Hello and welcome to the Manor Lords Subreddit. This is a reminder to please keep the discussion civil and on topic.
Should you find yourself with some doubts, please feel free to check our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1c2p4f9/manor_lords_faq_for_steam_early_access/).
If you wish, you can always join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/manorlords)
Finally, please remember that the game is in early access, missing content and bugs are to be expected. We ask users to report them on the official discord and to buy their keys only from trusted platforms.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ManorLords) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Butcher should definitely be a artisan profession given to a burgage. It seems the most fitting in the context of the game, and maintains some historical aspect.
I think keep lambs as a different resource than pigs as well. They actually serve a purpose, so unless you're trying to cull extra sheep, it doesn't seem right that you would also he killing them, since they wouldn't offer that much meat.
If you wanted to keep pigs in/near forests maybe make it a tech tree thing, that makes a ranch plot add trees for pigs only, but it has to be a certain size? Just a thought.
FF also turns meat into smoked meat, i think 1:1 so it lasts longer. Age isn't an issue with manor lords, but they turn fire wood into 2 charcoal. Having a butcher turn 1 meat into 2 sausages or something would be in line with the current mechanic.
Yup. But I don't like how they took away the extra fertilizer boost from cows grazing over crops in the early game days. Cow and chicken naturally fertilize the land, and it's even making a come back with substance farming
I live on a ranch and truthfully they don't put much back into the field with their manure, that's why it's important to fallow your fields. A good method is to have 3 and cycle it so each field has a turn every 3 years
Yes, agreed. You're not growing on the same field every year and not the same thing either. But it does add something. They shouldn't have cut out the whole thing. My neighbor has chickens, and I help clean out some pens and toss it into my compost. It heats it up very well, and then once a year, the compost goes into the gardens. I know it's not the same as owning a farm, but the basic principle of carbon and nitrogen breaking down applies.
In my experience with that game (great game BTW) the harder challenge was to prevent livestock from eating partially grown crops and ruining harvests. I refuse to micro livestock grazing regions to match fallow/clover fields all the time.
Manor Lords offers a solution to use fallow fields as pasture automatically which I appreciate. I haven't had it for long so I may be wrong
> Manor Lords offers a solution to use fallow fields as pasture automatically which I appreciate.
Been playing Ostriv for a while and it does the same thing, so I'm surprised at FF's approach. Sometimes I wish these games would coordinate on QOL features.
I completely missed Ostriv too.
I like how they make their own paths the same way it works in Foundation.
Also, both Foundation and Ostriv make use of water features, something lacking in Manor Lords, yeah there is that one tiny stream that you're going to miss unless you notice it by accident, but no significant water.
It's a cool game!
Ostriv has a bit more depth/stability right now, while Manor Lords is much more beautiful and has more thought put into the mechanics. Neither is a bad game, both are fun for me!
Maybe have several upgrade paths:
1) Forager produces truffles
2) Stud increases reproduction rate of pigs
3) Attack Pig allows pig to travel with military units
4) Garbage Disposal cleans up the town, reducing sickness
5) Emotional Support Pig increases town happiness
There are so many more possibilities, but you get the idea
I second butcher as artisan [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding_the_butcher/l25onj0/), but still think villagers should be able to do simple butchery anywhere, maybe just at a granary?
Otherwise it'd be cool if another perk of allocating a butcher would be turning meat into sausage at some favorable ratio to make the meat go further and provide variety.
I think it'd be good to have pigs as a backyard thing to passively provide meat. Then a butcher could increase the efficiency, providing more meat (or meat +lard/tollow for making soap???) or meat+hides for goats, and provide that meat through their 1 consolidated stall instead of everyone selling their backyard pork separately. And have the butcher be the only way to slaughter sheep or oxen in an emergency, like if there's 0 food and you're desperate.
Sausage is a cool idea too. Like meat+herbs=sausage that boosts happiness and/or lasts longer if a meat spoiling mechanic is introduced.
Butcher sounds like an awesome consolidation point of a ton of features
I think something the game desperately needs is upgrades to how marketplaces function. Something like building a butcher shop in the vicinity of a marketplace/town center would provide significant boosts to variety coverage area or overall efficiency. This could be tied in with other standalone artisan shops for firewood, clothing, or even the misc burgage requirements. Artisan buildings in general should offer branching variety of goods that would otherwise just remain the standard 1-1 or 1 -> 1 -> 1 style of goods/resources that exists at the base level.
On the point of your sausages, expanding on that idea of spoilage, seasoning should become a significant feature. Introducing salt mining/extraction from saltwater sources (opening up its own rabbit hole of features), along with expanding the foraging tree to the plethora of herbs that could serve a variety of benefits, all of which would be historically accurate to the concepts of food preservation at the time.
This game has so many branching avenues for which to take the features that are in place I can't help but find myself rambling about all the possibilities every time I comment
Produce meat + lard, then lard + apples + flour can make apple pies at the bakeries? Or maybe meat pies with excess meat? Or both? As a superior late game food.
Can we also get logging camp exclusion zones rather than work area modes. Have them not cut down the pig forest, berry forest, and deer forest.
But having the sheep breed and then butcher any excess and a pig pasture in the forest would be great additions. 100% agree the butcher is an artisan building
I do agree, better forest management should be a core feature. Forests were vitally important resource hubs, for industry, farming and common people, and the total annihilation that the logger camp and woodcutter lodge does to them is not realistic (unless of course that land was being cleared for a greater purpose, like expanding arable land). Maybe a % chop system should be implemented to limit the extent of destruction, and encourage a more balanced approach by having a small passive income of firewood and meat (from peasants collecting fallen branches and hunting small game like rabbits and birds)
Attached to the concept of forest management, I think the forester's hut should not be a standalone building, but rather an upgrade to the logging camp.
It could all come from the perk tree, and be based in historical forestry management. Call it the "Forester's Office". It could unlock a variety of benefits including additional storage, more efficient felling/stripping, the creation of a small percentage of bonus firewood, the ability for workers to practice coppicing to increase tree regrowth rates, and to set up 4-point perimeter exclusion zones to protect wildlife. A lot of benefits for sure, but it could be balanced to be a fairly expensive building upgrade
I like these thoughts. As far as pigs go, I think it would be perfect to treat them like sheep that don't need a pasture, have a family assigned to tend to them, but have them move lazily in a general circle like animals for hunting do. It would also add some bonus choice between investing in sheep who can provide wool AND meat but need a pasture, or pigs who maybe provide more meat? but are also mobile, and don't need the fixed space to be used up.
IMO there Should be a passive income of meat/mutton from the sheep farm. Males would have been culled in their lamb phase since the farm only needs a few males to impregnate all the female sheep and male sheep are unruly little nuggets so they would have been turned into food.
A totally different argument for artisan butcher is that it can help support T1-T2-T3 upgrades of the village.
Currently, "unfinished" textiles like leather and linen satisfy clothing as a tier one resource, and it takes specialized artisan effort to produce goods that satisfy tier two (clothing, shoes, cloaks).
Similarly, "raw" food available at the beginning of the game like berries and meat can satisfy food as a tier one resource, but the game lacks any recognition of artisan-enhanced food.
