v0.34:Meat industry

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v50.14 · v0.47 · v0.34.11 · v0.31 · v0.28 · v0.23 This article is about an older version of DF. More Info · V

This article is a quick guide to running a meat and related goods industry. If you decide to base your economy on such then keep in mind that the amount available depends on the breeding rate of your tame animals (how long the offspring takes to be born and mature), the spawning of wild animals, and/or the amount of meat and leather that traders bring.

Note that the meat industry involves many materials which can rot and so requires slightly more micromanagement than other industries.

Summary: Obtain some animals; kill and butcher them to obtain bones, (organ-)meat, fat, skull/horns and raw hides; the meat can be used immediately but the hide needs to be tanned into leather and the fat needs to be processed into tallow; finally cook the tallow into a meal (or make soap with it), and craft the bones, skull, horns and leather into an end product.

Acquisition

The basic units of the meat industry are its animals, and there are a number of methods to acquire said animals (note that the related fishing industry is its own matter).

Embark

You can buy animals on embark, and doing so even allows you to chose from male and female animals. Since you need only one male to breed, an example way to kick-start your meat industry is to embark you could embark with one bull and 3 cows. Note, though, that with the exception of cats, dogs and poultry, buying animals on embark is extremely expensive. You also get two random draft animals on embark for each wagon (usually one wagon with two draft animals). These can be butchered when needed, or be kept in the hopes that traders or immigrants will supply matching animals for breeding. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to buy one: If you happen to have a female, chances are that sooner rather than later it will meet a companion among the traders' many pack animals; see breeding, below.

Trading

As with most industry goods, you can purchase both animals and processed meat and leather from caravans, allowing you to vary your dwarves' diet without having to establish a meat industry proper. Note however that trading will never give you hair, horns, skulls, or bones in general. If you want to keep your leatherworkers constantly occupied, buying up caravans' (often vast) collections of leather is cheap way to get your fort clothed quickly.

It might be necessary that you request every type of leather at low priority in order to ensure the merchant comes back with a large quantity next year (they usually bring excessive amounts even if you don't). You can only buy leather from human and dwarven caravans. Elven caravans are interesting in that they often bring a small number of tame caged animals with them, which may be useful as pets (such as silvery gibbons) or for defense purposes (such as grizzly bears).

Hunting

In all but the most inhospitable of places, there will be some running food wildlife frolicking in the biome. An ambusher armed with a crossbow and a quiver full of bolts can and will attack these animals, cautiously approaching them ("ambushing", their speed and chances of not being noticed being dependent on their skill) before opening fire at their query with crossbow bolts. Hunting is a very outdoorsy activity, and will take your hunters well past where you can establish reasonable defenses; in addition hunters will occasionally do stupid things that will get them maimed, such as hunting lions, or worse still, killed in grisly ways, such as attacking elephant families.

Upon a successful kill the dwarf will return the kill, carrying the corpse back to the nearest butcher's shop to be torn apart, or the nearest refuse stockpile if no shop has been built yet. Hunters are rather single-minded; when hunting, they will ignore other animals besides their quarry, even if others are more easily attacked or less dangerous to do so against. Although multiple kills happen, hunters generally only return their quarry, or quit when they run out of bolts. To avoid wasting perfectly edible corpses, you need to change your standing orders (o) to Gather refuse from outside, although this will enable much more then ambusher kill returning.

Hunting makes an erratic but, when done by a skilled ambusher, very worthy meat source. It takes the bother of pasturing animals away, but comes at the trade off of defensibility. Many players on mature fortresses are simply too concerned with enemy sieges and the like to send dwarves out too far, and will thus disable hunting jobs on their dwarves.

Military

You can order your soldiers out to kill wild animals by selecting their squads or the soldiers individually (for a basic outline of such actions, see attack). This takes some management, but is particularly useful if a large herd appears and you want to get them all before they emigrate to less blood-soaked pastures; be prepared to process them all, however, as you do not want your potential foodstuffs to rot away if your butcheries are overloaded. Soldiers will not kill or butcher domestic or tame animals. Take note that soldiers will attack animals regardless of the target you've given them, as they will attack the nearest non-friendly creature in sight when told to move somewhere or kill a target.

Your soldiers must generally be very agile to catch up with a running animal before it leaves the edge of the map, and attacking with melee always carries the risk of getting your soldiers maimed or killed, so as you might expect military hunting is mainly for the crossbow dwarves.

Trapping

It is also possible to catch animals through judicious use of cage traps. Building cage traps where animals will walk will ensure that some of them will be caught; trappers can then haul the occupied cages away and reset them with fresh cages. You can increase your chances of catching something by baiting the trap.

