Hello people, i have a new proposition for a rework of how butchers approach their animals that i believe would be a more fair refinement and strengthen the dwarven meat industry while also reducing the demand to slaughter animals constantly for their resources by making it more efficient.
The basic concept is the singular Butcher Dead animal/Slaughter animal, is replaced with new jobs, on 'O'rder's auto butcher, it would constantly look for the accessible resources as it does already under different criteria.
Job One: Prepare Corpse/Slaughter Animal - Butcher brings corpse of dead animal to the block, or slaughters the animal and cuts them into severable pieces, training the surgeon skill in small xp boosts (
see BUTCHER_SEVERABLE
below for more detail)
Job Two: Butcher Corpse - Butcher then uses all the body parts currently in the shop, skipping the first step if there are already accessible [BUTCHER_SEVERABLE] parts availible in stockpiles or nearby, unless there are child types like hands or feet still attached
Each creature's body template could carry [BUTCHER_SEVERABLE] to indicate in basic ways that this animal can be divided up in the shop, and creatures that are too small have a normal yield are sliced up and then have their body parts destroyed regardless as not to create waste of resources that can't be worked due to size.
Why would i want to do this this way?: Factually speaking, using weapon traps to pre-dice live game is a known DF community strategy to increase your yields, especially in animals with valuable leathers to sever the limbs with as little actual bodily destruction as possible. Since killing and butchering the animal whole actually offers less.
Therefore each basic animal could be split up into
6 typical basic areas, including the additional ones on particular body templates like humanoid vs quadrupedal, or spider/squid like multi limbed unusual templates.
- Head - 1 skin (if large enough), meat, a skull. (and extra features, teeth, head hair etc.)
- Torso (and basic extensions that aren't butcher_severable themselves) - 1 skin, meat, bones from the skeleton
- Arms and legs - 1 skin (each), bones and some meat depending on size & scale
- Feet and hands - Dependent on size, skins, bones, meat. (accounts for finger-nails and claws if large enough)
Optional ones that could appear due to varied creature templates.
- Additional legs (like in that of a giant crab or a GCS) - Each leg would be divided up equally for the delicious meat or extra annoying chitin
- Tails - Possibly some skin, meat & bone.
- Legless fused humanoids or snakes - The head would be removed, any visible tails would be treated seperately to the torso processed as a whole
- Skeletons - Split up in the butcher shop into the general areas where the butcher_severable provided for skulls and bones, only key difference is that the meat has rotted off
- Individual Organs or body features - If for whatever reason you wanted a intact heart in which to process further, a poison gland, or instead to cut off a entire horn (externally on the body) to process further you can speficy the in the body raws to have this excluded as [BUTCHERY_SEVERABLE]
Anything that isn't desired, like cartilage or nerves (which there will be a considerable increase with this system) a alternative related tag
[SEVERABLE_REFUSE] will automatically list it as a junk body part, and depending on whether it is
internal or external extract it at the first stage of cutting up the limbs, or during the second stage of butchering the body parts.
Additional fur is taken into consideration too, especially on creatures like sheep or horses, where trace amounts of fur exist on anywhere large enough on the body for yarn or simple hair. Including scale, chitin and feather plumage, the greater amount of skin would also mean there's a greater amount of waste (see above for more examples)
- Size mattering quite a lot, small poultry like chickens may have unviable severed feet (destroyed in the shop for being too small), but the rest of the chicken may be recoverable. Geese might be more useful but the advantage of small poultry is less waste.
- This way, a singular rhino horn could be gathered or a pair of tusks from a elephant as a body part to be further processed into ivory rather than a extension of the head.
I apologise if that was a mouthful but thank you for reading, i would hope that it could be contributive to improving a troublesome aspect of the game, and help navigate around some difficult bugs.
Author
Topic: New butchering techniques (Read 3076 times)