Now that you can make Pastures and feed livestock, you might wonder, “What should I do to process all these succulent sheep and cows for my plucky, adventurous dwarves?” Well, ask no more and read our guide. Here’s how you can butcher animals to keep your Fort’s food production going in Dwarf Fortress.
How to Butcher Animals in Dwarf Fortress
First of all, you will need to create a Butcher’s Shop. It is located in the Farming menu of the Workshop. Now with that all set up, you can actually butcher livestock from any nearby Pastures as well as hunted wild animals.
To butcher tamed livestock, open the Labor menu, select the Creatures tab, and click on the Pets/Livestock option. Here you can mark any animals available to be butchered by pressing the butcher knife icon. Said animals will be taken to the Butcher’s Shop and slaughtered automatically.
A hunter dwarf will also automatically bring any kills to the Butcher’s Shop. Set dwarves as hunters by opening the Work Details and Labor menu. If they are close enough to a Butcher’s Shop (around 20 tiles), any wild animal corpses will also be butchered. By setting up the Refuse and Dumping tab in the Standing Orders menu, you can toggle the “workers gather outdoor refuse” in order to command your dwarves to collect any available corpses to be butchered from outside of your Fort.
Butchering animals in Dwarf Fortress won’t just yield meats and organs as food but also other materials needed for crafting, as seen below.
| Item | Uses |
| Meat | Eaten raw or cooked |
| Prepared organs | Eaten raw or cooked |
| Fat | Cooked into tallow |
| Bones | For crafting armor, decorations, strange moods |
| Shells | For crafting armor, decorations, strange moods |
| Skin | Tanned into leather |
| Wool | Spun into yarn |
| Hair | Spun into thread |
| Skulls | Crafting skull totems |
However, keep in mind that the butchering process is not instantaneous — that means corpses and carcasses will pile up if your butchers cannot process them fast. This will lead to rotten items that produce miasma, which will make your dwarves unhappy. Limit the spread of miasma by making a Butcher’s Shop in an enclosed space, having a roof that opens to the surface, creating a garbage chute, or even making one outside.
Lastly, there are some animals and corpses that won’t be butchered by your dwarves:
- Pets
- Tamed animals that died not from being marked by the butcher knife icon
- An animal corpse that is not large enough for butchering
- Rotten corpses
- The corpse of a sentient creature
Related:
How to Get Seeds in Dwarf Fortress
Dwarf Fortress is now available on PC via Steam and itch.io.