Cage traps should be built where animals will walk, not where they are when you decide to trap them. Any dwarves sent out to create and arm traps in the animals' midst will scare them away or (worse) trigger their aggression. As such most of the animals that you will end up caging will be small vermin, which cannot be turned into meat and, besides low-value pets, cannot be turned into anything particularly useful, except for the few that can be processed into extracts - see below.

To successfully trap large animals you need to build choke points into your map. The destruction of ramps to create sheer cliffs is the easiest way to force them to go down a particular route; with the construction of walls, ponds, channels, and so forth, you can force them to walk right through your cage traps. This is additionally interesting for defense, which is probably your primary goal: anything that will funnel animals will funnel invaders too, and caged goblins make good target practice once pitted.

Leave a small gap one or two tiles wide (depending on how many of the critters you want to trap) and build your cage traps there. If the animals haven't moved off or been scared off by the time you're done, and they're docile enough to not attack once they see your dwarves, use military orders to send a dwarf (or several) around behind the animals and herd them toward the choke point.

Note that when using channels and ponds together to create a choke point, connecting the channel all the way up to the pond's edge will end up draining the pond. If this is undesirable for your fort's water supply plans, be sure to leave a tile between the edge of the pond and the edge of the channel, and build a cage trap or wall instead.

Note also that cage traps cannot be built within a certain number of tiles of the map edge, so when planning your funnels and choke points, be sure to leave four or five tiles as a buffer zone.

Breeding

When a male and a female of the same species are present on the map, sooner or later the male will impregnate the female. Animal reproduction requires absolutely no contact between them, and in fact will occur regardless of distance, physical obstacles such as walls or locked doors, number of each gender, and even ownership. This has been jokingly refereed to by players as spore-based breeding; even a male in a herd of wild animals outside the fortress walls can impregnate a female locked deep in the lowest level, and females can get pregnant again immediately after giving birth (much like dwarves). The only thing that has been reported to prevent pregnancy is caging, but females that are already pregnant can give birth while caged (also much like dwarves).

Some immigrants will bring pets or stray animals with them, often to the effect of forming or completing breeding pairs. Remember that you only ever need one male: the only non-butchering product male animals produce, besides reproduction, is wool, and only a few of them. For this reason having one male bull and ten female cows is a good idea.

Using cage traps judiciously (or taking advantage of the animals elves trade) can sometimes snag you a breeding pair of wild animals. These can be used to establish crazy schemes, like alligator farms and giant eagle hatcheries. Tame something unusual and start something crazy if you get lucky enough! All tamable creatures can be tamed, but it can take a long time for exotic animals and they will slowly revert to wild state if left unattended; a skilled animal trainer is a real blessing in this regard.

There is currently a per type population cap, currently observed to be around 50, past which animals will not get pregnant; existing pregnancies will mature to term, and once some adults are slaughtered, the population can begin moving up again.

Pastures

Tame animals with the [GRAZER:<value>] token (most herbivores) need to constantly munch on grass to survive, and as such require a pasture containing grass, cave moss, or floor fungus to graze upon, or they will starve to death. Elephants and rhinoceroses in particular are bugged at the moment; they cannot eat fast enough to keep up with their grazing needs, and as such will slowly starve to death if tamed.

Pastures are simple enough to build (unless the location you embarked someplace where it rains fun). Designate a grassy area as a pasture activity zone (i-n), set (N) the animals to be released onto the pasture, and your dwarves will haul the designated animals to it - this does not require any specific labor, and much like harvesting food, will be performed by all dwarves, even those with all hauling jobs disabled. Once in the pasture, the animals will munch on all the grass they need, as long as there is enough of it.

Pastures can be easily depleted if the herd of animals on it is large enough; in addition, having too many animals on a pasture at once will lead to fights, which can seriously maim and injure your livestock. Since an above-ground pasture requires a significant plot of land, it is a major security concern - having enough grazing land for your animals while also keeping them protected from invading goblins is an important concern. A solution is to use the fact that livestock can graze on floor fungus and the like as easily as on regular old grass, and wall off a pasture inside of a cavern layer or set them loose in your underground tree farm.

Animals that don't require a constant stream of plant matter, like poultry, can be put in any pasture and do fine in them. The basis of egg production is a pasture with nest boxes in it.

Pens

A strategy to improve your framerate is to restrain most of your livestock near your butcher's shop, as a large number of free-roaming animals will reduce your game speed. Additionally it reduces the amount of time it takes butchers to track down and retrieve animals they are to slaughter.

