How to Butcher Animals in Rimworld

Rimworld is a fantastic story-telling survival simulator where no game is ever the same. With so many things to do and potential ways to run your colony, you will be able to weave a story to your liking. Simply choose a storyteller and a difficulty, and you’ll be on your way for your own narrative. To ensure survival for your colonists, you may want to learn to butcher animals, to ensure food to feed your colonists. Here is how to butcher animals in Rimworld.

How to Butcher Animals in Rimworld

Prepare for the process

You will only need two things to butcher meat. A butcher table, and a place to store dead animals.

If you don’t already, build a room for the table to go, you will need a 2 x 3 space. You can build the table outside, but your worker will suffer penalties. You can find the butcher table in the production menu or the architect tab.It will come in different materials, starting at wood.

To store dead animals, you can either assign an area to be a dumping stockpile zone (as dead animals cannot be placed in a regular stockpile zone) or any freezer / cold room. You can store dead animals outside, but the corpses won’t last for long.

With the table up and the zone ready, you will be able to start the process.

Get yourself some meat

Depending on wherever you are, different animals may or may not be available. If you can, try to make some sort of Animal Pen to ensure you have some on standby.

Related: How to Make an Animal Pen in RimWorld 1.3

To hunt an animal, you must first assign a colonist to become a hunter and equip them with a gun (or melee weapon, but that is more dangerous and more tedious). Look around your map for a safe animal to take on.

You may find it easier to draft the colonist to have more control over what they do, to make sure they are hunting to the best of their ability. Assign an animal for them shoot, and wait for them to successfully take it down.

That colonist, or another, can then take the dead animal straight to storage.

Butcher away

To actually process the dead animal into meat, you must select the butcher table and add a bill. Click ‘add bill’ in the top corner of the table’s menu, and select ‘butcher creature’. This will add the bill for a colonist assigned to cooking to perform. With a dead animal available, the assigned chef will haul the corpse and butcher it.

It will soon turn it into meat, the quantity and type depending on the animal that it was harvested from. Make sure to store the meat in a safe place, or turn it to food right away.

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