40d Talk:Butcher

Wouldnt it make more sense to redirect this to Butcher's_shop? --Mizipzor 20:29, 4 November 2007 (EST)

Experience/Speed

it takes my dabbling butcher only a splitsecond to butcher a mule - how could he be faster? --Koltom 19:43, 14 February 2008 (EST)

read carefully: "Higher skill allows them to process corpses only faster." He's getting faster with processing corpses of dead animals, e.g. from a hunt or from some accident. Butchering of an animal is surprisingly fast and independent of skill.

yeah, i had noticed that later and even made an edit to just that quote, only forgot to remove the above post ;) but thanks --Koltom 07:57, 15 February 2008 (EST)

Butchering immature animals

I was looking to see if there is any benefit to waiting for animals to mature before butchering them... ie does a "cow calf" produce less meat than a cow? does a kitten produce less meat than a cat? (we all know how quick the cat population explodes and there are no wild animals on the Z-levels I have access to!)GarrieIrons 09:15, 21 June 2008 (EDT)

I noticed the other day that kittens product 2 meat (1 less than adult cats), and I believe also 2 bones. I would guess that in general you get 1/2 of what you would get from the adult, rounded up. That's a complete guess though, so some actual research might be in order. --Raumkraut 19:10, 21 June 2008 (EDT)

A cow calf returns 6 meat, 6 chunks, 6 bone, 6 fat, skin and skull. This is 2/3 the value of a full cow, though the fat level is the same. I would expect then that butchering immature animals returns 2/3 the full value of a grown animal. -- Primax 23:35, 6 October 2008 (EDT)

For the record, I believe the amount of meat returned is equal to the animal's size. So a kitten is size 2 and returns 2 meat while a cat is size 3 and returns 3 meat. If they're all 2/3 the size then that may be an explicit decision of ToadyOne, but ultimately meat, bones, etc... returned are a function of the actual creature's bodysize, regardless of the ultimate reason for that bodysize. --Squirrelloid 07:18, 13 January 2009 (EST)

Butchering Goblins

Goblins are BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD. The page says this means they MUST be tamed and then marked to be slaughtered. Does this mean I can't butcher the bodies? You should be able to butcher just about anything... --Xonara 04:04, 24 October 2008 (EDT)

Correct. You can still get their bones by putting their bodies in a refuse stockpile and waiting for them to decompose (you'll get the bones anywhere inside, but the refuse area will hopefully not make a problem with miasma). I guess dwarves don't like to feast on the bodies of their enemies. --RomeoFalling 04:28, 24 October 2008 (EDT)

Empty Heads?

I was watching my butcher slog her way through the dismembered carcasses of a barrel of rhesus macaques when I noticed something odd. Because my traps are filled with obsidian swords, the monkeys were in many pieces. Like heads. When she butchered a head, I was expecting a skull to come out, but instead it was one bone and one meat. Bug? Is the head a feature of the body for some reason? --Oddrune 02:43, 13 January 2009 (EST)

AFAIK, heads, chunks, and limbs cannot be butchered, only the listed dead body, which always yields the specified bones/skin/skull/fat/meat values. Are you certain that the actual corpse was not being butchered, not the head object? Although, that leads to the question, do headless corpses still produce a skull, or is that handled? -Fuzzy 13:12, 13 January 2009 (EST)

Body parts can be and often are butchered. They produce materials proportional to the whole corpse - the size of the body part is the numerator, the size of the parent creature is the denominator. All of these are rounded down (that's what computers ALWAYS do unless told to do otherwise). So in this case, while you might reasonably expect the head to contain a skull, it's a fraction of the corpse, and computationally it produces a fraction of a skull - and that's rounded down to no skull at all. You could conceivably consider this a bug, but in my mind it's fine. Decapitations are rarely clean, so it's not unreasaonble to expect that the skull was ruined in the messiness, and the bones extracted are merely the usable parts. --ThunderClaw 13:28, 13 January 2009 (EST)

This is easily confirmed and seen by having your hunters use axes, which invariably slice SOMETHING off of the corpse. This is very inefficient, however, as it increases the number of butchering trips (each dismembered part is butchered seperately). It also makes it very difficult to hunt anything that runs away from hunters.--Zipdog 04:51, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Butchery related tokens

So, to the best of my ability to determine, dwarves (for example) do not have [NON_BUTCHERABLE] nor [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD], yet their corpses are not butcherable. Which tokens automatically imply one of the two above? Is there a token which overrides this and makes a creature butcherable regardless? --Squirrelloid 02:45, 16 January 2009 (EST)

well as the mot sentient creatures dont have to token any more i think its just got thrown out, because the ethics maybe do this job now, should be tested --Rhenaya 20:59, 16 January 2009 (EST)

For reference, your race's ethics determine whether or not you can butcher a sapient creature. --Quietust 22:08, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Butchering Caged Animals

Be warned that if you use the Z-Animals menu to designate caged animals for slaughter, random dwarfs will run up to the cage and release them - presumably, marking an animal for slaughter also unassigns it from the cage. Ordinarily, this just makes things take longer, but can spell disaster if you are butchering cats and want to prevent CWS from taking hold. --Quietust 03:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)