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[StubbornAlcoholic]

After playing and enjoying a certain recent horror game based around the unhinged large scale slaughter of beasts for meat, it got my mind resting upon how to best construct a slaughterhouse of disturbing proportions within DF.

I've half-heartedly tried animal breeding in previous forts, but I've never really managed to master the art of it as I'd like to.

My goals are thus:

1. To build a near-fully-automated system for the wholesale slaughter of boar and sows, which neatly delivers the corpses to Butcher Workshops.

2. To have the capacity to breed animals fast enough to meet demand.

3. To have enough meat to make meat products not only the food source of my fort, but also my main trade export.

4. To possibly expand this slaughtering system to include sentient enemies of the fortress, minus the butchery part.

Right now I have a few designs in mind (most involve retracting bridges, large drops, serrated discs and/or sluice grating), but I wondered if the veteran animal breeders here might have any juicy tips for my dark factory?

[Swonnrr]

I liked the idea of someone of using a werecreatures walled on a pressureplate to monthly activate a retracting drawbridge, and plan to do this myself in my next fort:

Basically, you set up your pasture with a 30z-lvl deathpit in the middle. You build a retracting drawbridge of empiricaly calculated size above said death pit.

Monthly, the werecreatures transform, thus activating the pressure plate, wich will retract the drawbridge, sending whatever random animals was standing on it.
On the longterm and with enough animals, statistics become your friends and you just have simple probability calculations to do.

To transport the meat, i guess, without being sure, that you could build the set up using 1x1tile deathtraps, falling directly inside minecarts, wich will deliver it to butcher workshops.
If for some reasons that doesn't wakrs the animakls doesn't explodes rightly and the bodyparts don't endup IN the minecart, samething:
you only have to have a grate in the bottom of the pit, wich you retract to let the now-dead bodyparts fall in the minecart.

[Repseki]

I don't believe items actually enter minecarts when they fall onto them.

[StubbornAlcoholic]

I liked the idea of someone of using a werecreatures walled on a pressureplate to monthly activate a retracting drawbridge, and plan to do this myself in my next fort:

Basically, you set up your pasture with a 30z-lvl deathpit in the middle. You build a retracting drawbridge of empiricaly calculated size above said death pit.

Monthly, the werecreatures transform, thus activating the pressure plate, wich will retract the drawbridge, sending whatever random animals was standing on it.
On the longterm and with enough animals, statistics become your friends and you just have simple probability calculations to do.

This is an inspired idea! If I can capture a werebeast I will certainly make use of it (my last fort had a weremammoth, scary creature...)

I had a rather simple approach in mind when it came to corpses. Animals killed by "the pit" would be washed into a second vertical chute (with a retracting floor) by high pressure water, preferably released from a re-routed river via floodgate. These corpses would then land directly adjacent to the butchers (with a raised bridge preventing flooding), with excess water drained via a floor grate.

This all assumes water pushes dead bodies around, which I seem to remember it doing when I previously drowned some Goblin Thieves...

[Snaake]

Werecreatures transform once every lunar month. A DF year of 12 calendar months has 13 lunar months (the transformations occur at the same times each year, though).

As already mentioned, (as far as I know,) items don't enter minecarts when they fall on them.

The water pressure washing corpses to a processing area sounds very minecraft-y. What you have to take into account is that in DF corpses rot and spoil, so in reality dfhack and autobutcher are probably the best way to handle things, if you're not averse to using dfhack plugins to get rid of micromanagement (as opposed to complicated dwarven engineering tricks). If you're only interested in the bones (including skull, hoofs, horns), as with the "classic" merperson farming system, it's not so bad, but...

Water does push stuff around, but have a look at this bug before you get too excited about using water to push stuff around as a method for item transport.

[Merendel]

hmm. you know you could mix in a horror element if you do this in a reanimating biome

[itg]

Glad you like the werebeast idea! Here's another one: the battle royale. Pasture/pit every single animal on top of a very tall 1x1 pole. The animals will panic and start fighting each other, and occasionally they'll dodge off the edge and die. Spikes at the bottom are optional. Allow the winner of the battle royale to live and reproduce, at least for a time.

