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Author Topic: Unassigned dead war dogs go in my refuse stockpile but can't be butchered?  (Read 961 times)

morikal

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I have a corpse stockpile, and separately a refuse stockpile with the corpses submenu enabled (and nothing else enabled).
The former usually gets the corpses (and body parts, for some reason, ignoring my outside refuse stockpile that accepts bodyparts) of my enemies. The refuse one gets hunter kills, etc, and is by my butcher shop.

I had a few wardogs killed, none of which were assigned to anyone, and their corpses are being put in the butchery stockpile, but can't be butchered. They stay there til they rot, and then their skeletons are also staying in that stockpile.
Is there a way to set things up so these skeletons get moved somewhere else?
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anewaname

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I am not certain of this but that is how it appears to work.

The Corpse stockpile and the Refuse>Corpse stockpiles, the Corpse stockpile appears to hold only sentient body parts, and the Refuse>Corpse stockpile holds all the others (including the remains of animated body parts).

Creatures are also a part of your civilization or not. Generally your dwarfs will not butcher dead creatures from your civilization, this includes pet and non-pets that died without being ordered to be be sent to the butcher.

So, your war dogs are members of your civ and unless you ordered them to be butchered, they will not be butchered if they died in combat. I typically order any nearly dead or annoying blinking dog to be butchered, because if they die from wounds, I cannot butcher them.

You can keep two Refuse>Corpse stockpiles, one for all animals that the fort keeps as tame animals, to be thrown in the magma, and the other stockpile to exclude those. This will unclutter your butchery stockpile.
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Quote from: dragdeler
There is something to be said about, if the stakes are as high, maybe reconsider your certitudes. One has to be aggressively allistic to feel entitled to be able to trust. But it won't happen to me, my bit doesn't count etc etc... Just saying, after my recent experiences I couldn't trust the public if I wanted to. People got their risk assessment neurons rotten and replaced with game theory. Folks walk around like fat turkeys taunting the world to slaughter them.

PatrikLundell

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If I remember correctly, dead pets actually go to the corpse stockpile with the sapients. Regardless, though, tame animals of your civ can not be butchered when not killed through slaughter, which is rather odd.

I use minecart quantum stockpiles to work around DF's storage issues, and that includes the refuse stockpile.
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FantasticDorf

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All dead pets are marked with 'dead_dwarf=true' which renders them a corpses rather than refuse and also stops butchery jobs, same going for intelligents and semi-intelligents. It sounds up-front faulty, but its working as intended as its not meant to be dwarf-specific.

Invaders are sorted into the corpses pile loosley, and guests of dwarven civilized descent & civilians are moved off the corpse pile storage/collection (or picked up from where they dropped) & queued up for direct burial in coffins & tombs. Simply running a DFhack script (with as much defined sophistication to avoid cannibalism) to turn off dead_dwarf=true to 'false' in the background to a useful criteria like at point of death will allow you to pretty much bypass it.

Unsetting dead_dwarf=true off a number of objects requires to select and turn off the item token booleans etc in gui editor tools which is a little bit complicated and can be opaque to people unfamiliar wth it.
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PatrikLundell

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I don't have a major problem with pets not being butchered, but it is a very recent concept, quite far from the DF approximate timeline. I do find it backwards that you can't butcher domesticated livestock that's been killed by violence, though (old age is a different matter). It's one of the things that catches every new player, resulting in variations of the OP's question.
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Hyndis

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. I do find it backwards that you can't butcher domesticated livestock that's been killed by violence, though (old age is a different matter). It's one of the things that catches every new player, resulting in variations of the OP's question.

Evil biomes can fix that. If your embark biome happens to have spontaneous undead just wait until the corpse gets up again. Beat it down with a hammer until its mangled. Then it can be butchered like any other animal.

That said, you are correct in that corpses/body parts is inconsistent. Sometimes things are a corpse and sometimes they're a body part. This even happens with bones. Sometimes a stack of bones is not usable as bones because its a corpse. This triggers job cancelations at craftsdwarf workshops and is very annoying.

A workaround is to periodically go in to the standing orders menu and order all corpses to be dumped. Dwarves will find anything deemed to be a corpse and chuck it into the magma chute or atom smasher.

Unfortunately this is a workaround to either a bug or a confusing game mechanic. Either way, its not good. Stuff like this must be cleaned up before any Steam release, otherwise DF will be reviewed bombed, and rightfully so. Things have to work intuitively if there's any hope of wider adoption by a larger audience.
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PatrikLundell

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. I do find it backwards that you can't butcher domesticated livestock that's been killed by violence, though (old age is a different matter). It's one of the things that catches every new player, resulting in variations of the OP's question.

Evil biomes can fix that. If your embark biome happens to have spontaneous undead just wait until the corpse gets up again. Beat it down with a hammer until its mangled. Then it can be butchered like any other animal.

That said, you are correct in that corpses/body parts is inconsistent. Sometimes things are a corpse and sometimes they're a body part. This even happens with bones. Sometimes a stack of bones is not usable as bones because its a corpse. This triggers job cancelations at craftsdwarf workshops and is very annoying.

A workaround is to periodically go in to the standing orders menu and order all corpses to be dumped. Dwarves will find anything deemed to be a corpse and chuck it into the magma chute or atom smasher.

Unfortunately this is a workaround to either a bug or a confusing game mechanic. Either way, its not good. Stuff like this must be cleaned up before any Steam release, otherwise DF will be reviewed bombed, and rightfully so. Things have to work intuitively if there's any hope of wider adoption by a larger audience.
With that standard DF is doomed. Fixing all relevant inconsistencies, wholly or partially broken mechanics, etc. is a project that would take several years. With less than a year available, with much of it spent on graphics and UI, a ruthless determination of what's most important is required, with all the rest having to be put on the back burner (prime parallel release material candidates later, though).
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kaijyuu

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The game got pretty popular just the way it is. It won't need to change much at all to be put on a new platform and reach a new audience.

The devs are focusing on QoL changes and presentation, which are the biggest factors typically for obtaining new players and keeping them, assuming the basic game is solid. Which it obviously is.
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Quote from: Chesterton
For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all, they must think it startling. They must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment. When the pessimist looks at any infamy, it is to him, after all, only a repetition of the infamy of existence. But the optimist sees injustice as something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action.