Quartering and butchering


Doc Feral

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To sum it up a little (without throwing in another dozen or so screenshots from more experiments). It started with "what's better, directly harvesting or quartering?" and the answer, as expected, is not so simple.

Level 1 harvester.
100% Frozen meat: hacksaw or hatchet, knife.
100% Frozen skin: knife, hatchet, hacksaw.
100% Frozen gut: knife, hatchet, hacksaw.
Quarter: it doesn't matter. Tools, frozen or not, it's the same.
Warm gut: knife, hatchet, hacksaw, hand.
Warm meat: knife, hatchet or hacksaw, hand.
Warm skin: knife, hand, hatchet, hacksaw.
Improvised knives and hatchets are less effective, so the improvised hatchet loses to the hacksaw when it comes to meat.

I've also discovered that a "spawned" ravaged carcass is harder to work on than a "killed" one. It takes more time and/or calories.
As the harvesting ability rises the "frozenness" becomes less and less relevant.

Level 5 harvester

At this level the "frozen" factor is ignored. Knife wins, "true" hatchet is slightly better than hacksaw, improvised hatchet is slightly worse.

When it comes to skin and guts, the knife always wins, and the hatchet is better than the hacksaw. If the carcass is warm, skinning by hand is better than using hatchet or hacksaw.
As for meat, if it's frozen use hacksaw or hatchet. If it's an improvised hatchet, use the hacksaw. If meat is warm, a knife is the best.

Quartering: useful to accelerate respawning because the carcass disappears (DON'T quarter wolves), it's really effective on large animals when you need guts, since skinning and completely gutting a bear or moose takes way more time than quartering. Creates heavy meatbags which can be carried to a warm and safe place and then sliced to bits. It's a lengthy process but it can be interrupted and resumed. Like crafting, there's no "half done", you need to finish the whole process.

That said, I'll continue quartering moose and bears.

Edited by Doc Feral
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  • 1 month later...

 

On 3/16/2019 at 9:52 AM, Doc Feral said:

HARVESTING LEVEL 1

Quartering becomes significantly harder with a frozen carcass. I didn't take multiple screenshots but I've seen that tools don't matter in this case.

quarter frozen.png

That is a ravaged carcass and for reason unknown it takes longer than a fresh kill carcass.  Is this a bug?

Great work so far.

Look into the times butchering a rabbit carcass compared to quartering a deer.  It takes seventy minutes to remove hide and gut from a rabbit compared to sixty minutes for the deer.  There are problems even when using a knife compared to using hands.  In my opinion harvesting rabbit needs to be reworked.

Also I commented before that hacksaw did not work for quartering.  Have you tested this in the new update?

Edited by Ice Hole
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Ravaged carcasses take more time and calories, maybe due to discarding the chewed and drooled on parts.

When I checked times I did it for the hacksaw too, but I admit I only took a screenshot of the option, I didn't actually do it and I stopped testing before the update. Anyway quartering times don't change.

I didn't test rabbits because you can always carry them to safety and time is less important (and there's no quartering).

Maybe I'll do some more testing.

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13 hours ago, Ice Hole said:

 

That is a ravaged carcass and for reason unknown it takes longer than a fresh kill carcass.  Is this a bug?

Great work so far.

Look into the times butchering a rabbit carcass compared to quartering a deer.  It takes seventy minutes to remove hide and gut from a rabbit compared to sixty minutes for the deer.  There are problems even when using a knife compared to using hands.  In my opinion harvesting rabbit needs to be reworked.

Also I commented before that hacksaw did not work for quartering.  Have you tested this in the new update?

What nationality are you @Ice Hole?

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Just to add my two cents to the discussion:

I never really do these sort of tests, I usually play and just figure out what works the best as I go. So I suppose you should take my word with a grain of sand.

Back when quartering was a fresh mechanic in the game, it made sense to quarter the big animals even if you wanted to "use up" all of the resources. Simply because quartering the animal took lesser amount of time then taking all the stuff yourself in the first place. But as you can imagine, this is sorta "strange", in the past, the best way to process a bear was to slowly strip it of its meat, till it have about 4 kg left or so, then use the quartering option to take out the last 4 kg in a meatbag along with "speedy" processing of the materials. 

Having returned to game after Redux, when I killed my first bear in that game, I actually checked to see if this were still true. After your tests I am no longer so sure, but I could have sworn I tried comparing how long it would take to take away the hide and all the guts from a bear, in comparison to those fixed 2 hours it takes to quarter it.

I think the difference was that taking the hide and all the guts was about 10 ingame mins faster then quartering it. I checked this with other animals and this always seems to have hold up.

