Here's a question: is there any way to make the bones of animals the same item? I.e., there's not a "dragon" bone or "cat" bone, there's just a "animal bone", with only the one type of bone showing up in the refuse stockpile.
I've worked on several methods to homogenize products (i.e., leather and tallow) but bone is something direct from the animal, so my previous methods are not reusable.
Sure - create a dummy creature to hold your bone material. Add the bone material to it. In every other creature, do not add bone material (edit the body detail plan even). For bone tissue, make it use CREATURE_MAT:DUMMY_CREATURE:BONE for the material instead of the usual LOCAL material.
This is the same way I'd do leather/tallow... I'm curious how you did it without doing this!
That *is* how I've done leather / tallow... wouldn't removing bones from the body plan mean that butchering yields no bones?
Actually, I guess we won't know until I try. Time for some !!science!!
You're not removing the TISSUE bone from the body plans - just altering it to use a different material. Since you never add the bone material to cats or dragons, you can never have cat or dragon bones (or preferences for them, woot!) - just your generic "animal bone". And your cats and dragons still have a bone material for their bone tissues, it's just a material that belongs to another creature (the dummy creature).
I went through and started doing this for all materials for all creatures but stopped after the first few creature files. On the one hand it would be nice to not have mandates for squirrel tooth items, for example ("animal tooth" gives so many more possibilities!), but part of the fun is getting such absurd requests.
Still, if you release this when you're done (as I see you have the leather modifications) I'll probably give it a shot. Sometimes simplification is relaxing and lets you focus on other aspects of the game more fully.