Hello.
Now that civs have had meaningful ethics around for a while, it would make sense to apply them much better within the scope of the game. I have been reading up on that prior to the ethics system, butchering used to work quite differently by utilising [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD] to get sapients in the workshop, this got me thinking to a bit and i think i've come to a conclusion as to how we could achieve it in a reasonable and controlled manner without a revert.
The core suggestion is that the behaviour of [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD] becomes a background factor to the ethics system rather than a tag placed individually on every particular creature. In such a system that the game reads the raws and excludes select tokens like [INTELLIGENT], [PET] and [NOT_BUTCHERABLE] when appropriate to the settings is tuned to. Here are a collection of points to expand upon this.
> If a civ's ethics disallows the killing of animals, then tame and wild (without self defence for butchering wild beasts etc) become disabled for that entity.
- On the flipside, all creatures that can be butchered will be in regular [KILL_ANIMAL] settings, including tame and trained livestock, [PERSONAL_MATTER] may be a helpful tag also for stopping dwarves (or particularly nature sensitive ones) from butchering their own pets or creatures that the butcher has a personal relationship to (to nerf catsplosion prevention techniques for !fun!) with tags like [REQUIRED] forcing the action to happen whether they want to or not
> Likewise if a civ's ethics allows [EAT_SENTIENT KILL][EAT SENTIENT_OTHER] this will fill the prerequisite to turn [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD] to all sapients, at base this would also rule out dwarves from any such action involving butchering and consuming bodies, while the rest of the races who do are free to go about their business in and out of worldgen.
- This is incredibly relevant for adventure mode, despite being generally mundane in standard dwarf fortress, entity rules on eating kills *made on a units kill list* and every other sapient including their own race is drawn into perspective in adventure mode, indeed you might be sentenced to death if you consume a small plate of a dwarf priests liver with a glass of chianti in the local fortress trading depot
> this new function also governs for all three ethic subtypes of trophy, so that even if a creature is slaughtered/butchered one way or another there is control over how its auxillary resources are used, given that while cannibalism might be a 'personal matter' in the line of thinking on a personal basis "it was someone i knew but im hungry so whatever ill eat their corpse" , making a cup out of your great-uncles skull might very much still remain taboo.
- If direct butchering is disabled for sapients, having this enabled would allow the resources once the skeleton has decomposed to directly be funneled into the relevant workshops, as per just disabling the butchering and eating of (in raw terms) meat template special butcher objects.
> Another thought into regulating illicit meat entering your stockpiles from other places is to automatically draft 'illegal' (or perhaps some kind of prefix like 'un-usuable' to make it clear to the player) meat and goods directly into a refuse stockpile on account of it being disgusting to be eaten in emergencies if needs be. It will also rot and eventually disappear quicker if overlapped by a dumping zone too if you don't want it sticking around or store it for as long as needed until you can arrange to destroy/sell it.
There are still some trivialities to this system, but it does allow some interactions from a scenario standpoint that culturally remains relevant to the different entities.
With a unmodded game, such tragedies such as
'The great Mermaid chase of 2008' cannot happen in regular play, and it will work as before in addition to more efficient use of livestock animals within the dwarven entity. I am not to argue with Toady's logic to dilute this aspect of the game but i think on a personal level that the extent that the 'nerf' has been orchestrated in a larger scale than necessary as a result fitting for the games progress of the time rather than the future down the line where we are now.
Take for example, my own explanation for why butchering sentients is 'bugged' (or just none-active) right now is that because ALL local fortress populations (including livestock) are exempt from explicit butchering, and neutral sentients too because the ethic to eat other sentients only applies to people within the 'invader faction' (which from a insight to dfhack's gm editor, is a factional group, like location patrons and merchants etc), [BUTCHERABLE_NONSTANDARD] if it is to be believed used to take care of all that and allowed the game to run smoothly for objects such as goblin bones to decorate a iron throne made of melted down goblin iron armor.
Make butchery great again!
Of course, please feel free to leave feedback on my suggestion. Thanks
I haven't put a lot of work into this since the whole system is likely to become more detailed with some more inputs and splits (aka gutted). I also don't have a lot of specific historical events related to these at this point, so it just does general evaluations (in a sense abstracting some horrible faux pas or other dip/hist event which will later be made more explicit). What they do now is check the
The full excerpt of that can be found on the link of that in the quotation, its only responsible that i point that out, as not to take those words out of context explicitly.
