Category talk:DF2012:Incomplete butchering returns

I think it's possible to calculate butchering returns from the raws, rather than observing it empirically.

Here's how the calculation works, as far as I can tell:

First, go through each body part the creature has. Using the BODY_DETAIL_PLAN, figure out how much of that body part is muscle, fat, etc. For instance, a sperm whale's flipper is 50/56 muscle, 5/56 fat, and 1/56 skin.

Second, multiply that number by a constant depending on the material concerned. For fat, the constant is 2; for every edible product except fat (meat, brain, etc.), it's 1. I'm not sure of the constant for other materials.

Third, figure out what portion of the creature is in that body part -- this is just the relsize of that body part divided by the sum of the relsizes of all body parts. Scale the result from step 2 by this number.

Sum this up for all body parts. For example, in the case of a sperm whale, we get 200 for brain, 2384 for meat, 518 for fat, etc. (for simplicity's sake and to make calculation easier, I multiplied all of them by the sum of relsizes). You can see that the ratios here are very close to the observed ratios. The absolute number is proportional to the size of the animal when alive (you can see this by comparing the returns from giant and normal varieties of a given animal -- the yield is always directly multiplied by the same amount that body size is). I haven't worked out the constant of proportionality, though -- if it's done by volume rather than mass, it'll be different for different body plans. --Zzedar (talk) 22:11, 15 April 2013 (UTC)