I can’t butcher even a small corpse, it tells me I need a tool with “Surface 2”, I figured that would be something like a table, but when I look it up on the item browser the only tool with the “Surface” quality is a brick kiln, this seems wrong to me. Am I missing something?
Well, a recent pull request changed the way butchering works.
That the item browser shows the brick kiln as (the only) object with surface quality is owed to unfortunate naming of the pseudo items related to the qualities and probably an oversight of @KorGgenT.
Also, I’m not sure if the item browser would even be able to process furniture and terrain qualities.
The items that can be used as a surface (based on the pull request) are:
- closed counter gate (Surface 2)
- desk (Surface 2)
- metal table (Surface 2)
- table (Surface 2)
- tourist table (Surface 2)
- fiber mat (Surface 3)
- leather tarp (Surface 3)
- plastic groundsheet (Surface 3)
- workbench (Surface 3)
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Chezzo incorrectly reporting pseudo items isn’t in my purview, so it’s a little weird to claim it’s my oversight.
I never stated anything like this.
My claim is that naming all the pseudo items “brick kiln” is your oversight, as I can’t see any reason to name it that way (as it has nothing to do with a brick kiln) and it already caused some confusion to others reading your commit.
Personally do not see the need for suface items, anything is a surface when needed
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oh, i see. woops. (post must be at least 20 characters)
I partially agree. I can’t understand why a leather tarp or a fiber mat placed on the (uneven) ground would be better surfaces than a table, or why a large wooden sheet would not work as a surface.
Technically you could butcher anything on the ground, but I imagine it would increase rot speed.
Maybe at one point in the development this will change again and you’d get a speed and hygiene bonus when done on a appropriate surface, but don’t need one necessarily? Who knows…
why is asphalt not a surface? 
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it’s based on size. a tarp is significantly larger than a table; you also probably can’t even fit a cow on a table.
because the whole point of doing a full butchery is to gt the meat for consumption. if you butcher on the ground you’re going to get grit and bacteria and all that jazz up in your butchered meat.
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Thanks! Appreciate all the attention to the confusion!
ima repost a comment i made on reddit to here: You dont need a sheet to sloppily butcher stuff, especially small creatures like fish! Really you shouldnt need it for any sloppy butchering, since you probably just are cutting the creature open and cutting off pieces of meat instead of like butchering it enough that the meat could get on the dirty ground and stuff.
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I think there’s an argument for Quick Butchery not requiring a surface, potentially, but we should possibly review its output in that case. Ideally we’d have the butchery time and output depend on Surface quality in both cases, as well as other tool qualities… tool qualities affecting this kind of stuff is a long-wanted feature.
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My thoughts were on the contrary. I sort of get needing it for butchery, as in keeping your meat from slopping about in the dirt or whatever and having enough space to separate good meat from organs from refuse, etc… In the confines of dissection it makes no sense to me at all. I’m not concerned about anything getting dirty, and the ground is literally the most spacious surface we have. I should be able to claw around for CBMs on the ground.
Just my two cents. I felt a lot better about the surfaces once I realized they were tied to the size of the surface. When I threw a body on a table and couldn’t dissect it, I was confused and angry because, you know, it’s a table. So I don’t know if you’ve considered relaying that it’s connected to the area of the surface to the player, but I think it would alleviate at least some angry griping that will come as a result of this change.
Leather tarp and other surfaces used for butchering should get filthy after every butchering, in this case and should need cleaning…
Well, in-game the uncooked meat is unsafe for use anyway, so what’s the point? Then, before cooking meat, one would wash it anyway with water, thus getting rid of all the dirt. At least that’s what i usually do…
You can 100% unequivocally butcher an animal for the meat, on the ground, without getting the meat dirty. The larger the animal, makes it all the more easy to do so as well. When field dressing a deer for example you flay the skin open and keep the flesh intended for use within the skin. Though it will take longer to butcher due to the care involved. Knowing enough hunters irl to know it is possible. It could if programmed so, may yield a lower amount of parts to be used.
For those thinking you need any platform to do this. Well how else did humans do it for several thousand years without a table? They dressed the beasty in their own skin. Simple as that. Requiring a surface is an added step in hygiene. Not a requirement.
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Full butchery vs quick butchery already served to simulate proper harvesting of meat vs just doing it on the ground, and dissection is already such a huge chore that I don’t think it needed another requirement. You’re just hunting for a piece of metal in the corpse that’s already filthy no matter what, and a concrete floor isn’t substantially different from a plastic sheet I had stuffed in my bag.
This is an extra step we didn’t need. As said above, native americans probably butchered animals in new england just fine before europeans showed up with nails to build tables. There are any number of videos on youtube of people butchering animals on the ground or in their hands (not for the faint of heart): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBcokkJh6n4
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If you want to for the grin test the idea of a novice being able to skin a deer in its own hide:
Charles Dance as an actor did it with only a rough idea. Granted it is on a table but the point is still obvious. He slit the belly and can now carve everything he needs inside the skin. The table is for convenience, but he could park his butt on the ground or kneel just as easy to perform the same task. If an actor without skill can do it. So can you.
Real deer by the way. It was killed a short while(legally) before they shot the scene. Which isn’t as silly as the clip may be understood or imply.
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Putting it on a table makes it so you don’t have to kneel or bend as much. Makes it faster and easier to do. As someone whose done survival training and skinned and eaten a couple rabbits in the field, I can testify that you can most certainly protect your meat from dirt if you’re careful. It is definitely more time consuming than stringing it into a tree, which is ideal for small and large game when you don’t have an adequate surface. And you definitely still want a surface for the bits as you remove them. Point is it should cost time, maybe be uncomfortable (morale), and possibly cause some latent bacterial problems, but not be impossible to do on a road or the like for sure. I’ve never done anything as large as a deer, but the same principles largely apply, especially if you field dress it first and drain away as much fluid as you can, which is always a good practice.
I like the new surface calculation, and feel more space should reduce the time, as you don’t need to be as careful.
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