Animals on restraints still can path (1 tile in any direction from the chain/rope), and that can hurt your framerate. By making a series of 1x1 rooms with doors set to "non-pet-passable", and restraining the animals there, the animals have nowhere to go and so pathing is not a problem. The door keeps them from wandering; the restraint is necessary to get them into the room in the first place. (see restraint for proper removal technique.) Pits can also be adapted for this purpose, without the restraint and with multiple animals.

The pens idea would be a good idea if pets actually understood non-pet-passable during calculation of paths. Instead they believe they can get through during mental calculations. Cold, hard, reality stops them at the door, but they continue to path as if they could get through, so, they just stand there (until a dwarf comes by and opens the door, at which point they gleefully run past). Pets in cages helps framerate the most, followed closely by restraints, since the search space bottoms out after only 2 moves (corner to corner). Pits, with no access besides (raised) bridges and (closed) floodgates, are also very effective, as pathing will stop as soon as the space of the pit is exhausted, so it's like a restraint with a slightly longer leash. Pens using floodgates would work, although loading the pets in would be nigh impossible without dropping them in from above, as anything in the way of a closing floodgate stops it from closing. It would be quite extreme, but such a collection of 1x1 pits could be an effective way of stopping pathfinding while retaining breeding. One could even use bars instead of floodgates, and have a really proper zoo/cage.

A common strategy is to cage all your young until matured because they do not give the same amount of bones, meat, and fat as adults. Some tamed wild species take more than 1 year to mature, unlike most domestic animals; this makes it excusable to butcher, for instance, elephant calves right away, as they take ten years to mature.

Furthermore:

• Cages can hold an unlimited number of animals, so you only need one.
• Caged animals do not path, and therefore, do not consume a lot of processor speed.
• Distinguishing between breeding animals and butcherable livestock is easier when clearly separated.
• Caged cats cannot adopt owners (thus decreasing the chances of a catsplosion).
• You can define a zoo from a cage, increasing overall fortress wealth, dwarven happiness, and so on.

Butchering

Requires: A butcher's shop, a butcher, and either a stray tamed animal marked for slaughter or one killed by a hunter or soldier

Note: While you can't butcher pets, their offspring will be at your disposal without restriction.

Once an animal has been killed you only have a limited amount of time to butcher the corpse before it rots. If your butcher is distracted by other tasks this is quite possible.

By default a butcher's shop will automatically queue Butcher animal whenever an animal corpse is available, or Slaughter animal for stray animals marked for slaughter. An animal corpse or body part is available if it is taken to the butcher's shop or in a refuse stockpile within a certain distance of the shop. An animal is not available if it is merely lying around. Once butchered the animal will yield one skull (though hydras should currently produce more than one), one raw hide and depending on the animal type a number of (prepared)(organ-)meat pieces, bones, potentially horns/hoofs, fat and cartilage. The skill of the butcher only affects the time taken for Butcher animal task (Slaughter animal occurs in the blink of an eye), not the amount produced nor the quality.

Meat and fat goes to your food stockpile. Bones, horns, hoofs, hair, cartilage and raw hides go to the refuse stockpile. Cartilage has no use and should be disposed of, but you would be well put to create custom stockpiles for hides next to your tanner's shop (see Tanning below), for bones/horns/hoofs next to your craftsdwarves workshop (see Bone carving below), and changing the settings on your main refuse pile to not accept bones, horns/hoofs and hides. Hair can be weaved into low-value thread, but not into cloth, so it is useless outside hospital (note that it doesn't rot, so it has to be dumped manually).

If it takes too long for the butchered parts to be hauled into the stockpile, the food will rot and miasma spread. To prevent this, it is advisable to build the butcher's workshop outside of the fortress, near refuse piles (you may want it inside the walls though). The fresh air prevents miasma spreading. Miasma doesn't spread through diagonal openings, so a clever architect might isolate the smell in a 3x3 room with the shop.

If the animal is butchered just before it rots, the products of the animal MAY not rot. It is unknown whether the time of rotting for butchering products is based on the time of death of the animal or the time of production of the butchering returns.^[Verify]

To keep your animal population growing you should preferably butcher the males except for one of each species you are breeding, because one male is enough to impregnate all the females. The number of males does not affect how frequently the females give birth as long as you have at least one^[Verify] (which can also be a pet).

Overdrive

In some instances - most notably, after rhesus macaque or mandrill invasions, or killing some other large herd with your soldiers - you may find yourself with more bodies and severed body parts than you can process. In this case it is a good idea to set up some temporary extra butcher and tanners' shops (and butcher and tanner workers) to process them all before they rot. Butchers are more important because these workshops have a tendency to get cluttered quickly. Setting up a new workshop takes but a moment, so one might even construct a whole chamber of them and suspend the butchering job in all the cluttered shops.

