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[Sutremaine]

I had a forgotten beast with a stack of 140 bones, and set those bones to be turned into crossbows. In the past I've had this issue with FBs and wondered if the bones were rotting away mid-job (bones 'stored' in a workshop in a workshop will remain there forever without vanishing as they can do in a stockpile), so I used DFHack to add the superdwarf status to the bowyer. End result: 33 bone crossbows.

It looks like time isn't a factor here, so what's happening? Is the game only giving me 1 bone for each bone-producing bodypart?

[Bumber]

Isn't there an issue where bone stacks are treated as a single bone, or something? I don't know why you'd get even 33 crossbows if the bones weren't in 33 separate stacks, however.

[Sutremaine]

For custom reactions, yes.

Most of the time when you get n bones from a creature, you get n hardcoded bonecrafting jobs from it. Most of the creatures you'll be butchering will be much smaller than an FB, with the largest domestic creature being a tenth the size of an FB. I don't think many people actually count what comes out of a bone stack of 100 or more, so observations on this will be limited.

[nanomage]

Perhaps this has to do with bones from the stack being eaten by vermin while in the bonecarver's shop?

[Renowne]

Maybe it has something to do from it coming from a forgotten beast, especially weird ones made out of weird substances like fire etc. My bone-craver managed to turn a forgotten beast made out of water into crossbow bolts, I was shocked to find a stack of "water" in my ammo bins, sometime later I noticed they were gone, probably fired into a invading force of goblins that came soon after.

[Garath]

slaughter a puppy or something for a stack of 4 puppy bones and see how many bone crossbows will be made. My guess is 1 after reading this. Sounds like bone reactions use different amounts of bone for different products, similar to metal. Never heard of it before, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[Larix]

Crossbows belong to the items that are normally produced at a rate of one per bone, the reaction doesn't delete the entire stack. I should know, i have 1200 "weapons" in one fort, ~1000 of which are bone crossbows, and i slaughtered maybe 300 animals there (and i made a bunch of other bone products as well and sold a few hundred crossbows already).

I have seen a few cases where large bone stacks didn't give the expected number of products. This _sometimes_ happens, but i don't know what causes it. Vermin eating bones shouldn't be it - bones inside buildings last forever, vermin doesn't get at them. I suspect that there are some circumstances where the game fails to calculate the size of the "remaining" bone stack properly and just deletes it, possibly when the craft job caused the crafter to gain a skill level??

[Deon]

[MATERIAL_SIZE:3] can have something to do with it.

[Larix]

Probably not. "Yak bull bone [16]" was turned into sixteen yak bone crossbows. Curiously, when it came down from [2], the remainder was labelled "yak bull right front leg bone"; a level gain during the crafting didn't cause the remaining stack to disappear.

It could be that the game internally keeps track of the different possible bone types and hiccups and fails if an obligatory bone type is missing - which might be common with unexpected body plans like legless "quadrupeds" and other stuff common in forgotten beasts. I remember that one of my bone disappearance issues came up when i lucked into a dead sperm whale and the ultramassive heap of bones gave very few bone _products_.

[Sutremaine]

Re: vermin possibly eating the bones while they're being worked on
That's what the temporary speed boost from superdwarf was meant to eliminate. I regularly get a full allotment of bone products from large domestic herbivores, and the superdwarf got through the large stack much quicker than they'd normally get through a stack of 20.

Re: single bone oddities
That bug's been around for a while. When you get down to the last bone in a stack and use it, it goes from being 'bone, stack size 1' to 'regular body part, stack size N/A'.

Re: FB materials
This FB was made of delicious meat.

Re: Sperm whale returns
Interesting. Sperm whales do have fewer body parts than the average creature...

Re:[MATERIAL_SIZE:3]
Ooh, I have an idea now. If a body part returns more than one unit of bone, perhaps the game uses the material size for each bodypart stack instead of allowing one unit to suffice (as it does with wood). This should be pretty easy to test as well.

Edit: Doesn't look like the above theory is correct. I resurrected an FB and killed it again, and its scaly eight-legged kangaroo body yielded 162 units of bone. Crossbow material sizes of 1 and 200 both produced 58 crossbows.

Body plan of FB, as listed in its Wounds screen, plus estimated relative size of body parts:
1 Head (300)
1 Upper body (1000)
1 Lower body (1000)
8 legs (3200 = 400 x 8 )
8 feet (400 = 50 x 8 )
1 Tail (100)

20 parts (6000)

I'd like to try this again with an organic FB with a lower total relsize, preferably the one that gave me 33 crossbows.

[nanomage]

I don't know, I still stand on the vermin eating hypothesis.It maybe that typical domestic stacks of ~20 bones are eaten more slowly because the probability of a bone being eaten is independent on the total amount of bones in the stack, that is, in a [200] stack each bone has the same x probability of being eaten each tick as each bone in a [5] stack. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suppose that that in a [200] bone stack the probability is even higher, because large amounts or [VERMIN_EDIBLE] stuff do attract more vermin.

That way, we would have an explanation for why the [200] FB bones stack got raided by rats while the regular [20] cow bone stack didn't, assuming the same time in the workshop.

I think the best experiment would be to try and plot a graph of the mean C(x) function, where C is the amount of crossbows and x is the size of the progenitor bone stack.
Perhaps we could have some insights looking at it.

EDIT: oh and another idea. It is possible to check the vermin eating hypothesis specifically by raising the concerntrations of cats in the workshop during the experiment. If the hypothesis is correct, than the mean number of crossbows produced will increase with the concentration of cats.