Butcher
Butcher is Slept on
Butcher is the most slept on role in this game. Most rounds I get this role for free because nobody realizes how powerful it is. You get your own little house and you get an effective monopoly on FOUR resources (Milk, Chicken Meat, Eggs, Butter). While it IS possible for players to get these resources, they don't spawn with access to animals and it's a huge pain in the ass for them because they need to craft bait and RNG pray that an animal they want spawns.
Interacting with animals
Feeding:
All animals are able to eat Wheat Grain or Oats, Goats and Saiga can additionally eat apples. You can manually feed animals by clicking on them with the food or you can just dump it all on the ground with a sack and they'll eat from there.
Milking:
Female Cows and Female Goats will generate milk once they've been fed, simply go over to them with a bucket on Fill intent and MASH click them, just MASH mouse one over and over until the bucket is full.
Breeding:
When animals (Goats, Saiga, Cows) are fed and they are near an animal of the opposite sex, they will make a baby animal sometimes, I am not sure the specifics.
Chickens are different, once they are fed they need a nest to lay an egg in. The Butcher starts with a few nests, but if they don't, simply leave ONE (1) fiber on the ground near the chickens, not a bundle of fibers! They will make a nest with that one fiber once they are fed and lay eggs occasionally. Some of the eggs will eventually hatch and become chicks, some won't and go rotten, I am not sure the mechanics of this either unfortunately. DO NOT STEP ON THE EGGS.
Butchering
The animals (except Chickens for some reason) will get PISSED if you hurt one of them near the other animals, I recommend crafting a Bed (1 fiber, 1 short log) somewhere away from the other animals, either inside of your shack or out of seeing distance. Place the animal on the bed and they will not be able to move and you can kill them easily with a few strong slashes to the neck!
PROTIP: If you use Shove Intent on the lower part of a female Cows sprite, it will tip them over and they can't fight back while you cut them up. This doesn't work on Male Cows or Goats.
Once the animal is dead, hold your knife and without any intent selected, middle click the animal to butcher them. Blood and Guts will fly everywhere.
What each Animal Drops:
Unfortunately, I have never counted specifically, I will update this later with in game data:
Cow | 6 steak, 2 hides |
Goat | 4 meat, 2 fat, 2 hides, 1 fur |
Chicken | 1 fat, 1 chicken meat |
Saiga | 4 meat, 2 fat, and 4 hides |
The Gameplan
Now that you know the basics, here's what you do.
- Wait for the Soilsons to farm enough grain to feed the animals
- If there are no Soilsons, you should have picked Soilson instead, otherwise, grow some damn wheat
- Get a sack and dump it in with the cows
- Milk the shit out of them
- Make a bed somewhere to Butcher them
- Once you've bred one or two more cows, drag them to the bed, shove the lower part of their sprite and kill one of them
- Butcher them
- Use the drying rack, 2 hides and 1 stone to craft a Whip
The whip can attack from THREE TILES AWAY, now you won't get your chest fucking caved in next time you try to butcher a Goat. With a whip in hand and grain to feed them, you just want to breed animals, periodically butcher them, gather eggs and sell Meat/Eggs/Hide/Fur to the Stockpile.
Butter: More Valuable than GOLD.
This is the ENTIRE REASON I wrote this guide. You are pretty much the sole provider of butter for the entire realm. The keep will thank you. The maids will want you. The Tavern Cook will genuinely fucking BLOW you.
To craft Butter you need 1 Salt and some Milk in a bucket.
Milk is no problem, the salt is. It costs 5 mammon to buy Salt from the Stockpile and you get 9 mammon for turning in butter and this is if Salt is even stocked anyway, this is why you just MAKE salt.
You can just fucking make salt
To craft Salt you need 1 Mortar and 1 Pestle (1 stone each), 1 ash, some water and 1 fat or 1 of ANY minced meat.
Just grab a bunch of sticks and use a torch to burn them to get ash, remember, if you step on ash or sticks, they break and go away.
Chicken meat can not be put in the stockpile, once you have your ash, water, mortar and pestle, kill ONE chicken, use the fat from butchering it to CRAFT salt, then, cut the chicken meat to make two chickens steaks, CHOP the chicken steaks to make minced meat. You have now made THREE units of salt from ONE dead chicken, thus, each chicken dead is THREE butter crafted.
Seriously, if you take nothing else from this guide, just craft butter- you can genuinely make so much butter that nothing means anything anymore. I am so fucking sick of no butter being stocked when this is genuinely so fucking easy and SO profitable.
How to calm down pissed off Saiga
You don't. They just get pissed off for no real reason and are basically impossible to calm down, maybe a Druid can do it with their 'calm animals' spell, but who knows? Some people say holding an apple and right clicking a Saiga to beckon them with the apple helps, but I haven't seen it. I genuinely do not fuck with the Saiga unless someone wants one bred as a mount. You get decent riding skill as a Butcher, but I think Saiga riding can be useful if you're a very slow race/class like Dwarf, but you aren't much faster than walking if you have regular speed and it uses your own stamina to run for some reason and if the Saiga gets spooked it'll fucking maul you to death, I am sure this will be reworked eventually.
TIP: If you don't feel like crafting a Saddle, one spawns in the little indoor area to the direct east of the Bog Gate on a rack.
Conclusion
Butcher is a good role. You can easily make a LOT of money from butchering animals and dumping the materials into the Stockpile. Since you don't have to babysit crops like the Soilsons do, you can easily head out and stock the pile for them and share the money because your role doesn't have much responsibility, the animals can never die from lack of feeding or attention. You can craft cool stuff with hides like Leather Cloaks, Satchels, Belts, Fur Cloaks, Whips, Saddles and you can make TONS of butter once you know [the method].