I have the impression that butchering corpses to prevent revivification takes a lot more stamina than downing them in the beginning. I’m not sure it’s realistic and maybe it needs some balancing ?
Also, would there be an easy way to prevent automatic Z-revivification without preventing necromancers to revive them ? I checked the mod that prevents revivification but apparently the flag used is the same.
It scales heavily with used weapon’s cutting damage. But yeah, it could use a rebalancing.
Currently katanas are really good for pulping (they shouldn’t be) and axes are only a bit better than those (should be great).
The formula for “pulp ability” is sqrt(bash+strength)*sqrt(cut+1).
The chance to damage the corpse is (pulp-ability)/(corpse volume/20), each bash. Bash costs 80% of the cost of attacking with the weapon.
Wouldn’t a really easy fix be giving certain weapons and objects an additional ‘pulping’ tool quality and scale the act accordingly? You’re going to be at it for awhile with say…a pocket knife. Likewise a sledgehammer would let you do a great Gallagher impression.
The idea for pulping ability scaling with cutting damage is that with high-cutting weapons (e.g. katana) you’re using the cutting to deal damage efficiently, i.e. by slicing large muscle groups, cutting through joints, and cutting up organs.
We could adjust the pulping message based on the ratio of bash to pulp, e.g. “You thoroughly smash the %s corpse.” vs “You thoroughly slice up the %s corpse.”.
I agree that axes should intuitively be better at it than katanas, but I think that would be more an area for a “pulps well” flag than adjusting the pulping formula. Not that the pulping formula is perfect, I just don’t think it needs to be completely overhauled. Alternately there might be some commonality among the high pulping weapons that we could tease out, high peak damage perhaps?
Adding a bonus/penalty based on attack type would work well.
Katana is a slicing weapon and so unsuited for “wrecking”, requiring to kick the corpse around to avoid bones etc.
Axes, machetes and chainsaws have the CHOP flag and all would work really well.
I’d say pulping should depend more on bashing than on cutting. A corpse with its head smashed apart won’t raise back up (a headless zombie variant could be a thing, though).
Maybe pulping ability should be based on all items you have in your inventory, like other actions that use a tool ?