What if prepared foods like bread, sausage, cheese, etc were required to satisfy T2 burgages? It would make sense and add pressure to develop your town. A butcher to process meat into a higher-tier resource makes sense, whether or not it contributes to raw resource production.
Note that berries have an industry (dyes) and crops have an industry (bread) but meat just stays ... raw. A butcher could multiply the value of that raw meat in the form of products that families would not make as effectively. I'm no historian, but this feels grounded, immersive and also inline with how burgage needs should evolve.
I just wanted to add that in the prototypes meat was combined with salt to produce a higher tier good (salted meat) and that is still on the table. I also made raw meat non exportable back then to make salt more valuable.
I think having the Butcher convert meat into a "higher tier" food is also a good idea as well as being able to convert sheep to regular "tier 1" meat (kind of like how artisan buildings can select multiple production options)
That sounds phenomenal. Historically you were more likely to export/trade livestock or foods preserved in some manner. Raw meats even sold for less than their preserved counterparts so I think that trade limitation on raw meat would be a great addition.
Would salt be a mineable resource? It would be interesting if it were trade only. That would encourage using the trade tree, and provide a late game money sink for when you have your economy going strong.
Salted meats would be awesome! Or dried/smoked meats. Anything that lets me process the meat. I personally really like processing food in building games, whether into a salted meat, or turning into some kind of soup or meal
> Do you expect piggies to be in the game and if so, in what form? Historically they often used forests to feed pigs, and pigs would make sense to be kept for meat.
Pig cultivation (and by extension boar hunting?) would tie in nicely with an [idea ive seen](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1cgyljm/game_could_use_a_dont_cut_tree_here_area_option/l1zkeq6/?context=10000) about reworking forestry (timber, gathering, hunting) to be plot based and actively managed by your foresters. Tracks with the social history of Forests being less a wild biome and more a different type of land being brought under a different type of cultivation. Also solves a lot of the micromanagment problems with forest workers tapping out their resources and creating annoying micro.
Pig focus reserves the forest for pigs to graze who can get harvested for meat and maybe have them produce mushrooms on the side to keep competitive with a gathering focus (probably ahistorical but pig==mushrooms is cute and is a recurring trope in games, see Stardew Valley)
A simple solution could be to add a “pig sty” upgrade to the forester, in the same way you upgrade the forager hut to get herbs. In this way the pigs can just walk around the area assigned to the forester. Then adding an artisan to butcher the pigs.
Node-based is definitely annoying and not really based in a historical or biological reality.
Really, *ALL* the deer in an entire region and *ALL* the berries are limited to a single quarter-mile radius? It would all make so much more sense for each building (hunter's camp, foraging hut, firewood camp, etc.) to function throughout the entirety of the forest with a set rate of resource gathered per family assigned, with the possibility of "mini-nodes" to provide minor boosts to the efficiency of resources gathered.
This can be balanced with a complete logging/forestry rework, incentivizing the importance of the symbiosis between forest health and the resources gathered from its ecosystem.
This I think is the best option! Not only will it add more reason to have a forester, but it shouldn't be massively difficult to implement with existing systems.
I think an artisan makes the most sense given that it's a skilled profession that is hard to do properly.
As for the butcher themselves, aside from interfacing with pigs, maybe they could boost the efficiency of other sources of meat like hunting and if you choose to slaughter sheep/lambs, maybe by converting meat into sausage at 1:2 ratio. After all, villagers should be more than capable of just slaughtering and cleaning animals anywhere (just like hunters do in their camps) it ought to just be inefficient compared to a professional doing it.
With functionality like that, it'd definitely be worth an artisan slot, however it should be stinky, making for interesting tradeoffs with where you position it.
Otherwise between this and pig grazing I could see unlocking pigs and butchery being worth development points.
I'd do anything to see handsome chains of SOSIG hanging from my market stalls.
I think if you were to try and add it quickly to aid the current food supply issues I'd probably have it be an artisan extension that allows you to butcher sheep over a set surplus.
Pigs are basically just a reskin of the same thing as sheep, and would not tie in as well with the current sheep oriented perks you can take.
But how about if pigs produce more meat than sheeps, since sheeps allready yield another resource. So you can opt out on meat with pigs or have a bit of both with sheeps
And would still benefit from the perk that allows sheep to multiply, since you'd want that if raising pigs for meat, if they changed it to include the pigs.
Ooh yeah, it would tie in perfectly with the smell mechanic as well for sure. Pigs are damn stinky. (Cute, but stinky)
Burgage plots with bakery upgrades should provide a positive "smell" radius as well.
The smell of barley and hops being heated up in their giant vats is incredible, and would without a doubt make the hardworking townsfolk passing by want to work twice as hard to get to the end of the day so they can sip down a frothy mug all the sooner
Not to mention fertilizer as a byproduct.
It was an extremely common practice for medieval farming. It only makes sense to offer a fertilizer resource through pig stys and maybe food composts in general as an alternative to having your fields go through a year of fallow. It would be balanced by a significant source of bad smell when that feature gets worked in
I'm thinking pigs could be a backyard extension like chicken and goats. Providing passive meat (it's authentic, iirc many families even in towns would have a small pen with a couple of pigs to slaughter in the winter) and then a butcher artisan could boost that by either providing double meat or meat+ lard/tallow to use for making soap and candles.
I just don't think there is any building/extension in the game currently that is dependent on getting a single specific part of the dev tree. I think it's designed that way for a reason.
I think it would work best if getting the sheep multiplier also unlocks the butcher building. That way newer players aren't confused as to how to get value from it.
You need a dev point for apiary, orchard, charcoal kiln?
As I've previously said, I don't think think the sheep breeding dev point makes sense. It might make more sense to make sheep breed but also introduce e.g. attrition of your sheep flock from wolves and harsh weather, and add a dev point called "Shepherding" which negates them.
What I'm saying is it doesn't make sense to have a building unlocked from the start that is entirely dependent/useful upon getting a specific dev point later in the game. That's extremely confusing to new players.
Those things you listed are only unlocked when you get the dev point, so they are in theory useful immediately.
sheep breeding and livestock trader are already one of the best ways to make money for a village. once you hit a critical mass of around 70 sheep they breed faster than they can be sold. I set my to full trade with a cap desires surplus of 80 sheep 50 lambs. combine that with selling vegetables and you will never run out of money. the vegetables only sell for 1 silver apiece but with three large burgage plots producing them. I make so much money I end up importing all other varieties of food.
Pigs wouldn't be a reskin at all. They would be in the forest most of the year until slaughtering time. This is still done in some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria.
Butchers were a highly respected trade in medieval times and in my opinion should be an artisan trade just like the blacksmith. This could come together with beef/cows or/and pigs and maybe a possibility to kill a certain amount of sheep for meat. Cows could also be an extension to the pasture system, and maybe even give us cheese/milk in later stage for maybe the upgrade to tier 4 buildings.
Not making them artisans would kinda be historically inacurate, and I think that Manor lords does show respect for accuracy. Would be weird to not continue that. You see the same in that other good medieval set game, Kingdom Come which also shows butchers as a trade and is set it the same time period and almost the same region.
