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[Ragnarock]

Hi,

I'm playing Dwarf Fortress for two days already, my first fort was located at a really cold biome with water frozen for the whole year, so I starved the bastards to death, and abandoned my bearded little friends.

My new fort is located in a Hot temperature, and I've got a brook in the centre of my map, so it's okay.
I have small mines, my gemcutter has a lot of work to do, and I just hit native platinum, but that's not the point.

I've constructed a butcher workshop, the guy has 1 job - to slaughter animals. I had tame camel and a cow, and I readied them for slaughter but nobody did the job and both of the animals died of starvation and brought to the refuse pile.
One of my guys is hunting constantly and killed a kangaroo and some strange animal with it's own name, nevermind. Extract from dead task was underway, but... both brought to the refuse pile.

Why 5700lbs? The guy was hunting, and he just brought a goddamn ELEPHANT corpse to the fort. The problem is - he's moving it to the refuse pile... Why? I want to make meat of it... I saved the game in the exact moment when he's halfway to the refuse pile, what to do friends? I don't wanna waste the meat, and I'm sure Butcher has "Extract from dead animal" (or something like that) task underway, but he's not doing it...

Please help!

Also, if you got some time, you can tell me what to do next - I've got some gems already, just hit platinum, have no ores to smelt, I'm making 'lotta booze etc. but I'm just curious what to do.
If all the animals will be moved to refuse pile, we're gonna starve soon...


Thank you in advance

[CaptainLambcake]

they are moved to refuse before butchering, always happens.  put your refuse near the butcher?

[Ragnarock]

they are moved to refuse before butchering, always happens.  put your refuse near the butcher?

Well, they have both rotten already

[TruePikachu]

Make a corpse pile.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Yeah when killing big game it usually helps to urgently designate a stockpile near it and place a butcher's shop as well.

Hauling titan corpses takes forever.

[Naryar]

Do you have a dwarf with butcher enabled ?

[Ragnarock]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

These are my dwarves.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the upper right, my butcher workshop. In the center, a lil' to the left, my dead tamed animals (which are not being stored in the refuse stockpile, I don't know why) right next to a dwarf which is carrying elephant to the refuse pile, located south, just next to walls of my fortress. Maybe this'll clear up why my animals aren't getting butchered, nor slaughtered.
edit: i failed to capture butcher's workshop in the second screenshot, was in a hurry. sorry, but it's there.
On the job list, Butcher An Animal is marked as inactive.

[Veylon]

By default, dead animals outdoors are not hauled to refuse heaps. You need to go into (O)rders and change that. I believe this also applies to butchering non-hunted animals. The corpse never gets hauled, it never gets the tagged that marks it as available for butchery and so nothing gets done.

[Ragnarock]

By default, dead animals outdoors are not hauled to refuse heaps. You need to go into (O)rders and change that. I believe this also applies to butchering non-hunted animals. The corpse never gets hauled, it never gets the tagged that marks it as available for butchery and so nothing gets done.

Well, I turned it on to NOT ignore refuse outside, but the animals I keep hunting and killing are still not butchered, they just rot

[MasterShizzle]

You can put one or two butcher's shops outside your wall proper, then enable butchering on your hunters/woodcutters since they're headed outdoors anyway. Then put refuse piles in the squares around your butchers that only accept non-rotten animal corpses. The butchering skill has nothing to do with the produced products, IIRC. Slap a minecart adjacent to it to move all your meaty goodness to a food stockpile ASAP.

EDIT: I thought that when hunters hunt they used the "Return Kill" job to bring the corpses back for butchering, and that refuse hauling isn't even involved. Am I wrong in this? I thought I remembered seeing "Return Kill" jobs get interrupted by gobbos in the past.

[Larix]

Tame animals can only be butchered when you successfully slaughter them. If they die of starvation, goblin or old age, they'll go to the refuse pile and won't ever be touched again. Do you have 'gather refuse from outside' activated? It looks like the corpses lie on 'aboveground light' tiles, which is the distinction the game looks for when checking whether refuse is outside.

If the 'E' with the red background is the dead elephant, it might likewise have ended up 'outside' for refuse hauling purposes.

And if you want corpses from your refuse stockpile worked on by your butchers, you must place them close to each other; if the thing on the southern end of your screenshot is the refuse stockpile and the butcher's shop is in the upper northeast corner, the distance is _much_ too large. The game's not joking when it cancels because of the lack of a "nearby unrotten corpse".

[wierd]

Odd... I usually have to fussily disable hunter dwarves, and rehabilitate them into more useful roles, like marksdwarves.  I don't like dwarves wandering around the map picking fights with giant lions when the food stockpile is already overflowing with butchered turkeys.

Same with fisher dwarves trying their hardest to get eaten by carp, or fall into freezing lakes in the fall.

I don't like them stealing all the bolts made every 10 seconds to go harrass the local wild ducks with either, nor their cancellation spam when I physically bar them from going outside.

Really, I really hate hunter and fisher dwarves.

*edit

The advice about putting the refuse pile very close to the butcher shop is very sound. Corpses spoil quickly. It is also a good idea to either have those above ground, or walled inside a tight area, to control miasma generation.

Personally, I hate grazers, because they die constantly from starvation. Dogs, cats, and poultry don't need to eat.  Poultry can be controlled by controlling access to the nest boxes, thus avoiding the population explosions that cats and dogs suffer from. (They also give you yummy eggs.)

I tend to buy wool from caravans and keep it on hand for moody dwarves, rather than try to grow it myself, because of the retarded grazing needs many of them have.

[swordsmith04]

You know that your bridge is up, right? The dwarves can't bring corpses killed outside to the butcher's shop inside your fortress if the bridge is up.

[Sutremaine]

Large corpses can be dealt with by having your refuse stockpile set to accept wheelbarrows. You'll need extra stockpiles (due to the 3-wheelbarrow limit) and some tweaking of the stockpile settings (unless you don't mind your dwarves fetching a wheelbarrow to move a dead butterfly) to make the whole thing run as smoothly as a melted well-emulsified ganache, but after it's done you won't need special measures for every individual jumbo corpse.

Auto-butchery only works when a corpse is within a certain distance of the butcher's shop. It's somewhere in the region of 20-25 tiles.

[lucusLoC]

hunters should return the kill to the butchers before anything else, and slaughter animal jobs should also be done there. I am not sure what you could have set up to change that behavior. is the butcher shop tied to a stockpile at all? if it is it will not accept any material from elsewhere. you need to make sure that *none* of you shops are attached to a pile, because if the job gets randomly assigned to a shop that is the job will stall permanently. that's the only think i can think of that would cause your problem.