But maybe Im just misremembering it. But from my experience, when comparing whether to take away only hides and guts or quartering the animal to get these materials, its better to just straight-up do it. (if my instincts about this are correct, does that mean that harvesting a gut from a bear takes less time then from lets say a rabbit, I wonder?) (I might just do some tests myself, I feel like Im just fooling myself here).

I also noticed some strange things with the ravaged carcasses. I believe they used to spoil just as the normal carcasses do in the game, but ever since Redux I feel as though they last in the regions for tens of days, a lot longer then they used to. Maybe that is why they also seem to have different processing times?

The advantage to quartering is decay, funnily enough. I still dont quite understand it, but for some reason, the meat on carcass decays very rapidly in the first few moments after it has been downed, this is why getting an above 90% condition raw meat seems so difficult, I had a method to it that you would harvest the meat off the carcass in increments of 2kg or 4kg, with each batch getting dropped to the ground after finishing harvesting it, thus making batches of best condition meat and gradually making worse and worse batches, which can be cooked in that order to max out condition of the food). Yet, as the carcass decays, the decay seems to slow down gradually overtime. However, quarters have a fixed decay of 10% condition a day no matter if at home or outside, or held in an inventory. This means that quartering the meat fast may actually help "preserve" some of that condition of the meat compared to just letting it decay with the carcass early on. At some point, the speed of decay would change, and the carcass would decay the meat slower then the quarter would, but around that time the meat would have had much lower condition caused by the earliest rapid-decay effect.

But those are all just my observations based on my experience, I havent done any proper tests. I do find them very interesting to read, keep it up :) 

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@Mroz4k Looks like I should do some more testing. From what I remember, a randomly spawned ravaged carcass stays there as an unchanging part of the environment until you click it, then it becomes "activated" and starts decaying. It's like opening a container. I don't know if it was always like that.

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5 minutes ago, Doc Feral said:

@Mroz4k Looks like I should do some more testing. From what I remember, a randomly spawned ravaged carcass stays there as an unchanging part of the environment until you click it, then it becomes "activated" and starts decaying. It's like opening a container. I don't know if it was always like that.

Interesting, this might be it. Maybe I am just not realizing it because I recently changed my approach to ravaged carcasses. In the past, I would process them down entirely upon finding them (I usually play voyagerish difficulties so no big deal there) - but recently Id at most take the meat, then leave, but more often then not I would simply just avoid them as Im keeping my weight down for traveling around more lightly. This might be why I still see ravaged carcasses around after I come back into that area 50 days later. What you say makes sense with what Im seeing now. :) I will keep that in mind, too.

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6 minutes ago, Mroz4k said:

Interesting, this might be it. Maybe I am just not realizing it because I recently changed my approach to ravaged carcasses. In the past, I would process them down entirely upon finding them (I usually play voyagerish difficulties so no big deal there) - but recently Id at most take the meat, then leave, but more often then not I would simply just avoid them as Im keeping my weight down for traveling around more lightly. This might be why I still see ravaged carcasses around after I come back into that area 50 days later. What you say makes sense with what Im seeing now. :) I will keep that in mind, too.

There's a dead deer under a wooden shed in PV, between the farm and the Draft Dodger's Cabin. I've seen and ignored it when I went to explore the area near Three Strikes and Skeeter's Ridge. Then I found the entrance to TWM. So I carefully explored TWM, leisurely taking my time, and now I'm carrying stuff back to the PV farm. The carcass is still there, after at least a month.

Edited by Doc Feral
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25 minutes ago, Doc Feral said:

@Mroz4k Looks like I should do some more testing. From what I remember, a randomly spawned ravaged carcass stays there as an unchanging part of the environment until you click it, then it becomes "activated" and starts decaying. It's like opening a container. I don't know if it was always like that.

Pretty sure this is right, because I've found 1,000+ day-old ravaged carcasses that still have meat, hide and guts.

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3 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

What nationality are you @Ice Hole?

Born in Canada.

I see Doc already cleared that up though.

 

37 minutes ago, Mroz4k said:

This might be why I still see ravaged carcasses around after I come back into that area 50 days later.

The ravaged carcass for as long as I have been playing remains in the world without decay.  Once opened then the decay starts.

Oddly I have just recently changed my behaviour dealing with these carcasses.   Unless it is in a difficult location I generally leave them.  When crows are around it becomes a beacon.  Feathers can also be farmed.  Also its a desperate times meat storage location.  Learned that these are much more useful to remain untouched.

Edited by Ice Hole
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