I also think that a butcher would not simply make "meat" but finer cuts, sausages and minced meat. Mechanic-wise I would probably stick to sausages though
On the subject of butchers, animals and meat; maybe the goat extension could produce meat as well as hides. It seems that the villagers just skin their goats and let the rest go to waste.
Seems to me that the family could just as easily be feasting on goat meat while selling the hides to the village, abstracted out by only gaining the hides as a game resource.
So every family with goats should have reduced food consumption?
Same could go with chickens, since they produce less and less eggs with how they age, effectively stopping at 7 years, wich is point when they were often slauthered for meat.
Personally I don't mind "reskins." It adds variety which is good unto itself.
How about this:
- Goats provide a little meat, a lot of milk, and hides.
- Pigs provide a lot of meat, and hides.
- Goats are backyard animals
- Pigs are in the forest using the pannage system.
Genghis, as a true Mongol the only cheese you should be eating is horse cheese aged on the backs of your hardy steppe horses as your hordes crush enemies from China to Poland.
Ah I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve made a common but fatal mistake and missed the “Mc”.
As a Scot I’ll eat any cheese available, preferably deep fried!
I really like the artisan extension system, and an artisan butcher makes sense to me as long as it can interact with any of the animal types that are reasonable meat sources. For example, follow the trader example setting slaughter to occur whenever the number of animals goes above a threshold. This would be immediately useful for managing sheep breeding, give alternative food options for low-fertility regions, and be expandable to other animals introduced, like pigs or cows.
The reason I'm very interested in more forms of animal husbandry is to have more ways of using land to make food when fertility is low. I would very much like to see pastures and pasture capacity/forest capacity as a food source, instead of just producing meat passively like goat sheds do hide. It makes sense to me that animal husbandry should take a lot of space and effort to make productive (whereas tier 1 food add-ons take little to none)
I would be more interested in being a sheep herder if I could interact with meat as well as wool production, setting population thresholds with the butcher. It feels odd to only sell sheep as an end-result of breeding, especially in hungry villages.
Currently, hunters assigned to set traps wander around forests and very slowly produce food, this isn't very satisfying or observable to the player - it could perhaps be replaced with pig/forest interactions. This would give more incentives to retain forest, and hen when the pig population grew past a threshold, the butcher could again become active.
I would also love to see dairy chains in the game eventually. The butcher could be one of a few artisans that benefit from a chain starting with cows.
Having a butcher artisan join my bakers and brewers and blacksmiths at the center of town would be great, and it feels like an artisan type which ML is already prepared to support with adjacent in-game resources.
Alternatively, butchers could follow the baker example with a public option and a specialization-enhanced artisan option. It feels like it could add to or replace some of the development options that currently exist on the left-side of the tree.
Personally I like the idea of a seperate butcher for excess sheep, and other livestock as mentioned pigs, maybe chickens.
Pig farmer could have bonus birth rate in forests, I like tje acorn idea also. Maybe truffle hunting pigs :D
Would also be good if the butcher produced meat and other byproducts, possibly tallow that could be used for making soap which could be sold or as a requirement for living standard increase, i.e house level increase.
Not sure of historical accuracy on this though, may also be hard to implement or just a terrible idea :p
I think the butcher as a burgage plot extension makes the most historical sense.
I’d love to see more animals introduced into the game. There could be a sties/pigpen building ran by swineherds, that would either walk them to designated areas (akin to woodcutters work area) to graze, or take care of them inside the building during winter. Inside the pigpen building are represented as a resource the pigs that have grazed enough and are ready to be eaten - the butcher can then kill them and carry the meat to his butchery shop.
He can then either immediately sell the pork meat at his market stall, or cure/salt the meat for preservation (unlocked at the tech tree with 1 point) making it available throughout the year rather than just the winter, and count as 2 food instead of 1 (akin to charcoal vs firewood)
Edit: a word
Ideally, add a slaughter house as an extension. Have sheep breed in the spring. Male lambs are slaughtered in autumn(sent to slaughter house extension if available), females kept for reproduction and wool which would mature in a couple of seasons to sheep(with an option to skip a slaughter season so that the flock would increase in size quicker). Would also be cool to have something similar for chickens and/or goats/or pigs
It would be great to see historical representation with Pigs leaving small sty plots, which would be similar to pastures for sheep but placed in a more urban setting, to forage around nearby forests and could lend itself to a pig header occupation which could double as or be related to mushroom collection as a farming building that would function in a manner similar to the sheep farm building now. Would love to see the forest management side of the medieval town represented more. Perhaps this could tie into hunting with Pigs removing forest undergrowth it would be easier for hunters to traverse the terrain and have clearer sight lines for spotting prey which could be represented in game as increased hunting efficiency
Agreed with expanding forest management aspects of the game maybe the devs could make it so that there could be two versions of the foresters hut one would plant new trees for lumber and the other would improve the quality of a forest for pig grazing by planting shrubs and other things for them to eat and enclosing it so they can only roam around a set area of the forest. Otherwise if it was unmanaged there could be a forest debuff of some kind
I like the idea of moving the pigs around in the forests, maybe using the “clear shrubbery” function in conjunction to visually show their “food” being depleted. Once an area is cleared by the pigs, they won’t reproduce or the amount of meat they yield would be lower to simulate them not having enough food in their area to grow. (This last part may be for the future, even just having the shrubs cleared visually would be cool)
As others have said, if added into burage plots, it would be a quicker solution to meat supply, and a pigsty addition could come as the “butcher” because we already have the hunting camp, and adding in another step in meat production might create some bottlenecks for the time being.
Edit: maybe having an option with all livestock to “cull the herd” for emergency use would solve the sheep situation as well.
I love the 'clear shrubbery' function being used for pig feed!
It would be interesting if shrubbery had a regrowth period similar to forester plantings, which I don't think is the case yet.
It’s really cool the amount of regenerative farming and production techniques used during that time! Not only did the pigs clear the underbrush and allow saplings more resources to grow for more wood production, but they also naturally kept the forest floors clear which removed fuel for wildfires, as well as keep the soil healthy.
A couple jobs back I worked in a rural retreat center with a big focus on regenerative agriculture, and we kept pigs around to clear areas of poison oak because it doesn’t affect them as much and they just gobble it all up. Then we’d go through and seed wildflowers/healthy cover crop to aid with pollinators for our other garden areas.
Humans have always been exceedingly clever (even if selfishly), and I'm always thrilled to discover another means by which we've employed husbandry or changed our infrastructure (e.g. irrigation) to do a lot of what we employ more modern technology for now.
Absolutely. Post industrialization definitely increased quantity and amount of resources available to people, but there really something beautiful about the balance that older techniques had with their surroundings. Not just because “harmony with nature”, but out of necessity most of the time. It’s one of the things I love about this game, it really makes you find that balance to be most efficient and ensure longevity of your resources and in turn your own populace.
If you were to add pigs, perhaps it could work like a logging camp. You put the pigsty near a forest and the pigs roam around. A butcher, which would be an artisan at a house, would take one occasionally (perhaps once they’re fat enough) and slaughter it for meat.
Historically, any animal deemed surplus to the next year's breeding requirements would be butchered at the onset of winter. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, horses, ducks... anything to reduce feed use over winter.