Using the animal products

Animal products can support several industries within the fortress: they provide meat, fat and eggs for cooking, leather for bags, clothing and armor, and bones for ammunition, trade goods and in desperate circumstances armor. Horns/hoofs can currently only be used for decorations and to make crafts from. The value of an animal product is multiplied by the animal's modvalue, so items made from common animals are less valuable than items made from rare animals like a giant cave spider or a dragon. An animal's modvalue can be found in the creature raw files.

Bones and Skulls

Requires: Bone carver, craftsdwarf's workshop, and some bones, horns, hoofs or skulls

Butchering an animal produces quite a few bones and a skull. In the case of some animals (like cows) also horns and hoofs. By setting up a craftsdwarf workshop near your abattoir you can turn these to use, such as turning your piles of bones into bone bolts for your archers to practice with.

The only useful thing to do with a skull is turn it into a totem for trading. Note that totems do not fall under any category in the "Move trade goods to depot" screen, so you need to search for them. Usually however they will be in a finished goods bin and not show up at all, so just transport the bins to the depot.

Note that hooves count as 'horns' in the sense of the 'Decorate with horn'/'Make horn crafts' task in your craftsdwarf's shop.

Meat and fat

Requires: a cook, a kitchen, and some meat or fat

Fat can be rendered into tallow at a kitchen, and then used as an ingredient in meals. The various organs and meat can be eaten raw, or used as an ingredient. Tallow is no longer a good ingredient - rendering the fat causes it to separate into many tiny stacks, which affects the size of resultant meal.

Tallow can also be turned into soap. Not worth much as tradegood considering the required effort, but since version 0.31.01 soap plays an important role in staving off infections when performing operations in your hospital, and it's recommended to stock your hospitals with at least some bars. See the soap article on how to make soap.

Skins/Leather

Requires: a tanner, a tanner's shop, and raw hide

As with the butcher's shop, the tanner's shop will queue Tan raw hide automatically (by default), the tanner's skill has no affect on quantity nor quality of the leather produced, and the task is time-sensitive because of rot.

It is quite sensible to have a single dwarf as both the butcher and tanner, as you will never need to begin tanning until you finish butchering. You could also make this same dwarf your leatherworker. However, there is no outstanding reason to do this. It may be advisable (or not) to simply ensure that there are no stockpiles that will accept Fresh Raw Hides and to have the tanner's shops in the immediate area of the butcher's shop - if fresh raw hides can be stored in any refuse stockpile, they will instantly be designated for hauling and cannot be tanned until they have been stored. Ensuring that raw hides will not be stockpiled means that they will be available for tanning fresh off the former owner.

Once a hide has been tanned, it will be stored in a leather stockpile.

Leatherworking

Requires: A leather works, a leatherworker, and a tanned hide

Once you have tanned hides, whether created yourself or bought from a merchant, you can use them to produce leather goods at the leather works.

Eggs

Requires: female egg-laying animal, nest box

If you have tame egg-laying animals, egg production can be a byproduct of the meat industry. Female egg-laying animals will claim a nest box, and lay a clutch of eggs. These can be allowed to hatch into young animals (to replace the ones sent to the butcher), or collected into food stockpiles and cooked into meals at a kitchen.

Milk

You can also milk certain female animals such as horses, cows etc. at the farmers workshop with an empty bucket and a dwarf with the milking labor enabled. The resulting milk's only use is to turn into cheese at the farmers workshop with a dwarf with the cheesemaking labor enabled. This is the only use besides trading, milk cannot be drunk (but cheese can be eaten).

Summary

Worker type / Labor

• Ambusher / Hunting
  • A crossbow or other weapon
  • Bolts, quiver
  • Leather armor
  • Stats buffing
  • Archery practice

• Soldiers/Military
  • Soldiers
  • Some form of armor
  • Any weapon

• Cage trapping
  • Mechanic
  • Mechanic's workshop
  • Mechanisms
  • Cages

• Breeding
  • Animals
  • Cages
  • Restraints

• Processing
  • Butcher / Butchery
    • Butcher's shop
  • Tanner / Tanning
    • Tanner's shop
  • Leatherworker / Leatherworking
    • Leather works
  • Bone carver / Bone carving
    • Craftsdwarf's workshop
  • Cook / Cooking
    • Kitchen
    • Barrels

See also

• Leather
• Industry

Workshops FAQ
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How do I make glass?
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How do I make soap?
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