As for corpse collection, I have an idea which should be both overengineered and somewhat effective. Basically, it's a terraced funnel with retracting bridges on every terrace. The bridges should be set on repeat. When corpses fall on the bridges, they get shuffled around at random until they fall down to the next level. Eventually, everything will end up falling through the chute at the center of the funnel.

Here's a little diagram (a vertical cross-section) of what I'm talking about:

Code: [Select]

X       X
X_     _X
 X_   _X
  X_ _X
   X X
   X X

X = wall
_ = retracting bridge


[wierd]

Reanimating biome would also give you zombie bacon, which would increase your meat production yeild by about 20%, IIRC.

LoudWhispers ran a fort where he did exactly that, for that exact reason.

[Merendel]

As for corpse collection, I have an idea which should be both overengineered and somewhat effective. Basically, it's a terraced funnel with retracting bridges on every terrace. The bridges should be set on repeat. When corpses fall on the bridges, they get shuffled around at random until they fall down to the next level. Eventually, everything will end up falling through the chute at the center of the funnel.

Considering you'd still need to send haulers in to collect the stuff eventualy that sounds rather dangerous for your dwarves.  As stuff will be raining down at simi random times you'll want to build in a way to close the chute while your haulers are in the chamber collecting stuff.  Well unless you want bits of dwarf added to the meat pile.

[itg]

Well, it is a horror-inspired project. That said, it wouldn't be too hard to rig up a pressure plate in front of the collection zone which automatically closes the chute when a hauler walks up.

[Noobazzah]

You also need a system of some kind to actually feed said pigs into the machine, and possibly a maintenance hatch. A simple trapdoor-ish setup inside of the pasture zone should do the trick, combine it with the werebeast idea before. Accidentally killing all your sows/boars is a concern though, so you'll either need a really large herd of pigs or a more complex feeder setup.

On a side note, you can actually make some use out of sentients as well, if you cut them into nice lumps with serrated discs etc. This allows you to use the bones from severed limbs for all sorts of artwork, probably not the meat though. Remember to add the maintenance hatch if you do this though, 'cos the blades can get stuck.

[Button]

OK, here's how I would attempt this.

I'd start with selective traditional breeding before making a fully automated system. Get all my pigs gigantic and muscular. Then chain my best sows up on 1-z-level-high 3x3 pillars without ramps, with all squares except the chain square made out of training spear dodge trap. The sows will never dodge off, but their children will.

The level beneath the spawning ground would be a maze of fear. Using windows and doors I would control the path of the bacon, keeping them flowing through the maze - for the entirety of their childhood. At points in the maze there would be checkpoints - pressure-plate-linked doors which will only open if a sufficiently heavy animal is trying to flee through that door. (These would probably also be set up to close doors to hide more sources of fear on the other side of the door, to ease passage of the pork.)

At the end of the maze, the last checkpoint would be a floor hatch. Pigs drop a Z level into the pork pen right next to the butcheries, where the butchers can finally reach them. With autobutcher plugin, they won't live long. (I highly recommend slaughtering live animals instead of killing them for mass butchering, because live meat doesn't spoil.)

[wierd]

That's some interesting idea there...

If you find a way to make zombie reactions remove the [intelligent] tag, if present, then the zombies should then be butcherable for meat, regardless of what the creature was in life.

Zombie elf sausages seem quite possible that way.

Sadly, those reactions are randomly generated/hard coded. You would need to have a new syndrome reaction put in the raws that makes zombies unintelligent, that is ubiquitous. Something that impacts only zombies.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I think the best way to do it is by killing the creature via dropping then doing an assembly line of cleaning and cooking.

[Fenrisson]

I very well understand the dwarf-style-points using a werebeast automation system to auto "butcher", but wouldn't it be a lot easier to simply have minecart ride on a pressureplate ordered to be be pushed once every so and so days?

My idea for a automated retract butcher system would be:

Have sows chained on 3x3 areas with auto retract bridges - and kill the offspring by retracting the bridge - maybe not all will die every time, but then there is always next month.  The sow will be safe while constantly produce new meat. Given that there are enough sows, bitches, alligators - or what ever you want to fabricate into roasts, soap, cloaks, crossbows... One will have a fully automated system with no need of micromanaging