Zombyfycation dispels my zombies!

Question

Zombyfycation lets me summon a lot of zombies, but from time to time casting it kills most of them. It's quite frustrating to have that happen when I'm at eight zombies and trying to raise three more with the last scraps of mana left, only to end up companionless and out of mana.

Looking up several wikis provided me with texts that said the spell only allows a single zombie. This is confusing, because either there is a very obvious, game-breaking bug in the main skill of the Fleshsmithing tree (highly unlikely with any sort of maintenance on the game), or the texts have not been updated. The spell has a range of 3x3, which also makes no sense if it was meant to only raise at most one zombie.

What is causing the dispels, and how should I prevent them?

Answer 1

I happened to have spellDB.xml open (was working on something to better browse the game's data, but that's unrelated to this question), and...

<spell name="Summon Zomby" type="targetcorpse" icon="skills/spells/zombyfycation32.png" >
<requirements mp="1" />
<effect type="summon" monsterType="Zomby" amount="8" />
<anim sprite="sprites/sfx/summonA/summonA" frames="10" framerate="100" sfx="blast" centerEffect="1"/>
<anim sprite="sprites/sfx/corpus_burst/corpus_burst" frames="7" sfx="naughty" framerate="100" centerEffect="1" />
<description text="Give new life to the rather recently dead - as your undead Zomby minion!" />
</spell>

The game only really allows 8, maximum. My guess is that the game destroys any summons created through that spell once the limit has been exceeded. So, not a bug, just a quirk with how summons are implemented (???)