Just as the title says. I came around from UnReal world so as the adaptation goes, hunting is very important to me. I though of outrunning my opponent and punch them to death but that does not seem to result in regular corpses. Its always came out either damaged or pulped like that and the game mention that this affect the final result of butchery.
How to I control the quality of my preys?
And what affect its final results?
What really affect the corpse quality
to get undamaged corpses, you need special arrows/bolts. I don’t remember specific name, just there are such projectiles. Using melee, especially with a high-damage weapon or just high strength, will result in pulped corpse, which should give less loot when butchered.
But, TBH, food is not an issue in Cata at the moment so I wouldn’t worry about corpses being pulped/damaged.
UrW’s damage mechanism is rather different from how this game handles it. I think opponents, at least non human ones, just are (armored) bags of hit points, and when that bag is empty they die. If the final blow overshoots the remaining hit points by some percentage of the original hit points the corpse gets damaged, worse the more such thresholds that are passed.
A damaged corpse seems to produce less of what it can produce, so when I killed a chicken with a nodachi it provided two measly scraps of meat, and when I killed it with my fists (resulting in total exhaustion, due to the number of misses), the unharmed corpse produced 10 measly scraps of meat.
It can also be noted that the tool used for butchering matters, so the yield is worse with a pocket knife than a butcher cleaver (and, strangely enough, the hunting knife has the highest butchery value of any tools).
Skill is another factor. The skill used for Dissection is First Aid, but I think the skill used for all the “real” butchery tasks is Survival (some skills have been changed since 0.E2 stable, at least when it comes to their names).
Edit:
Forgot location. I think using a butchery rack improves the yield, and it’s required to use a rack or an alternative to it to even try full butchery of large corpse.
You can use bleeding to kill a opponent. This will always resault in a undamaged corpse.
Would recommend ranged for preserving corpse quality. Strength especially seems to really wreck corpses and I believe mostly of my pulped corpses were from blunt overkill damage. All this scaled by the size of the animal as well. A 47 damage hoof strike tenderizes an oppossum but not a coyote for example, it just bruises it. Bigger prey squish less easily if you are using melee so if you are going to use melee for hunting aim for bigger prey.
If using firearms to hunt, keep a small caliber weapon for the task. Using an assault rifle on a squirrel will leave you a tuft of bloody fur & little else, where something small like a .22 will leave a much more intact corpse to butcher.