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[veok]

Sometimes, my butchers are lazy. Dwarven Caravan arrives, disturbing a pack of vultures. One gets chased into the fortress, corners a miner, and gets an iron pick in its head for its trouble. The other one gets shot down by the caravan guards.

My butcher only touches the corpse generated by his miner buddy. The other vulture is sitting in the refuse stockpile, a scant 12 spaces from the butchery. "Butcher a dead animal" is throwing back error messages about their not being a valid butcherable corpse.

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Another fort.

Bloody unicorns. I send out my military to punch the prancing buggers to death. It works. The unicorns are brought back to the fort. The butcher handles them fine.

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Another fort

Embark next to a family of raccoons. Immediately draft the woodcutter to chase down and murdilate the three things. He is successful, and 3 mangled raccoons are brought to the refuse pile. The butcher handles exactly two of the raccoons, and refuses to touch the last corpse, slowly rotting in the refuse pile.

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Another fort

Buzzard gets cornered into the fort, and a civilian manages to break its wing in their panic. I send the military in to finish it off. Bam. Buzzard Meat Biscuits for everyone.

Then, a Nightwing attacks. The military is called up again. They murdilate him. The nightwing is brought back to the refuse pile. "nuh-unh" says the butcher. The nightwing rots.

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Am I missing some essential step in butchering animals? Sometimes my butcher has no trouble finding the corpse. Other times, they find the corpse after queuing the "butcher a dead animal" several times. In other instances, they can't find it at all.

The corpse has *never* been forbidden. "Dwarves gather refuse from outside" has been turned on in all applicable cases. Is anyone else running into this? Am I doing something wrong?

[peregarrett]

I have an idea, but i'm not sure of it.
First of all, aren't they rotten? rotten coprses can't be butchered, but after they leave skeleton, it will be disassembled to bones and skull. It's counted as "butchering" too
Then, second.
There is <animal>'s corpse and there is <animal>' mutilated corpse. Hunters usually make accurate shots, so it's not teared apart, while with military it's just luck. And i suppose that complete corpses can be butchered, while mutilated aren't - need to check though...

[thijser]

Mutilated corpses should get butched aswell(I once had a lot of cage traps and I build a system that made the captured animals explode on the ground (20+ z-level drop)). However if everthing goes well this should auto generate a butcher order (unless you turned it of). Have you checked that it didn't get butched and that you are not looking at a piece of skin?

[JAFANZ]

To my mind the fact that it's never the First corpse that's the problem suggests to me that maybe you should verify that your Butcheries aren't full of unused crap resulting from previous efforts, unless you've already done that.

Or, maybe, just build an additional Butchery whenever the problem crops up, if that helps, see above.

[veok]

Corpses are not rotting. Mutilated corpses can be butchered just the same. (I wound up with 5 raccoon leather from 3 raccoons that way).

I never have problems when hunters kill things and bring them back, only when the military or civilians kill something.

[cyks]

I had a similar experience.  A dwarf caravan killed a unicorn outside my fort and although I had never used the butcher shop, the unicorn corpse just rotted away.

I suspected that the caravan performing the kill was to blaim because my butcher had no problem butchering zombie marmot limbs.

[FleshForge]

Corpses that are outside are considered "refuse" if the hunter doesn't carry them via the "returning kill" job, for example if he is interrupted and drops the corpse, or if he kills it in straight combat.  If you want it picked up, you need to turn on "gather refuse from outside" (o-r-o).
although if they made it to the refuse pile, something else may be wrong (rotten or mutilited corpse I expect).

[Iche_Bins]

I had a similar problem too, where my dwarfs would not gather gorillas killed by my millitary. I turned gather refuse from outside on and made a refuse stockpile only accepting corpses close to the butchery (no goblins though) and it works fine now.

[Zaik]

er, aren't Nightwings Sentient? I can't check the wiki atm :/

I've never encountered one normally, however i have them as a modded race with the fortress defense mod.

Then again so are elephants >.>.

Anyway, because you can't eat sentient creatures without raw fiddling, you can't butcher them either. However, you can let them totally decompose and they will eventually become bones.

[pushy]

er, aren't Nightwings Sentient? I can't check the wiki atm :/

Where do you think people get the info to put into the wiki? You could have checked the raws
Anyway, yes, nightwings are considered to be sapient creatures.


So the nightwing couldn't be butchered. Regarding the vulture and the raccoon, I'm thinking distance from the butchery might be a possible cause. I had the same issue with an elephant corpse in a recent fort, which was perhaps about 15 tiles away from a butcher's workshop, with all dwarves having butchery active, and they wouldn't touch it. As soon as I built a second butcher's workshop just 3 tiles away, they rushed the elephant into the second workshop. You do seem to need to have corpses being stupidly close to the workshop, which wasn't the case in versions like 40d. Having a large main refuse pile and a much smaller one directly beside the butcher's which is set up to take corpses from the larger pile, in theory that'd get the job done with minimal fuss You'd need to set up the small stockpile carefully, though - specifically, it should only accept corpses of non-sapient creatures (so it doesn't get filled with hair, cartilage and all that shit, and also doesn't get filled with goblins and other corpses that can't be butchered)

[Auto Slaughter]

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[veok]

Ah, my mistake. The 2010 Nightwing entry was empty, and the 40d one indicated they had certain returns when butchered. But yeah, that doesn't explain the vulture. If it happens again, I'll upload a save and see what folks can do with it.