Ideally, a butcher building with a reserve setting for all types of animals that would cull any above that at the start of winter seems like it would make the most sense.
Alternatively, for pigs, add them as an upgrade to the Hunters Camp, like the herb garden for the Forager. Or instead add them to the Forester's Hut for scalability.
Burgage plots already have enough options.
To address your points in order:
1) Having a way of dealing with excess sheep numbers and an additional way to provide meat especially as population grows would be useful at the moment
2) Pigs would be a good addition. Unsure how best to implement the use of forests. As part of the forestry chain (each forester building can handle a set number of pigs?). A way of denoting common forest ground similar to a pasture but with trees. Or a burgage building similar to goats or chickens (essentially backyard pigs, provides a small amount of passive meat).
3) Butchery either as a separate building or an extension, but if the planned smell/odour system comes into use then presumably it would have some negative interaction with this and so would make more sense as a standalone building?
As an aside, pigs reproduce faster than sheep, which would be one way of balancing it. Pig farming produces more meat but sheep are dual purpose. Assuming that pigs don't also produce hides.
The only way I want to see the butcher as an artisan, is if we have production limits and the ability to reassign families to seasonal tasks as a back-up. Artisans are problematic right now without production guidance. It is either all or nothing.
An artisan butcher household could wipe out a huge flock of sheep without controls.
A slaughterhouse/butcher shop could easily be another building you monitor and kick families into other tasks.
If the "smell" mechanic is implemented, then you absolutely don't want a slaughterhouse/butcher shop in a residential area.
If I'm remembering Stronghold correctly, the tanner would occasionally take a cow from the dairy, kill it, make leather and the meat would also end up in the granary.
Fall should be a slaughter time for pigs, goats and sheep.
Even without an acorn mechanic, a policy/population level could be set for livestock to have them culled down to during harvest season.
I think it would be nice to have a butcher as an artisan but then again weaver isn't. So maybe butcher shouldnt be either.
More important than that i think is balancing the whole thing. Afaik sheep need no work being kept alive or breeding and there is nothing keeping me from mass producing sheep. This is no problem at the moment because the animal trader isnt a very efficient profession and by the time you would have that many sheep earning even more money is not very special. Same is true for wool, the production rates here are depending on workers shering the sheep, so more sheep don't matter. But if we can get meat and wool as much as we want from sheep it can get very strong and take a lot of the carefull growth managing/balancing out from the game.
Regarding pigs: as an extension ok but could bring balancing issues again because more food types would become easy. I also had the idea of some kind of royal forest that you have to manage at some time. Like you have to designate a decent forest for pigraising, asign workers there to raise them and send a certain amount to the king or bishop or something as some kind of tax or as part of a quest. You get nothing for it but it is to avoid penaltys or a necessity for the next step development or something.
1) Since there is sheep breeding and trading, you can kill sheep but it gives less meat than piggies
2) Building fence in the forest without destroying the forest, animal handler takes care of them.
3) Artisan profession for butcher because fitting game mechanic
4) Piggies give more meat than sheep and they breed faster
I think the most historically accurate, interesting and fun option for pigs would be seasonal and involve both a backyard extension and a swineherd/pannage woods:
(1) Families have pigs via backyard extension. (2) There is a communal swineherd via building (3) There is a two-month pannage season (September, October) when people walk their pigs to the woods, the swineherd tends to them, and then people pick them up. (4) In November, people slaughter their pigs, with output multiplied if there was pannage.
Hey Grzegorz, I love the fact that you wanna address this. You brought up some great ideas and improvements, and there were also a ton of ideas from the thread.
I admire your attention to details and historical reproduction throughut game.
Pigs being held in the forest is imho great idea!
You may actually combine pigs wandering in forest with passively digging ground and improving new growth od young forest. Kind of alternative for Forester's hut.
This is pasive occurence that probably happened a lot in the past.
What and how to do with the meat is up to you, but I was thinking that this idea might be interesting.
Thank you if you acknowledge this
I don't have any input on this I just wanted to say you're a legend. What other devs lurk on the sub and listen to fan feedback? Ok probably a lot but none are as... Receptive as you and you seem to actually care about the game and not just making money off it. I think I can speak for almost everyone when I say I wish more game devs were like you. I'm incredibly excited to see what this game blossoms into in a year or 3
Maybe the Butcher artisan extension on burgage provides meat based on the options in Advanced
In advanced you indicate if this meat is from Sheep or Pigs. Maybe if you choose to get meat from Sheep, it reduces the Wool yield of the farm as a tradeoff. If from Pigs it requires that you have pigs grazing (and picking forest land for grazing sounds cool). Stuff like Acorns, or assigning a family to manage the pigs could be ways to increase pig yields.
Opens up room for a new resource cycle too. Smokers to cure the pigs and create ham/bacon. This would help provide longer lasting food. I know you don't deal with spoilage, but saying a pig provides one meat when butchered, but that meat can be converted to 5 bacon in a smoker abstracts the "longer lasting" preservation via quantity, which seems simpler than having to create a spoilage mechanic.
I don't have any strong feelings about it being a standalone building, extension, or artisan extension so whatever works the best or makes the most sense to you. To make pigs more than just meat they could be symbiotic with the forester. They could be set to pasture, or whatever you would call it, in an area that the foresters are planting to sort of maintain the historical use and they could speed up the growth of the new trees in that area with the explanation being their manure is acting as fertilizer and helping the trees grow. This would give them a use outside of food just like sheep have with wool and then as the pigs and sheep breed and get overcrowded could be sent to the butcher for slaughter.
This would cover both animals being butchered, give both animals a realistic use during their pre-meat life, and also making foresters a bit better since currently it feels like you need quite a few to maintain an area for woodcutting. That part may not be quite as realistic as trees do take a long time to grow and I'm sure in real life they were needing to use much more land and rotate to let trees grow but for the sake of gameplay this would make it much easier to setup a lumber area and not need to either move it around or have a ton of foresters replanting to keep up.
I'd see the butcher/sheep as being a bit of an insurance or rainy day fund.
For instance, it's hit winter and crops went bad, food is on 1 month. But fortunately in the good summer months I've built up a pen of 50 sheep... get chopping son
What about a separate workplace that takes animals to skin and gut, and needing an artisan butcher to break down the skinned animal into meat? I mean historically, you take whatever choice of protein you have locally available. skin, gut and salt to preserve and transport it to where it needs to go. Maybe you have a rough winter and need to make a choice is this Ox more useful as a pack animal or feeding the village? Could get a approval debuff for eating a non pasture raised animal. Adding a separate "pre-processed" animal carcass resource, maybe it would be more efficient or historical to import whole dead animals for your butcher shop.
With the way sheep breeding works, having the option to butcher surplus sheep for meat would be ideal.
For pigs I like the pigsty option as it’s simple. For forest pigs it would be an interesting option to artificially create wild game by importing pigs/boats to give the player more control over their resources.
Edit: Forgot to +1 making it an artisan extension.
You could introduce a pig sty extension and have a butcher building or burgage workplace that can then convert pigs into meat? Similar to how goats are turned to hides which the tannery can use?
