Butchering

A Butcher turns livestock into meat. With MCA alone, a butcher smokes raw meat at a smoker. With the Butchery mod installed, the trade grows into slaughter, carcass work, grinding, curing, tanning, and cleaning up afterwards, across several buildings.

Without Butchery

A villager who takes a smoker as their job block becomes a Butcher. They fetch raw meat and fish from storage, smoke it, and put the result back. That is the whole trade until Butchery is installed.

With Butchery

Butchery adds the buildings and the tools. The Catalog lists what each one needs; in outline:

• Butcher Shop, Butchery, and Full Butchery are the three tiers of the main workplace. Each seats more butchers.
• A Slaughterhouse holds hooks and basins for the messy end of the work.
• A Slaughter Pen is a fenced yard with a blood grate where animals are kept for slaughter.
• A Smokehouse and a Tannery are separate rooms. Tanning belongs to the Leatherworker, who works from a cauldron.

See Catalog for the full requirements and Cooking & Baking for how workplaces hire.

What A Butcher Does

The butcher’s work, roughly in the order they prefer it:

1. Carcass work. A carcass hanging on a hook is cut down in stages with a cleaver and a skinning knife until nothing is left.
2. Dismantling a placed iron golem, for its parts.
3. Grinding at a meat grinder or a pestle and mortar. With Farmer’s Delight installed, the grinder produces Farmer’s Delight minced meat instead of Butchery’s.
4. Taxidermy at a taxidermy table.
5. Smoking raw meat at a smoker.
6. Curing sausages on a hook.
7. Cleaning blood puddles off the floor.
8. Breaking heads at a hammer. Rare, display-worthy heads are kept rather than broken unless processTrophyOutputs is turned on.
9. Slaughter, last of all. See below.

Dismantling, cleaning, breaking heads, and slaughter also appear as job lines on the Order Sheet, so you can turn them off or reorder them for one shop.

Slaughter

A butcher slaughters a cow, pig, sheep, chicken, or rabbit that is adult, unnamed, and untamed, and only inside a Butcher Shop, Slaughterhouse, or Slaughter Pen. They need a cleaver, wait a while between kills, and hang the carcass on a free hook in the shop or slaughterhouse.

Naming an animal protects it. So does keeping it outside those buildings.

Slaughter can be turned off with allowLethalWork, and the wait between kills is lethalWorkCooldownTicks. Both are in the configuration. With slaughter off, the butcher still does everything else and will tell you slaughter is disabled if you ask why the pen is full.

Tools

The butcher needs the right tool for each job, fetched from the shop’s storage:

• a cleaver for slaughter and most carcass stages;
• a skinning knife for skinning;
• a hacksaw and a hammer for the later stages and for heads;
• a hook, a skin rack, a blood grate, and a grinder in the building itself.

When a tool or a station is missing, the butcher says which one when you are nearby.

Keeping The Shop Running

Livestock in the pen, tools in the chest, and space on the hooks. The butcher’s status shows the block when something is missing: no livestock, no cleaver, a stuck carcass, no smoker, nowhere to put the output, or an unreachable target. When the shop is promoted to a higher tier, the butcher says so.

The Chronicle records a village’s first slaughter, its first butchery, and the hundredth.

Butchering Yourself

Cutting up a carcass, curing, cleaning, breaking heads, and slaughter credit your own Butcher career through the same Jobs the villager uses. A slaughter counts when you kill one of the listed animals with a cleaver, under the same rules as the villager. Grinding and taxidermy at Butchery’s own stations do not count yet. See Careers.