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[Ihmhi]

I recently started playing again. I have an above-ground Refuse stockpile in order to move corpses of slain animals and whatnot there.

It's 10 x 20 and the corpses are really starting to pile up. Corpses don't seem to disappear like they used to. What do I do here? I could just throw them all into a single tile dumping ground but that feels a bit like cheating to me.

[Fishbulb]

It takes years for corpses to decay away to nothingness completely. Literally years, though I've not timed it or anything.

The way I think it works is that you start with a corpse or mutilated corpse, which may or may not be butcherable. (More on this shortly.) Assuming it's not butcherable or you just don't butcher it, it will after not-that-long decay into a rotten corpse or a rotten mutilated corpse. This takes maybe an in-game month? I haven't timed it, though it's probably on the wiki someplace.

Nothing can be done with a rotten corpse or rotten mutilated corpse, I don't think. I think they're useless objects. However, after again not-that-long, these will further decay into a skeleton or a partial skeleton. Now, if the corpse or mutilated corpse you started with was butcherable but just not butchered — like say, you didn't get to it before it rotted — then you can queue up a "butcher an animal" task at your butcher shop which will tell a dwarf to pick up the skeleton or partial skeleton and break it down into a stack of bones, and maybe a skull or whatever. You can then use these just like you would anything else.

But if the corpse you started with was not butcherable, then there's nothing for it. The skeleton or partial skeleton will remain in that state for in-game years before finally decaying to … well, I don't know what, frankly. I don't know if it decays to a stack of bones or if it just disappears, because I've never had the patience to watch it happen.

There are some controls in the raws that dictate what is and what isn't a butcherable corpse, to a limited extent. By default, sentient creatures (like kobolds and gobbos, and I think man-animals like tigermen and pandamen and such) are not butcherable; the default dwarven civilization considers desecrating those corpses or making them into trophies abhorrent, so you dwarves won't do it. You can change that (generating a new world in the process) to make your dwarves amoral with regard to butchery; this is a pretty common change, from what I gather, and one I make myself. There's something very satisfying about strafing goblins with goblin-bone bolts fired by marksdwarves wearing goblin-bone helms and goblin-leather armor. But again, that's not something the dwarves will tolerate by default.

The other thing to bear in mind is that corpses, rotten corpses and skeletons (and their mutilated and partial cousins) are dumpable objects … and not magma-safe. Just sayin'.

[Nan]

If dumping is a problem for realism, you could always dig out a substantial pit and throw the corpses into it. It's what they do in real life in wars where the corpses are piling up and becoming an inconvenience/embarrassment/hygiene issue. A dump zone on the edge of a cliff, will cause the dwarves to dump things over the edge, rather than on the tile.