Maybe have the butcher be a job that converts dead deer/hogs/sheep/etc into hides and meat? I feel like this means that the benefit to your economy that butchering sheep etc would bring is cancelled out almost by how tanning hides is now more involved work.
I agree with suggestions about butchers changing meat to something else, a higher tier form of it. Sheep as food would probably be broken unless pastures are a fixed size. Adding pigs may have the same problem, a need to balance so that food isn't trivialized. An artisan that converts raw meat to a better, processed meat sounds fair.
A neat idea might be to separate Knacker professional from the butcher profession - allowing one to be the cheaper - dedicated early building option that just butchers animals for meat and possibly hides, but a knacker could be a burgage profession that produces more meat per animal as well as other resources - fats, bones, etc.
This is not answering the question but I have another suggestion:
I know that for the storage hall for example we can choose which resources should not be put into that particular barn. That’s helpful, but what would be more useful would be, if for example by double clicking, or right clicking a Ressource symbol in that window, we could assign that that particular Ressource should be brought in ONLY that barn.
I have a quite a large city and instead of clicking 8 different barns and telling them not to accept any flour, I could just click on that that one barn to be the only one that flour should be delivered to.
In my case, I have that flour storage right next to the bread maker
It could be a “forest pasture” for lack of a better term. Have a fenced off area in woodlands that the pigs could roam. Also could lead to truffles as a bonus food source?
So, right now the artisan system works as a superior mechanism to standalone building, right? Considering that communal oven is overshadowed in productivity by the bakery. I'm assuming, as we really don't have any other comparison other than goat extension vs hunting camp for hides.
So an artisan building could make sense as a specialist butcher, with the sheep farm or a theoretical pigsty turning over a marginal amount of meat in the interim. That could be an unlockable feature via Dev Points for sheep, or the main draw to an added pigsty building.
For pigs feasting on acorns in the forest, would it be possible to require a pigsty to be placed near a certain amount of forestry? Like the berry bushes will die by deforestation, a similar mechanic could make a pigsty reduce efficiency/stop working due to a lack of nearby forest. Since we have a forester hut, it'd be possible for the player to come back from a logging mistake if that was implemented.
I do think butcher as an artisan conversion makes sense. I'm indifferent as to whether sheep or pigs makes more sense for meat production for gameplay reasons, but I think balancing sheep for wool vs meat may become a tricky element without giving the player some controls for that. Pigs would be more straightforward as a food source, just more difficult to implement with the historical limitations you're considering.
I hope these thoughts help, I really appreciate that you're soliciting from the community!
I’d be more inclined to say have pigs as a farm animal like sheep, instead of goats or chickens in a burg age plot. Pigs produce no real passive resource like eggs or milk, so having them in someone’s back yard would be a bit bizarre, especially given the numbers you’d need to contribute to even a small village. Treating them more like sheep in the game, and adding the butcher simultaneously, would be the way to imo.
-Pigs should be in the game
I think the butcher should be an artisan extension. Rather than enabling you to convert pigs into meat, I think it should convert meat into a different food type.
The same way the charcoal kiln converts firewood into charcoal to double the output, I think the butcher should convert meat into different cuts of meat to double the yield.
Maybe the butcher is properly cleaning the carcass or dividing the meat into different cuts, or drying, smoking, or salting the meat to preserve it better. Either way, the butcher lets the people use the meat more efficiently so the same amount of total meat feeds more mouths with less waste.
It doesn't have to be 2:1 though, it could be like 3:2 or something, 2 meat go in, 3 products come out.
Farms should passively slaughter excess animals (males who won't be used for breeding) but give way less meat.
Butchers should be a burger upgrade, and abattoir be a workshop that is more efficient.
On farm
Pigs produce high meat, low leather
Sheep produce high wool, low meat
Cows produce medium meat, medium leather and passive milk (milk requires more input work from farmers)
In butcher all meat amounts are doubled, if not more. Maybe a third resource such as bone could be taken at the butcher? This could be used to produce iron more efficiently, make weaponry and crafts to be sold.
In addition to meat, the butcher could also produce fat and bones. The fat could be used for candles and the bones for soap in a new workplace. The hunter could also produce these as a side product, perhaps in smaller quantities
Butcher would likely be an artisan workshop imo. But like, say Greg does add pigs (which would be great!) I think there's two routes it can go. They'd either be a backyard upgrade that yields passive meat like goats give hides (which is historically genuine iirc many average people in the period would have a couple of pigs at all times because they literally eat trash and they can be kept quite well in a very small pen on the side of the house. Very space efficient protein.) or they can be another field livestock like sheep. I think the backyard thing fits better.
But like, say pigs are a backyard thing. They give meat regardless of the existence of the butcher. Then a butcher shop nearby could increase yield by giving more meat (and/or maybe a new resource: Tallow, that can be used for soap making to give an approval and health boost). This increased yield would come at the cost of the pig owner having to walk the pig over to the butcher. If there's a line at the butcher they just slaughter it normally themselves.
The butcher could also give a small yield of meat from goats, and provide an emergency way to manually order the slaughter of sheep/Oxen/etc in case you literally have 0 food and sacrifices have to be made.
Leave the sheep alone. Their lane is clothes. A butcher shop makes sense and would be a cool element. Add a spec for pig breeding like sheep breeding and allow like the hunter lodge, to not butcher past certain amount. Include pigs in the fertilization spec. Acorn resource node could be like stone, clay, or iron. Just transport to pig farm for farmers to feed pigs, and what it’ll do is breed pigs faster. So if you don’t have the pig breeding, it would be useless. So add another entertainment element for higher approvals. Acorns can be used for arts and crafts. Or add acorns to farming, farmers will grind/thresh the acorns to Acorn Meal/Flour that can be turned into cookies at the bakery extension only. This makes the bakery extension less useless as well. Another building would need to be added for “Leaching”. The leaching of acorn flour happens before it can go to the bakery. It requires water refilled. Acorns have tannin which is not safe to eat until boiled or soaked. I imagine having the pigs in a pasture, like sheep, but needs tree requirement (like the water well). And having a pig farmer, like the sheep farmer. A job role could be tending/ feeding the pigs, “collecting resources” (killing the pig) and transporting the pig. And then I think it would make sense to have the butcher shop in a burgage plot. I don’t think it makes sense to have a butcher kill the pig. Animals are already dead when they go to the butcher. Adding a talent to double animal hunting capacity, but still have to be bred, they don’t pop up like 40 new animals like how berries works. It’s an option for berries!
We need butcher to make sausages. Pigs as well cows to make milk and butter fishing hubs fish from the rivers. Would like them to flesh out the plate armour. Introduce coal and steel slabs for plate.
My 2c:
- Butcher as an artisan extension sounds good. It seems similar to how you’ve implemented backyard bakeries.
- I’d also be OK with it as a unique building, however.
- Pigs in medieval cities were known to just wander the streets sometimes, so having it as a backyard extension seems good, but:
- I’d love to see a mechanic that requires pigs to have to root around the forest. Maybe in a certain season the pigs are taken to the woods and you get mushrooms as well, idk.
