So now that butchering dead(again) zombies has become a priority, it’s become really obvious that Cataclysm zombies are boneless.
That is to say, butchering them produces tainted meat but no bones.
Hmm. Do human corpses generally leave bones?
(Probably should.)
I might guess that the bones are beat-up, Blob-laden, and otherwise not suitable for use, but if that’s the official line then the players need notified.
If you’ll like to see bones in human corpses (i think it should too),
it also should like the meat have another name - because you shouldn’t try to eat bones from a Z even if you can from a bear (or use it in recipes).
I think they don’t give bones because of that (no infected enemies give bones or i’m really wrong).
Maybe for bone needle/mutation potion for human trait (whitch isn’t in the game yet, only possible to get them when you create a caractere). So it would make more sense for gameplay to add them.
Sound like this post don’t feel in the right place maybe ? Sugestion.
IIRC bones from butchering zombies were removed to balance out having them too readily available as a bone source since you end up killing so many. You could probably build a bone ziggurat with the mountains of bones you would end up with otherwise… bony palisades, bone plating for your car, bone armor, bone spears, bone arrows, et al.
Hey, the Necromancer was the only reason to play Diablo II, IMO. Bone FTW! 
It’s not exactly like you can tape a bunch of bones together and make a mininuke or anything, so I’m not sure how balance would really factor in.
To the best of my recollection zombies have never produced bones when butchered, so I’m guessing it’s just an oversight.
There’s a little primetime show called “Bones” I watch sometimes. It shows you, one episode after another, what do the bones look like when a carcass is in its late decomposing stages. I don’t want to touch that, nevermind to use 'em. Let the blue-eyed girl stare at them, I’m just a lonely doomsday butcher.
Bone armor!
The main reason was due to the edibility of bones. It made zombies a perfectly clean food source.
Why are bones a food source anyway? I can see some sort of recipe where you’d boil them to make a weak soup stock, but even my pitbull can’t exactly ‘eat’ bones. Doesn’t stop him from trying, but all he’s doing is slowly gnawing them down to powder.
Edit: Playing a character that cooks her food before she eats it has shown me that yes, you can indeed make broth from bones.
But why not ‘tainted bones’ that can be used to make things that require bone, but not safely eaten; zombies already drop nonstandard flesh, why not nonstandard bones?
That is exactly how they are classified as a “food source”.
Yet you can also munch on them like potato chips.
A man after my own heart. I was more of a summoner though.
On topic: Just make a lore explanation that in zombified bodies the bones turn into a stone-like (inedible) substance or something.
Bones start rotting from the inside, especially if they were cut deep.
None of that is the stuff like “dragon-sized, dental-plan-hardy, miss Sunshine white” that you’ve read off a cardboard. This is like a walk in the woods, where you step on something crunchy and it’s bones. And that stuff’s been rotting for only a few weeks…
A man after my own heart. I was more of a summoner though.
On topic: Just make a lore explanation that in zombified bodies the bones turn into a stone-like (inedible) substance or something.[/quote]
Yeah, I did summons & Poison.
Skeletons could petrify, etc. Zeds might be a different story.
Then make enemies that drop tainted meat drop tainted human bones. Actually, now that I have a chance to bring this up, shouldn’t zombies be dropping tainted human meat instead of just tainted meat? And shouldn’t dead humans at least drop human bones to fit it in with the cannibalist trait?