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[JT]

I built a Craftsdwarf's Workshop to make arrows and a Bowyer's Workshop to make a crossbow, and once I had those available I set my vicious hunting dwarf loose.  His hunting dog died pretty fast, since the only game in the area were unicorns and elephants.

As my Hunter continued merrily, downing two elephants without a single scratch, I realised I hadn't yet put down any Butcher's Workshops!  I hastily added one, and after quite literally waiting forever for the Farmer (whom I assigned to handle Butchering) to stop hauling tasks and start butchering tasks, he went ahead and built it.

However, the elephant corpses that my Hunter had produced sat useless just three screens away from the butcher's shop.  They finally rotted a short while later, and the game never added the butchering tasks.

Now, elephants do weigh 800 units in the game, but I still can't understand why no dwarf has attempted to haul them in and butcher them.  I can't fathom why a hunter would kill an elephant if they aren't butcherable, which leads me to believe that the job was just in stalemate for some reason.

Thus, I would like to be able to specify on the [j]obs Screen that I would like a certain job done RIGHT AWAY, which means that the closest dwarf doing a job with a duration of "infinite" (-1) would stop doing that job (without cancelling the job) and go do the other job instead.  I was ticked that the Farmer merrily chose to do everything else before getting around to building the butcher shop.  That's likely the chief reason why the elephants couldn't be butchered.

I do wonder whether the elephants were rotten before or after the shop was completed, because they said they were just "elephant corpse"s but the shop would absolutely refuse to butcher anything, claiming there were no butcherable bodies nearby.

[karnot]

quote:I built a Craftsdwarf's Workshop to make arrows and a Bowyer's Workshop to make a crossbow, and once I had those available I set my vicious hunting dwarf loose.  

Shouldnt you also make a quiver ? However, how do you make a leather quiver without hunting is beyond me...

quote: However, the elephant corpses that my Hunter had produced sat useless just three screens away from the butcher's shop.

Technically your hunter should kill the elephant, then switch to "Return Kill" job, and haul the corpse somewhere close to the...to the wagon i suppose. I havent seen any elephants, but maybe it is strength dependent ? I mean, you can see dwarves haul different things with different speed (anvil, anyone ?) and maybe elephant is way too heavy ?

quote: the shop would absolutely refuse to butcher anything, claiming there were no butcherable bodies nearby.

The "Butcher" option is, i guess, made for the living things, like, you can butcher your horses. I believe "Extract" is the right thing. But anyway, butcher shop DOES work on very strange principles, if at all...

[JT]

A) Nope, you don't need quivers.  Your hunter will just carry 15 arrows in one of his hands and carry the crossbow in the other.  I'm assuming that the quiver would simply allow him to carry more arrows than that.

B) These corpses were made before the Butcher's Shop, sadly.  No one ever got assigned the job of Return Kill for the old ones.  My hunter just killed a gorilla and that works just fine, now that I have the butcher shop in place. =)

C) Killing your domestic animals is actually done through the Animals submenu of the [z]Status menu.  Butcher is the term the game uses for everything related to skinning and cutting up prey, so I'm guessing that I was trying to use the right function but the game wasn't interpretting it correctly.  I'm almost sure the elephants weren't rotten by the time the shop was built...

[ August 11, 2006: Message edited by: JT ]

[Toady One]

Although there are many, many strong contenders for "Worst Interface of the Game", butchering is right up there.  It has gone through many iterations, and there always seems to be problems.  Right now, the butcher's job is automated to take *nearby* corpses, where nearby is quite nearby.  Unless you set the standing order to collect refuse from outside (quite dangerous), getting failed "return kills" is harder.

Since 19b, the hunter should be slightly more diligent with return kills, but not much.

At the same time, coming up way to handle butchery has been annoying.  People in the past have resisted the idea of making specific designations on corpses as being too cumbersome.

Adjusting job priorities is an important Req, and there's a lot to be done, and there's a lot of it that depends on individual taste, but I agree with the sentiment of just wanting to get certain job completed at the expense of other jobs.  There was an idea of some kind of invisible bidding type system that seemed like it would handle a lot of problems, after some kind of user input, and other ideas floating around about adjusting the priorities of the different professions a dwarf carries in [v p l].  This sort of thing is further complicated by the distances of units from buildings.  Right now, buildings choose the units rather than the other way around so that distance can be minimized, since travel time is a huge factor in the game, but if a building tries to select and fails, it holds off for a while to save the processor.  Then, the units are off doing new things for themselves, so buildings really do need to use some kind of priority system to strip units away from jobs.  I'm ranting.

[JT]

A little off topic, but ideally, the butchering system could just have an automatic and a manual component:

The Automatic Component
When issuing an instruction to "Butcher an Animal", the Butcher's Shop should scan the unit list for butcherable (deceased, non-pet, non-humanoid) corpses and issue a Return Kill job for each of them that does not already have the job pending.  Return Kill would be prioritised by the Hunt task (i.e., the hunter who kills his prey will be the first chosen to haul it back) but could also be supported by the Animal Hauling task.

The Manual Component
When viewing a corpse with the loo[k] key, there could be a menu to utcher this corpse (and probably a few other functions, like burial).  When viewing a live animal with the [v] key, there could be a function to declare [k]ill this animal.  Unlike the automatic component this would allow you to kill or butcher actual pets -- presumably you would do this only in the most dire of straits, since this would cause the pet's owner to become rather upset...

[Toady One]

This sounds reasonable, I think.

Incidentally and randomly, you can create skull totems from hunted kills at the craftsdwarf shop.  Ownership immediately passes to the hunter.  You might also be able to do it with things like frogman skulls after they rot, but I don't recall.