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[B42] Rebalanced Yields: Butchering

Changes the animal yields to provide more realistic, immersive quantities of meat from butchering.

Build 42.12.1 note: Compatible with the latest update.

As you can see from the screenshots, vanilla butchering for larger animals (i.e. not chickens) is a complete waste of time as of the latest unstable build. I have balanced the functions that create the resulting loot by hand to provide a balance between realism and immersion for gameplay. An actual, fully grown cow would certainly provide more beef than this mod, but it certainly should provide more than three chickens, as it currently stands in vanilla gameplay.

I strongly recommend you use the Butcher Hook Animal Size Fix mod as it provides further balancing to the butchering aspect of gameplay, the developers have missed out a vital parameter related to animal size when factoring in the butcher hook. From the author:

To make a long story short, since build 42 came out any and all animals would have a static size of 0.6 on the hook due to being resized for the UI, the issue is that this ALSO affected the value used for butchering and harvesting meat from them.

As such all this mod does it add an additional parameter to be passed to the butchering util file that uses the correct animal size rather than the static 0.6 that was used before. No animal meat values are changed or modified by this mod in any way, this only affects animals butchered on the hook.

If this changes - being true as of the latest unstable build (October 2025), I will update the description accordingly. Similarly, if butchering is rebalanced by the developers, I shall make sure my mod is still relevant.

-Cuts of meat, from all animals, weighing more than 0.4 can be halved with a craft recipe.

-Overall, this mod does not focus on just increasing the amount of meat pieces that animals provide by butchering, but making sure that you do not get stacks of small unusable pieces. You will be getting larger cuts weighing up to several kilograms, you can process these in recipes and your aim upon butchering a large animal should switch to preservation.

-Pigs have a moderate chance of providing lard, allowing the player to establish a sustainable source of cooking fat into the apocalypse.

-Additionally, this mod tweaks the amounts of bones that animals, particularly small animals, have a chance to drop. Larger animals will still drop small bones (cows did not drop small bones, I have changed this so they do), and you should know that in vanilla it is possible to break larger bones with hammers to create fragments that can be used in recipes as small bones.

-Penalty for not using the butcher hook reduced, as in vanilla, the lack of a butcher hook meant that large animals would yield half the pieces of meat, therefore twice as little in terms of hunger reduction and calories. Also, no leather. Using a butchering hook still provides a 20% bonus to base-defined animal values, so you would, in theory, benefit from 20% increase in meat yield by using it.

-Vanilla roadkill would result in mangled scraps, as both the minimum and maximum yields for number of items would be halved, and the "meat ratio" (i.e. meat to nothing ratio, based on theoretical yield of the animal weight and your butchering skill) would be randomly set to a low amount. I have reduced the penalty for roadkill, however it is still sizeable, so you should avoid running over any animals that you can shoot or otherwise kill in melee.

-This mod does not add any items that did not exist in the base game, however as hunger reduction/calories/protein/fats, etc. are governed by the base items as well as the scripts that spawn them, I had to use a lua implementation to tweak the calories of base meat items to real life values, and this should not conflict with mods that alter these items.

-Make sure that rodents and raccoons (which use the Base.Smallanimalmeat item) are balanced further as it really is anyone's guess as to what is going on between the butchering and the animal trapping system.
-Bacon from pigs maybe?

This mod overwrites the AnimalPartsDefinitions.lua file responsible for the butchering loot and so will almost always be incompatible with other mods that affect the butchering loot. Additionally, this mod tweaks 2 functions in ButcheringUtil.lua (to make changes to "no butchering hook" and "roadkill" penalties) and therefore will probably be incompatible with other butchery balancing mods.

Please do not modpack or reupload.
If this mod is deleted, you are welcome to reupload to Steam Workshop only.
Thanks and enjoy!

Realistic Distributions: Alcohol, Cigarettes, Clutter
Clothing Protection: Rebalanced
Temperature Affects Food Spoilage Rate
Quality of Life and Miscellaneous Tweaks
Immersive Preservation: Canning and Jarring of evolved recipes

Workshop ID: 3564838872
Mod ID: RebalancedYieldsButchering