I already do bug finds here and feel like I don't do enough. :(

This is a great feature here btw and I'm glad for it because of how much it makes Innawoods feel truly lived in and desolate entirely with "life features" so don't feel like I'm ragging on you. :) But I guess until there's an option for usage: I have to undo my habit of burning Rotten items from playing Vanilla for so many years (it used to spawn vermin and roaches etc) to stop the Corpse Ash spawning in the first place.

[Merikona]

I'll be honest. The game is not short on ideas to implement, and most proposed ideas/suggestions don't make it to the game. That said, nobody will judge you so submit them anyways and perhaps a dev will find themselves with free time, see it, and want to make it reality. Also, since a lot of the coding is jsonized, it's not actually that difficult to become a dev yourself. There's a dev-help channel on Discord and a helpful guide here. https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/wiki/New-Contributors-Guide-Getting-Started

I'm really happy to hear that you liked this PR. Since practically none of the devs for this game are getting paid for their time, every piece of code is a labor of love and it's positive feedback from the community that keeps us going.

[evankimori]

Oh I hear you loud and clear there. I ended up playing this game regularly because I had a friend who worked as one of the ContribDevs and he was so proud to show off the game and his bit. Quit a while back because he and all felt like his work was just Meh/ignored and he went on to other projects. Meanwhile I'm here happily trying to break the game for at least 2 hours every day by playing the Unstable branches, updating every release and seeing what sticks and what breaks and writing up Reports. XD

Thanks so much for your work folks. This game is so fun when you have the patience for it and I love every moment of it. I'll keep trying to contribute. If it's any praise: here's a thumbs up and raised glass from me.

[evankimori]

@Merikona - So here's a thought if it's within your handling: in at #58538, a suggestion was made to incorporate the Corpse Ash into the (Liquid?) Fertilizer recipe instead of glass. Thoughts? Or this is a closed project for you?

[Merikona]

I'm a bit busy irl at the moment, but could take a look at it once my time frees up a bit more. I'd have to do some digging to see how reasonable it is to make fertilizer out of corpse ash, what equipment you need, how long it would take, how much labor is required, and if a single person can realistically make it, yada yada. Probably would be around December when I get back into CDDA development.

[evankimori]

Word. Well keep me posted if you get into 2023 and are willing to work on this again. Would love to contribute. Will do some research meantime @ the usage of cremains.