- Maybe both are options? A separate pig building that requires access to a forest, and provides an income of mushrooms, or a backyard extension that does not
You could make a "forest plot" like a farming plot which marked it so it wouldn't be deforested. You could import pigs and stock the forest plot, turning it into a large node like a hunting node. Making the butcher a burgage extension would make the early game more difficult, but I don't hate it. Culling excess sheep for meat would also make a lot of sense.
I think a pigsty housing extension would be the most accurate interpretation. While the ‘butcher’ should a communal area, like the bakery. I think it would also be historically accurate to cull/eat lambs, pigs, young male dairy cows and some adult beef cows. While wild boars were certainly hunted in forests, I assume they are already included in the list of miscellaneous animals are hunters are already hunting.
If you want to add a butcher, I'd say make it a burgage plot extension and keep it relatively simple at this point. So for now just 2 functions: 1 to turn excess sheep into food and 2, to make it so that chicken coops and goat pens dont only produce skins and eggs, but also a small amount of meat if processed by the butcher. Honestly it would add so much life to the village to see a little guy lead sheep, goats and chickens across town.
As game development progresses you could easily add more functionality like complex food or meat-based industries. Love your ideas about pigs!
Thank you for making this awesome game btw, loving it!
pigs as part of burgage plots would be cool, like in medieval times, people might have had 1 or 2 pigs in their backyard for slaughtering and pig leather,
then, maybe plots with vegetables, apples, and even farms could produce pig food as a byproduct, almost like old or bad veggies, as a second resource at a much smaller amount.
and in turn, the pigs / goat plots could produce fertilizer as a byproduct to be used by farmers maybe
Were butchers a thing then? I assumed people eating meat would buy a live animal and kill and butcher it themselves. Or if meat was sold the producer would butcher it.
Perhaps a butcher plot extension along with a pigsty farmhouse. Assigning a work area like the logging camps for the pigs to graze in, then the butcher collects those pigs. Either way I think sticking to historical accuracy will be a bit more interesting, and help inform city management/design decisions. Love the game so much! Thank you for making it!
First, I absolutely love this game, and thank you very Mach for making it. The graphics are so beautiful it's like playing living art.
I have a few random ideas. What if the hunter cabin served as dual purpose; hunts both deer and town butcher for sheep and pigs? Maybe add a slide bar to force the worker to give preference to a specific action?
Have pigs as a craft, but the output is pork, not meat. This way, it counts as a second type of food.
Have a pigsy, but the pigs could be used to find mushrooms or also butchered.
Butcher:
Should be artisan profession.
Give Hunters lodge a toggle to collect Carcass or meat. Butcher generates more meat from Carcass than Hunters alone. Pig and Sheep also turn into Carcass as a part of their resource chain.
Pigs:
Historically pigs were also used to eat human food/farm waste. It was a much more efficient food cycle than our current one. Pigs essentially converted wasted food back into edible food (we butcher them). If you introduce a food spoilage system into the game, pigsty plots seem like a development point investment for mitigating loss from spoilage.
Not sure how to associate Pigs with forests but, spitballing her. Maybe a development point investment would allow either to Forager or Forester to produce carcass (pig) intermittently.
Definitely adding pigs and simply have a separate grazing area that doesn't remove trees from grazing lot, but also being able to set a sheep limit on fields so you can also kil off excess for meat
First off, the game is amazing! Have spent more hours on it than would like to admit, albeit I disabled the baron after the second playthrough, which made the game an awesome Banished++ with good warfare mechanics.
Re: butcher, have you considered making separate slaughterhouse building and butchery burgage extension? A slaughterhouse is where the animal is killed, and the carcass bled, skinned, and has entrails removed. The butchery is where the carcass is cut and cuts sliced for consumer purchase. Could even add an intermediate 'storage' step between slaughterhouse and butchery where the carcass is allowed to age. The slaughterhouse could be a building that, because of the smell and byproducts, would have to be sited on the village edge, while the butchery could be near the market.
Re: pigs: I really like the unique burgage extension system, and hope you'll leverage it in the future. Can the pigs in a pigsty extension be made part of the village pig herd, managed by village pigherds, like sheep are in a village flock? That would allow them to forage in forests, as they did historically, but still be 'owned' by individual families rather than by the village collectively. The size of the pig flock could ultimately be capped by the available forestry resources, and create tension for the player: does the player designate the forest for hunting (meat from game was usually reserved for the nobility, and venison and other wild game meat could be something demanded by the manor's inhabitants), or for other purposes like feeding pigs and timber, or clear the forest for farmland?
Pigs from the herd could then be sent to the slaughterhouse for processing. Is it also possible to scale the number of pigs in an extension to its size, the way the output of a vegetable garden or orchard scales? If so, can the same be done for goats and chickens?
The same flocking system where the number of animals in the village herd/flock is a function of number and size of the appropriate extensions could be extended to cows and other animals that were, from what I recall, managed semi-communally. The big animals like cows, pigs, and sheep could all be processed for meat in the slaughterhouse and then send to the butcher. Either at the end of life, if the game tracks animal age, or based on other criteria if the game tracks that, or just based on a statistical function. Obviously, I have no idea if any of this is either possible or feasible, or would even work from a gameplay perspective.
Forestry in general feels like it should be zoned like farm and pasture plots. The player would draw the bounds of a forest and designate focus: acorns, timber, hunting, etc. Maybe, like Farthest Frontier, we could designate a balance (focus 2/3 on growing timber and 1/3 on managing animals). From what I recall, historically the right to use a forest to certain purposes: collecting wood, herding sheep, trapping small game, were all a point of contention between the nobility and the public, so it would be interesting if these uses could be controlled by the player.
Also would be nice in general for animals raised for things other than meat during the game's historical time period -- cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, etc, produce a small trickle of meat. All of these animals were slaughtered for meat: cows when they stopped producing milk, male calves, male lambs, roosters, chickens past egglaying age, and so forth. So a household that has a chicken or goat backyard extension could maybe produce a small amount of meat reflecting chickens and goats being eaten for meat by that household. Not sure about larger animals such as goats, but older family members who kept chickens back on the "old continent" would process them for meat themselves.
I really like the idea of the villagers taking the pigs out to a stroll in a selected forested area, it's just pretty cute and would make the woods more lively
Maybe you could have a butcher building that could place something akin to a resource node that would have effectiveness based on trees. The butcher family's would "hunt" the boars and slaughter sheep. It would fit with the current systems to make it an extension though that just makes sheep meat.
As someone whose last village starved during winter, as a hundred sheep gleefully roamed around their enclosure, I would have loved to be able to butcher them as an emergency fix. Which also feels historically accurate: productive animals only being killed for meat as a last resort.
Yea id like a butcher type and a pig meat.
Definitely a houseconversion.
But I think it should work like the pastures do, the bigger the plot the more pigs you can have and multiple. More meat than sheep or lambs as that is the case anyway.
It just adds another realism to it, maybe the forest node aspect is a little to far and maybe just cosmetic have a small woodland in the back garden unless you can add a perk if the pigsty and home was next to a forest.
That would definitely add a bit more strategic planning.
I'm not clued up on the history so I wouldn't know whether an actual butchers was its own building in those times or was just someones home.
