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[penco]

Is it possible to butcher something other than creatures that were just slaughtered or hunted? I can butcher those fine, but...

• Animal killed by stray dogs: nope.
• Animal killed by military dwarves: nope.
• Animal killed by hunter but left alone for a few days (not rotten, just sitting out): nope.

I always up with a bunch of perfectly good, non-rotten animal corpses just laying around collecting dust while my butcher sits around with No Job. Am I doing something wrong, or does butchering only work for creatures killed a particular way?

[Tacomagic]

These are all related to an existing bug:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=874

Essentially, if something OTHER than a hunter kills an animal, it can never be butched.  This INCLUDES if an animal bleeds to death or otherwise succumbs to injuries after being hit by a hunter.  Only a hunter directly scoring a kill-hit will result in a butcherable corpse.  The third item on your list is probably related to this.  The hunter probably injured it, but it died of its injuries rather than being directly dealt the killing blow.

Similarly tame animals can only be directly butched.  If they're killed something, they cannot be butchered.

Also, sometimes butcher jobs don't happen when they should.  You can attempt to queue up a manual butcher job and see if that works.  Odds are, though, the animal wasn't killed just right.

[Loci]

That bug report is rather outdated. In the current version, wild animals that die by almost any means remain butcherable. If you capture some wild elk birds, you can leave 'em in cages until they eventually croak from old age and your butcher will gleefully process 'em. Small creatures do tend to have problems (butchers refuse to butcher corpses that won't produce significant returns). Tame creatures, however, remain bugged--they are only butcherable if slaughtered.

[Tacomagic]

Might be a bug with hunters then.  Any wild creature that my hunters wound but then die on their own remain unbucherable by any means.  Even queuing up manual butcher jobs leaves the corpse there to rot.  I've lost track of the number of times this has happened.  Seems like I only ever see a hunter actually return with a kill is if the bolt instantly kills the creature.

Now that I think about it, it might have something to do with refuse collection since I usually forbid corpse collection in the orders menu.  I might be my own bug.

[GavJ]

Unless toady has commented on it, it's unclear to me what might be intentional here or not. I mean, in real modern life, the USDA doesn't let you sell tame/farmed meat that wasn't directly killed by way of a butchering process line. Cows die from things like blizzards and have to just get thrown out.

Making that also the rule for the 14th century dwarves might be a bit of a stretch... but maybe not! I don't know, people back then might also have been super suspicious of animals just dying randomly for other reason, out of fear of getting diseased meat or whatever. You don't have to understand microbiology to know full well that dodgy meat or sick animals are bad news for food.

The hunter not taking an animal that bled to death is silly no matter what, but sounds like he fixed that.

[Tacomagic]

Yeah, building a pocket world to test hunting right now.

Tried testing with an old fort that I didn't care about, but a zombie horde showed up and killed everyone about 5 minutes after I'd finished getting my hunters all set up to go kill stuff.

The undead care not for science.

[thraxarious]

I've been running into this a lot.

I keep capturing those horrid parrots (Damn Keas!), and I have a stock room full of the horrid things. I have them set "ready for Slaughter" as they have been caught, but my butcher would rather study his navel.

I can't tame them (not tamable creature?), so they sit there in their cages. I so far only seem to be able to use them as bait animals in a cage, but would like to get some leather or fat for soap from them. Its been a right pain trying to get a hospital set up.

I set up cage traps as part of my defense, it sure thins out some of the goblin hordes.

[Tacomagic]

Ok, figured this out.  When a hunter makes a kill and does not immediately haul it back (which happens a lot since they tire out and head back for sleep rather than collecting the corpse and dragging it back) the corpse is abandoned and becomes surface refuse.  You have to enable surface refuse collection before anyone can actually do anything with the corpse.

I replicated it several times in a test fort.

Also, it may require a stockpile with corpses active.  Going to do some more research on that.

[rolk112]

Not sure on the hunter part but in my experience to butcher something killed by the military you need to manually set the butcher to butcher dead animals, for some reason military kills do not auto butcher.

[Tacomagic]

Not sure on the hunter part but in my experience to butcher something killed by the military you need to manually set the butcher to butcher dead animals, for some reason military kills do not auto butcher.

In this case, even manual butcher jobs fail because it does not see any butcherable corpse.

In order to get hunting working at 100%, it appears to need 2 things:

A stockpile with both refuse and corpses enabled.
Surface refuse collection enabled.

If you don't have either of these things, the corpse will just sit on the surface.  For some reason, once the corpse gets hauled to a refuse pile, an auto-butcher job fires off and it gets moved to a butcher shop.

Tried it several times by disabling surface collection or disabling the refuse piles.  Unless both were active, nothing would cause the corpse to be butchered.

Without surface collecting and a generalized refuse pile, only about 1/4 of the hunted creatures would actually get hauled back by the hunter.  Most times, the hunter would go eat, sleep, or on break right after a kill, leaving an inaccessible corpse (until I fulfilled both the above criteria).  Once the hunter was done with that task, they would go back to hunting fresh game.

I'm going to start working on a bug report and get a save set up were the bug is active.

Also of note: If the corpse is on a stockpile, it will still be butchered even if surface refuse collection is disabled.

EDIT:  OK, got a save where the bug is currently effecting a hunted corpse.  Bug report is here 08181

[penco]

Awesome, I will try that and see if it works. Thanks for all the work.