Haha, I got back to playing some IVAN recently, and the game continued to surprise me.

I've discovered an awesome (and I wouldn't call it "abuse", really) situation for training: Fighting a zombie torso with a carrot!

For some reason, an equipped carrot is well capable of cutting off every bodypart of a zombie, but doesn't hurt the torso. And since torso can't hurt you and you can attack them ad infinitum, it's a great way to rise dexterity and arm strength!

There are side-effects, obviously. First of all, carrots rot. Second of all, l.e.p.r.o.s.y.

I imagine a similar result could be achieved by, say, material changing a sword into cloth.

Fighting with carrots is much funnier though. You should be able to connect two of them and use then like nunchuks 8h)

Also, you can still deal damage with a cloth sword. A carrot fails to behead a farmer at 1020 ASTR :/

I'm sure you could find a softer material

Unlikely. It's not the material, it's the fact a sword is still a weapon. Hell, I've gone on a rampage with an air scythe before and managed to wreak havoc aplenty.

I tested your hypothesis, but I slaughtered the zombie.

Actually, I tried redoing the effect in Wizard Mode, and I failed also (eventually killing the zombie). But then I recalled that I used to have a pet zombie equipping leather armour - and that's it! Eureka!

What you need to do is have a tame zombie (wand of necromancy), equip it with a leather armour (nothing stronger!), wield a carrot, then piss off the zombie and attack it.

The hilarious part was that you can hack off its limbs but not kill the torso... therefore rendering the zombie pretty harmless but unkillable.

(edit: It seems that, for example, ommel hair armour also boosts the zombie's limbs' defense - therefore the claim that only cloaks protect the whole body is wrong; armour increases defense values of limbs too, albeit less than of the torso)

I think this was known; body armor provides half-defense to arms and legs. Cloaks on the other hand provide full defense value to all body parts, in addition to having a chance of preventing fluids from splashing on YOU (instead they would splash on the cloak).

zombies can still move around without limbs right? You know what, I'm going to go create a new thread