The Butcher Table turns a whole carcass into the parts everyone else cooks with. It is the step between the farm and the kitchen, and almost nothing in the food economy happens without it.
One carcass goes a long way
A carcass is not crafted. It comes off your livestock or back from a hunt, and the table’s first job is to break it into portions.
| Carcass | Portions |
|---|---|
| Pig | 104 |
| Cow | 100 |
| Lamb | 45 |
| Deer | 35 |
| Chicken | 25 |
Portions are the currency of everything above them. Every named cut is priced in portions, so a carcass is really a budget.
Check the price before you cut
At level 1 the table makes the cuts people ask for by name, and they are not priced alike. Pork blade costs fourteen pork portions where pork ear costs two — cut blades all afternoon and a whole pig is gone in seven.
Pork is where the spread is widest: two portions for an ear, three for a snout, and thirteen or fourteen for a leg or a blade. Lamb runs two to nine, chicken two to ten. Price the cut before you commit the carcass.
Mince is three steps, not one
Portion, then trim, then mince — each its own minute-long craft at level 0. People arrive convinced mince is broken. It is not. It is three cuts deep.
Level 2 pays for itself
The four level-2 recipes take a joint you already made and cut it again, and the arithmetic is kind:
| Cut | Costs | Yields |
|---|---|---|
| Pork chops | 1 pork loin (12 portions) | 12 |
| Pork spare ribs | 1 pork spare rib (10 portions) | 10 |
| Lamb chops | 1 lamb loin (6 portions) | 6 |
| Lamb cutlets | 1 lamb rack (5 portions) | 5 |
One portion in, one piece out. The second cut costs nothing but three minutes and pays 30 experience instead of 20.
The four cuts with a dish waiting for them
Four beef joints have a cooked dish that ships with the game: porterhouse, rib eye, scotch fillet and tenderloin each become a cooked plate at the cooking station, level 1. They are also the four most expensive beef cuts on this table — 4, 7, 5 and 10 portions respectively.
Everything else you cut is raw material for the colony’s cooks.
Odds and ends
Whole chicken costs 25 chicken portions, which is exactly one chicken carcass — the only recipe here that puts an animal back together.
Nothing you cut spoils, so there is no penalty for butchering ahead of an order.
Hides are not this table’s work. Scrap hide goes to the leather tanner, where five of them with dung and water make an animal hide.
Where to start
Chicken. It is the cheapest carcass to replace while you are learning, and every level-0 step takes a minute flat.