How does NPC butchery work?

Have a faction camp set up, and I’m not super familiar with how things work. Have a bunch of corpses that would take a while to butcher, so I thought that I could just assign an NPC to work on the camp, with the butchery job. Seemed to be an option in the assign to work at camp dialogue option that will do exactly that. However they don’t seem to be doing that.

I suspect I have something set up wrong. Do the corpses need to be in a particular zone to be regognized? Is there some other prerequisite that needs to be done before things happen?

Currently, the easiest way to deal with it is to give NPC butchering implements and just set him to work directly (your activities -> butcher nearby corpses).

When I try that, the NPC just starts following me around. Is there a way to do that without them following me as I do other things (therefore putting them out of the range of butcherable corpses)

Nevermind, it was because they did not have a knife on their person, so they could not butcher things. that makes the your activities -> butcher nearby corpses work properly.

For a correct camp setup, please take a look at this checklist:

Also, not sure if needed, but place a table (or other flat surface) next to the butchering rack.

Currently have all of the above done, with knife, hacksaw, butchery rack, table, and corpse storage zone. Atomic lamp too so there’s always light. Still the assigned worker seems to be doing nothing when assigned to basecamp butchery.

Pretty much the same as any other medium sized animal, you need a flat surface to work on, a knife for cutting skin and flesh, and hacksaw for bones.

Turned out that NPC will intermittently butcher if I put a table nearby - apparently a counter does not count as a flat surface - but detection seems intermittent. They butchered an otter, but missed the wolf on the same tile. Does the hacksaw need to be in their inventory, or is having it in either an adjacent tile or zone work too? Or is there something else needed for larger animals? i’ve got the knife and hacksaw, but struggle to figure out what else they might need.

Edit: some quick testing tells me that putting the hacksaw in their inventory does not help.
Edit: additionally it keeps telling me that the butchery NPC has finished their task, when there is clearly a non-butchered corpse nearby.

Knife, hacksaw, table, and butchery rack should really be everything you need since the tools are in their inventory. You could lay out a leather tarp/fiber mat/plastic sheet and see if that works better than the table.

None of the corpses are rotten are they? I don’t know why that would make a difference but could be worth checking out.

I’m out of ideas… Maybe throw in a fine cutting tool for good measure?

throw up a savegame, and ill find out whats wrong with it, I added the NPC butchery task to the game, and if theres anything weird happening, I should be able to find out and fix it.

And if its not a bug, then when https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/37300 is merged, the player will have far less confusion in cases such as this.

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I don’t know what changed, but after updating the game it seems to be working now.

Does anyone know how to rescue the 5 commits from @dpwb’s (?) pull request off of GitHub? The UI shows me the differences, but does not offer me a way to download them. I cannot add the source repository to remotes as it no longer exists, presumably because @dpwb deleted their GitHub account.

I am having trouble getting NPC butchery to work, as the NPC completes their task without telling me why. I have added about a dozen prints to no avail.

Have an remote corresponding to the cleverraven repo called upstream, then

git fetch upstream pull/37300/head:local_branch

Or just append .patch to the end of the URL, and you can then save it (and apply it) as a patch.

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I did some rebasing and … well… there’s 1500 lines of errors in compile and my motivation to continue has dropped to 0. Probably adding printfs all over the place will be easier in the short run.

EDIT: I have a butchering rack with a fresh bruised zombie corpse on it, a table 2 tiles north and butchering kit, hacksaw (sawing), grappling hook(rope) in between these. There’s a tree right next to the butchering rack. The NPC, upon told to butcher any corpses, proceeds to move 35 tiles north west (into a vehicle deconstruct zone) and tells me that it has completed assigned task. I double checked that its assigned task is actually butchering by asking it talk->d->h->a.

Addendum: when asked what it is doing while moving away from corpse, the NPC responds by “I’m tidying up”.