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[Wannabehero]

New version is up!

This is a minor mod that adds additional small internal organs to all standard vertebrate creatures, organs made of skin, causing them to yield more leather upon butchering. In addition, the type of leather obtained as well as the number of skins varies depending on the creature size, but follows this approximate scale:

Code: [Select]

Body Size Example # of leather materials
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1,900    -  27,000 small birds, cats 1 tanned skin
27,000   -  90,000 dogs, pigs, alpacas 1 tanned skin + 1 leather
90,000   -  190,000 reindeer, llamas 1 tanned skin + 2 leather
190,000  -  1,700,000 grizzly bears, horses 1 tanned skin + 2 leather + 1 hide
1,700,000 or higher elephants, megabeasts 1 tanned skin + 2 leather + 1 hide + 1 tough hide

The quality and value of the leathers progresses as (from lowest to highest):

tanned skin - equivalent to vanilla leather,  scaled vertebrates (like cave crocodiles) will not yield this leather  (VALUE:1)
leather - slightly better protective properties than tanned skin, equivalent value (VALUE:1)
scaly leather - slightly better protective properties than normal leather, particularly to edged attacks.  Scaled vertebrates yield this instead of normal leather (VALUE:1)
hide - significantly better armor material than vanilla leather (still worse than wood), only obtainable from bigger animals.  (VALUE:2)
tough hide - best armor quality, roughly equivalent to wood.  Only obtained from truly massive beasts (elephants, rhinos, ect.)  (VALUE:3)

All of these materials are treated as leather and are used by your dwarves for leather reactions.

This mod creates small internal organs made of skin in order to obtain the additional skin layers for tanning into leather (or skin/hide).  These organs cannot be targeted by edged attacks in combat, but can be hit by blunt attacks.  The small size of the organs and the restriction to one location in the body helps keep them from be involved in combat except rarely, so the effect on creature survivability is minimal.

This mod alters the b_detail_plan_default.txt and body_default.txt raws, so if you currently are using another mod that also edits those raws then you could experience a conflict.

Version 1.1 Change Log:
- Reduced the number of max leathers from 7 to 5
- Rescaled the body sizes for the additional leather yields
- Reduced size of new internal organs to further limit interaction with combat
- Changed leathers to include five different types with improving quality, based on creature size
- Changed STANDARD_MATERIALS_TEMPLATE to cause skinless (i.e. scaled) vertebrates to yield scaly leather
- Removed all modifications involving material_template_default.txt to minimize compatibility conflicts

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Link to the Download
Better Butchery - more and diverse leather v1.1

unzip and drop the files inside into the Dwarf Fortress/raw folder.
Changes require regen of the world.

If instead you don't want all the new leather types, and enjoy even MOAR leather, here is a link to version 1.0
Better Butchery - more leather from butchering v1.0

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I didn't originally intend to post this, but instead worked on it as part of a larger Butchery overhaul, however with the very interesting post by sackhead on obtaining more leather, I thought it could be valuable to share.

[Mitre]

What effect, ( if any ) does this lead to in combat?

I'd think that more layers would mean more difficult in both slashing and smashing weapons.

[Wannabehero]

That is a good question, and something I've been thinking about.  I haven't run the arena tests yet (I probably should have before posting), but my hope is it will be negligible.

The extra skin doesn't come from additional layers of skin around the body, but instead from organs made of skin inside the upperbody.  The biggest effect I would see is that if the extra organs do interact in combat, they dilute the possibility of hitting more important organs, such as the lungs or heart.

The rel size of the extra organs are fairly small, the biggest extra skin organ is slightly smaller than a kidney.  The tissue rel thickness is as small as possible, and the tissue shape is set to feathers, as it is my (limited) understanding that feathers interact the least in combat (creatures never get damage in the feathers, IIRC).

This is something that does bare some further testing.  My hope is that it is minimal.

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After some testing, it appears the feather shape is doing its job.  The new skin organs don't appear to be targeted by edged attacks.  They can be involved with blunt attacks, but the small size also appears to do its job.  It is very occasional that a wound lands on the skin organs, and it always seems to be the largest one.

Soooooo, yes, the new organs do have a minor influence on combat, for blunt attacks, targeting the upper body.  Interaction with a blunt attack is uncommon but can occur.  I do not believe it significantly impacts the survivability of animals, and will only really be an imbalance (minutely) between an invertebrate and a vertebrate.

[Wannabehero]

Version 1.1 is up now

I scaled back to number of leathers obtainable from max 7 to 5.  It felt a little more right to me.  The body sizes at which the additional leathers are yielded from butchering was likewise altered.

As a flavorful addition, the types of leather also scale with creature size.

• Tanned Skin - The lowest quality leather is the same as vanilla leather, but the name is changed to "tanned skin".  So now all your turkeys and cats will provide your fortress with tanned skins instead of leather.
• Leather - Mid sized creatures, from dogs to the common farm animals, with provide both tanned skin and leather(s).  Leather is now slightly better than vanilla, to help differentiate it from tanned skin.
• Scaly Leather - Scaled creatures like alligators will not provide any tanned skin or leather, but instead will drop skin tissue that is tanned into "scaly leather", another improved version of leather (better than leather particularly against edged attacks)
• Hide - Large creatures, such as grizzly bears, horses, and yaks, will also provide a "hide" leather.  This is significantly better than normal leather in terms of protective properties, but is still not as good as even lowly copper (or wood for that matter).  Has a higher material value to reflect its awesomeness.
• Tough Hide - Extremely large creatures, like Elephants, will drop all of the previous leather materials, as well as a "tough hide".  These are even better than regular hides at protection from blows (roughly equivalent to wood as an armor), and are worth more as well.  When obtained from a rare creature, these tough hides can fetch quite a hefty price due to multiplication of values.

No more modification of material_template_default, so it should have less potential conflicts with other mods.

If the new types of leather are undesirable, the old version is still linked, or I could create a new version that is the same as this one, except without all the new leather types.

[Wannabehero]

Ok, so heads up, I've encountered a significant bug during further playtesting and tweaking.

It seems that any editing at all to the body_default.txt raw file will screw up stockpiling of harvested body parts.  That means skin, hair, bones, horns, hooves, scales, shell, ect. will not be stored in a stockpile.  They stay in the butcher shop until called on for another reaction, or manually dumped.

This doesn't have a huge impact on playability, save for the ability to use custom stockpiling to selectively coerce dwarves into desired material selection.  Of most significant impact are cartilage and nerve tissue, which your dwarves won't haul out to your refuse stockpile, so instead they stick around in the butcher shop to rot.

A short term fix may be to update this mod to prevent rotting of any of the unusable and unstockpilable remains, as well as skin.  I also will continue experimenting with possible work arounds; there may be a way to force stockpile the materials with some effort.

[Meph]

Please check if that includes items that are made of these materials... when I first did my standardized materials I had a similar problem, with bodyparts not being stockpiled (skin, bones and so forth) and that resultet in all products not being stockpiled either. So you take a bone to make a bone amulet, but its not being stockpiled. That was a major problem.