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[iamihop]

I recently fended off a goblin/troll siege. Everything was going swimmingly until a band of trolls managed to break into my livestock pen, followed by a squad of goblins. By the time my troops broke through the rest of the siege and killed the attackers in the animal pen, about 3/4 of my several hundred livestock were dead. I built two new butchers shops and assigned some more butchers, in anticipation of the flood of work, but they haven't butchered a single animal. By now, most of the corpses have been hauled to a variety of stockpiles, including the one right next to the butchers (so they're clearly accessible). "Butcher animal" is set as the task in each shop, but three of the four butchers have "no job," and the other is at a party.

Some of the corpses probably aren't butcherable, but there are also plenty of adult yaks, cows, and other large livestock that I know can be butchered. Just last season, I send my military out to kill wild capybaras. The butchers wasted no time getting the corpses and butchering them.

So, what gives? Is this a bug, or is livestock only butcherable if my dwarves killed it (or not during a siege, or something)? Will they not butcher the corpses because they were outside their access when they were killed?

Here are some things that I have checked and are NOT causing the problem:
- Burrows. I took off my standard peace-time alert (keeping them out of the caverns), even though it included the areas of interest, just in case. It had no effect. Nobody is assigned to specific burrows.
- Rotten. These are fresh corpses. None indicate rotting.
- Not near enough. There is a mangled water buffalo bull corpse 5 tiles from one of the butcher workshops. My dwarves recently put it there, so they should be able to access it, right?
- Give/Take orders. None of my stockpiles give to my butchers workshops (ie they aren't waiting on a specific stockpile).


I get the impression that, with 170 dwarves and lots of other things going on, DF is just having a hard time. Pathing is getting worse (they sometimes go in circles before they set off in the right direction, despite my traffic designations). My soldiers tend to move about 20 tiles before they respond to new orders (which makes battles more FUN). And my dwarves like to ignore itens, such as freshly chopped wood or Trade Depot goods, until I put a stockpile right next to them, and even then progress is slow. I'll have a depot full of goods, an empty broad-spectrum stockpile next door, and 60 idle dwarves.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Am I losing my mind, after so much DF?

[MobRules]

Are they "corpses" or "mutalated corpses"? I've noticed that the latter don't seem to get butchered, ever.

[iamihop]

Mmm, good thought. With hundreds of corpses, it isn't surprising that they run the gauntlet - some are mutilated; others are mangle; a handful are just corpses. For example, right now I'm looking at a "Stray Horse corpse."

[PatrikLundell]

Your problem is that tame animals killed in ways other than butchering aren't butcherable. This has nothing to do with the state of the remains.

[iamihop]

Thank you!

Alas, that's basically what I feared. Well, time to dump some perfectly good corpses... and install better defenses for my livestock pen.

[GiantCaveMushroom]

Animals pastured outside tend to be massacred whenever a siege happens, defending them will also take a lot of materials and time.

Hence why I recommend breaching the caverns, make a room with soil/muddy floor, let dense floor fungus grow, and pasture the livestock there so they will gnaw on cold fungus in the relative safety of the fortress interior.

[PatrikLundell]

Or use my method of building a roofed over surface courtyard with the defenses at the entrance to the courtyard (with the original ones from the courtyard to the fortress interior proper as a last line of defense and the cattle as a meat shield to buy the time to close that last line off).

[vanatteveldt]

Only thing you can do is capture a necromancer, have him raise the corpses, then kill and butcher the corpses

BTW, does anyone understand the rationale for making this distinction? It doesn't really seem to offer an unfair advantage to allow killed cattle to be butchered, and it's strange that if your hunters shoot a wild horse it's ok, but if goblin hunters shoot a tame horse it's off-limits?

[PatrikLundell]

I'm guessing here, but I think tame animals are members of your fortress, so an emergent result of that is that they're not butcherable [you'd have to play goblins to do that...]. In a similar vein, caravan draft animals are labeled as merchants.

[escondida]

If you like, you can save some bits of them, which can be used once they decompose some more.  For instance, a cow upper leg will decay to a pile of cow bones and a cow head to a cow skull, both which can be used by your bonecrafters. The exception is individual teeth--the only useful teeth you can get come in piles and can only be gained by butchering. Complete corpses will only decompose to skeletons, though, and those are useless except for hurling at your enemies from high-velocity minecarts, so you may as well dump them in lava or chuck ’em under a raising bridge.

Interestingly, all this also applies to the body parts of your slain enemies; this is the only way short of modding to acquire usable bones from sapient creatures.