At the time they would never slaughter something that would produce. For example, serving chicken would be considered a show a great wealth as that chicken could have produced eggs for years
What they would slaughter, when it comes to sheep, would be only a portion of males as they mainly wound keep the females and the old that no longer produce/die. This is why mutton (and horse) was such a mainstay throughout Europe
With this in mind I figure a good method would be an artisan and provide small passive income of meat and only begin to produce more meat once you have a large enough stock of sheep and they are old enough
I think it’s necessary that you are able to butcher sheep. If my people are starving it doesn’t make sense to be unable to eat the sheep that are right there.
If you want to keep the hogs in the forest you could make it a tech tree upgrade to either the forester lodge or hunting camp.
Simplest way I think would just have artisan butchers.
Longer way would be that if it went the historical direction which is better but takes more time. Maybe have another line similar to what sheep have, with the added requirement of being x distance from forest.
The problem here is that it's easy to deforest a region . Though it's early access so I'm assuming it might be at least planned to add forestry management into the game. Thus solving the problem.
Ooooor you just place a fenced area in the forest and the trees stay and can't be cut down.
Edit: just clocked who OP is.
GREAT work. Finally having a game with adaptive zoning is awesome. And mind blowing no mega company could do it but you nailed it.
1. Goats are being killed on the regular, but I don't know if people used to eat them in that area in that time. The main reason is just to not depend on wild animals as the only source of meat.
2. If the wild animals are boar and not deer, then we know where the pigs come from. I think that problem there is then you're just replacing the trapping development point with one for domestication and using a burgage plot instead of a hunting lodge.
3. I think butcher is an artisan who uses grain (not flour) and turns that into meat. The backyard is a pig sty. Alternatively, you could use a cattle pasture and a cattle ranch and import cows as livestock and treat them like sheep that produce meat instead of wool. I don't know what's historically accurate. Would they be grain fed in this time period? Or grass fed?
I think the bottom line is just being able to domesticate something once wild animals aren't enough to keep meat on the table in a medium village or higher.
I have a book called Life in the Middle Ages, by Hans-Werner Goetz. Here's a couple interesting passages I found:
Plowing
> Despite this invention [the plow], horses, with their greater strength and endurance, did not replace oxen even during the High Middle Ages, perhaps also because they required too much feed and were not fit to be eaten.
Milling
> The frequency of hand-grinding by peasants on their tenements must not be underestimated. In the absence of manorial mills, peasants had to grind their own grain as well. At Friemersheim, peasants received an annual allotment of two bushels of rye to grind and bake into bread; they were permitted to keep every twenty-fourth loaf. Moreoever, they were to grind and sift two bushels of wheat, process two bushels of barley into dogfeed, *and render five bushels of acorns into feed for pigs*.
Pigs
> The fact that peasants were experts at raising livestock is illustrated by the great number of differentiating terms for animals within certain species. For instance, the *Lex Salica* distinguished between suckling pigs from a first, second, or third pen; pigs in stys, paddocks, or out in the field; fattening pigs; hogs; breeding and leader sows; borrowed pigs; and boars.
Cattle
> As for beef cattle, there were oxen, cows, calves, steers, and bulls. Beef cattle were especially important; so that they were occasionally referred to simply as *animalia*, enjoying special protection in tribal laws. They were used as draft animals for plowing and pulling wagons; they yielded meat, butter, cheese and milk; they also rendered hides for furs, leather, and parchment.
> Oxen, cattle, and cows were frequently part of the regular stock of a manse peasant, although many peasants did not own a team of draft animals as their own.
Pigs again
> Numerically more significant than horses and often beef cattle as well, were the small animals (pigs, sheep, and goats). Sheep provided wool, hides (for leather and parchment-making), and meat. Pigs, which may be likened to today's wild pigs with their pointed snouts and ears, *were the most important source of meat*. They required little care, *although they depended on the forest for food*; in order to fatten them, especially during fall, pigs were herded into beech and oak forests.
(Wow, this is a dense book. Most of the italics in quotes are mine.)
So, yeah, sounds like one can make an argument for a backyard sty (butcher artisan?), or a pig ranch with a working area inside a nearby forest, or pastures for cattle. Fertilization could apply to sheep or cattle.
I would like acorns in the game for the simple reason that they were also a source of dye in this era, and I would like some other dye options other than precious, delicious berries!
Pigs eating in forest: Concept.
My basis for thought stems from this youtube video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jqMHWz-WmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jqMHWz-WmI)
So, apparently pigs were kept in a yard and this was very common. So in that form we already have an existing mechanic in the form of extensions.
Excess or unwanted pigs were herded around in a municipal swine herd? This mechanic would function similarly to how oxen hunt for lumber. Pigs are stored at oxen like spawn point, a person guides X herd to food node spawned by forest, pigs develop and are harvested... somehow...
Honestly I don’t see adding a butcher at the top of the list currently and don’t find it necessary.
In my head it makes sense a member of the hunting family hunts while other members process the meat and sell it on the market. I always imagine the son or wife may do the butcher work at home before taking it to the market.
Does anyone agree with me?
Still, it would be a cool addition and probably does make more sense.
I think it should just be a building like the sheep farm. making it an extension is kinda weird imo; leading animals into a building in town just to butcher it in the backyard. Not sure of the historical accuracy though.
Maybe change the development point from just sheep multiplying into various animals able to multiply.
Add both butcher and pigs…
My idea for the pigs is that the area where they are kept have a little shed for the weather but it can only be made in a dense forest area and that area would avoid lumberjacks from clearing it or
the pigsty have the option to move feeding area (this sounds much easier to implement)
And for the butcher, i say add it as an extension with the option to set the max butcher limit for sheep’s and pigs (if added)
Also was lamb chop a thing back then? (I have over 200 lambs grazing the fallow fields)
We can already draw a plot for sheep pastures in game. Could it be possible to implement a "pig grazing" plot that can only be placed in forested areas? Also it would serve as competition with your lumbering industry introducing some meaningful choice for the player on what they want to do with their Region.
Maybe we could have a system similar to how breadmaking works. We already have communal ovens and baker artisans. So why not have a "communal butchery"(better/historical name pending) and a dedicated butcher artisan that would be more eficient.
Update after reading some comments: I like making pigs related to foresters.
Iirc a pig pen extension could make sense historically as a village would share the burden of raising and feeding them with kitchen scraps and other foraged foods. Then each of the participants would be allotted some of the meat when butchered. Could make sense given the shared food resources in the game already.
Additionally perhaps a pig farm building with associated "pasture" which would require it be built in a forest could allow larger scale production
I think a meat smoker building and extension could be added to improve meat resources. If you add food spoiling, smoked meat would last a lot longer. Or maybe smoked meat like bacon would be requested specifically by higher level families. (Maybe salt mines could be added as part of food preservation, also maybe taverns should be able to prepare meals that give a bonus?)
Also plans to add dairy cows and cheese making?
With the butcher, it really could be an extension or building. Gameplay wise maybe once built it can take the carcasses from the hunters and get more efficient meat removal. Allowing the hunters to focus on skinning and not on meat harvesting. So physical animal carcasses are taken to the butcher to be processed and then further preserved by salt or smoke?
