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[Pinstar]

Very new to DF here, so please excuse my newbieness.

I embarked on a fortress and had a hunter. I spawned with a big pack of emus on the map and the hunter immediately set to work hunting them. He killed 4 or 5 of them before he ran out of his starting ammo. They eventually made their way to the butcher shop, but by the time I started getting my kitchen setup, the meat was going bad and being wasted.

To eliminate this I have an idea in my mind of what I want to do...but am unsure how to do this, or if it is even possible at the moment given the commands available to us.


I want a dwarf to go off and hunt. When he kills something that can be butchered, he'll stop hunting and drag it to the butcher's shop. That same dwarf will then butcher it into its component meat/bone/leather.
Then with his own private kitchen/crafting workshop/tannery, have that dwarf cook all the meat into meals at the kitchen, process all the leather into leather stuff of some sort, then process all the bones into bone bolts. Once the WHOLE animal is used up, he'll take the bone bolts and go off hunting again.

The idea being that the hunter will prioritize processing dead animals first before going off to hunt. That way, butcherable animales killed in ways besides the hunter (Say a wild animal attacks a military dwarf) the butcher will seek to process that corpse first before going off to try and make a fresh kill of his own.

Is this possible?

[AutomataKittay]

Not possible, unfortunately, there're no real priority system. Hunting seem to get dwarves' attention pretty quickly, even with other jobs enabled. And even if it wasn't, dwarves are really really bad at priorizing their jobs.

Sounds more like an issue with not having enough butcher shops or dwarves with butchering and tanning jobs and 'o'rder set to not gather refuse from outside. Meat doesn't go bad in food stockpile and refuse stockpile for corpses should be close to butcher shop for automatic processing. Vermins can eat meat, though, if it's not in large pot or barrels.

Almost all of my farmers are set to butcher and tan, so it get done pretty timely for me. Corpse hauling involves refuse hauling job, so you could limit what dwarves will wander out to grab corpses.

I does like the idea, it's not practical to do in-game without too much micromanagment, though. I personally prefer to have hunter do just hunting and hauling while leaving the butchering and tanning to the farmers and the meals to the dedicated cook. Processing a lot of bone takes up too much time, too, so dedicated bonecrafter gives better return while hunters hunts at same time.

[Merendel]

I dont use hunters often but as I recall they tend to drag a kill to a butchers shop before starting a new hunt automaticly, assuming there is a butcher shop.   However they wont necessarily do the butchering on their own once they get there even with butcher enabled.  Your better off assigning another dwarf to processing the results of the hunt.

[ShadowHammer]

They will attempt to drag the kill back, but if there are other animals nearby, they get "interrupted by animal" and just keep shooting until 1. They run out of ammo 2. They kill all the animals 3. They die.

Hunting is a very good way of training marksdwarf skill, though, so even if the corpses are all left to rot, it is not profitless.

[Cobbler89]

I wonder if the DFHack people could figure out how to alter the game's prioritization of different labors, in leiu of Toady overhauling the labor and prioritization system?