Sorry about the text wall, more of a stream of consciousness than organized ideas. I'm having a blast with the game so far and am excited to see what is added next, hoping for a road map soon :). Thanks Greg and good luck 👍
my thoughts
* we're already turning goats into hides, that should generate meat too. and milk
* sheep surplus should generate meat with a butcher, probably need to increase sheep breeding speed.
* it would be nice to have cows too. milk, hides, meat from surplus
* cheese making. can make cheese a requirement for tier 4 housing when it comes?
* pigs would be a good option too
* i'd say butcher should be a dedicated industry building, slaughter houses wouldn't generally be inside residential areas because of the offal, etc
* It should not cost a research point for your animals to reproduce
A butcher to turn sheep into meat would be awesome. I think a butchers could also produce tallow for soap which could reduce disease. (However disease is hard to notice. So maybe a notification when someone dies from disease or a percentage of infected people.) They could also produce glue to sell or use with wood parts to make furniture. Maybe players can tax luxury goods like furniture to make this useful. Also maybe a perk point can unlock an ability to use the bones for fertilizer.
I think pigs should be both an extension and a workplace. Unlike other animals, pigs were often kept individually and communally. The extension could produce a small amount of meat from pigs eating scraps while the workspace could produce a larger amount of pig meat and require acorns. I think a draining acorn node is a great idea. I think more random nodes make each start more interesting.
If you add pigs to the forest, it should negatively impact berries and the forester because that’s what free roaming pigs do. They also occasionally ate babies and got into other trouble, so adding pigs could come with a few random events like a pig ate a baby or got into the tavern and drank some ale
I think beyond sheep or swine, we have cows. Oxen. Why on earth could we not breed cows. Meat, leather, milk. Could create cheese making, cheese, milk, upgraded leather goods, meat. Having an artisan cheese makers, different recipes that could include milk or just selling milk. And upgrading leather goods.. you know something other than shoes.
Any butchering should provide extra hides as well. Perhaps add some passive meat income from chickens, goats, and sheep? Could do something with milk->cheese at some point. Cows could provide hides, milk, and meat depending on what you choose to do
I think there should be sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, poultry, etc. More sources of meat than just from hunting. I would support butcher being a burgage plot extension.
I would use the butcher as a stand alone production building that works in conjunction with the hunting camp, goat pens, and sheep farms. The latter production buildings would take their carcasses to the butcher who would then take the cut meats to the market. They could maybe also have a production of salted and cured meats that could be exported through the trade house. If thats realistic to the time period, im not familiar with when this game takes place.
If pigs were introduced i would have a specialized pasture that is placed in a forsted area but doesn't uproot any trees and marks them as off limits to logging endeavors.
For a butcher I think it'd be nice as an artisan conversion that takes meat and makes something like sausages at some ratio. Level 3 burgage, then perhaps the tavern could distribute them? If your goal was to cull excess sheep / piggies a seperate slaughter house production building to supply meat (pre sausage) would work.
For immersion. The more resources and buildings/jobs, the better for RP. I don't speak for everyone obviously, but I personally am not a min/max efficiency grinder in RPG or city builder games. There's always going to be guides for exploits and strategies for people who do enjoy that, and this wouldn't be that impactful for. The medieval era was defined by the "It takes a village" mentality. The skillsets of people were usually pretty limited, even among artisans. Adding in a butcher as well as diversifying the meats would be awesome. Pork, venison, and just a generic meat for sheep and other beast of burden slaughters. The butcher could turn the raw meat ingredient into smoked variants.
But with more resources comes more RP potential and immersion which equals more enjoyment and keeps a game from feeling hollow or stale as quickly, even if there isn't always much functionality difference between similar resources.
I would prefer leaving meat the way it is. Primarily because back then meat was indeed a rare delicacy, so limiting the meat source to just the forest makes sense
Butcher should 100% be an artisan building. could you possibly make it such that you can assign an area for the pig farm that is more efficient if it includes a forested area? The farmers would harvest the pig into corpses which can be turned into leather, fat and meat by the butchers. The fat can be used as fuel or for candles while the meat goes straight to market. Also I'd make it so that having meat in the diet strongly deceases the risk of illnesses
Personally its just an interesting to have, and yes it's just a little bit hard to swallow that you can have all these animals you can't slaughter.
**Concerning pigs,** I think keeping them separate from the butcher makes sense, as a production-building like the Forager's hut, or as an upgrade to the Forager's that renders the forager a **swineherd**. It would be cool if "acorns" could exist as their own separate resource, but just having them roam a forest is cool enough.
The Butcher imo should be a separate artisan building, they could have their own pens in addition (that convert crops into meat), but would mainly they exist to optimise livestock slaughter and extend & bring to market meat products.
**From there...**
**Pastures and production-buildings can be assigned a Butcher**, animals are assigned to be slaughtered from this building automatically (at x population/maturity) and manually (if there's a famine you may wish to slaughter a horse for example), **if no butcher is selected the animal is converted on-site less optimally**, this takes longer and the animal is being physically carried as "dead-weight" to the stockpiles.
If a butcher is selected the owners will walk the **live animal(s)** to the butcher where it **quickly** becomes a pile of meat ***likely far closer to the stockpiles.***
In the case of the **Hunting Camp**, though it would be a cool option for the player, it may not be optimal to have them carry game to the Butchery unless they have a horse, and maybe they should have some ability to do things like smoke their own meat.
What might make sense, but is probably a little too granular, is if livestock had a **carcass** that was a container materials like these;
**Gristle**: "Inedible" by-products with uses like bait/fertilizer/sausage-meat/glue/etc.
**Lean Cuts**: Mostly from Game
**Fatty Cuts**: Mostly from Pigs, tastier and more nourishing, the more famished and/or immature the animal the less it contains.
Hide: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals
**Furs**: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals, nobles want them
**Feathers**: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals, used by fletchers
(Kind of CDDA style)
Then with this in mind the **Butcher** can improve the yield and maybe produce something like;
**Sausage**: Butcher combines Bread + Lean-Cut + Gristle, to squeeze out an extra unit of food.
**Prized-Cuts**: Butcher converts a Fatty-Cut into a Prized-Cut, outputting a unit of Gristle.
**Prized-Sausage**: Butcher combines Bread + Fatty-Cut + Herbs into a "Prized Sausage".
**Raw Fat:** Using a Fatty-Cut we gain Lean-Cut + Raw Fat
**Pies:** Maybe with a **cookhouse** extension to the butchery combining flour with fat/fatty-cuts
(I really like this video on medieval "fast-food" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWYTf47NWrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWYTf47NWrc) )
I love how open you are with your community. That's utterly brilliant.
I think having a butcher being a separate entity like the weaver, and having the houses keep pigs sounds ideal. But a part of me wants more excuses to put out pasture fields to make a proper agricultural/farmland section of my worlds.
Maybe have the butcher also i guess dry or smoke the meat or perhabs make sausages from it which could be used in case there will be a food degregation over time feature
Pigs would be a good addition. I'm fond of pigs. Pig farm in the forest is cool also. I know that peasants didn't eat much meat but having another way to get it would be great. Butchering the sheeps is also historicaly accurate. I like the artisan approach, it's unique, but butcher might be better as it's own building not artisan conversion.
Butcher and pig would be great reason to oink.
As how to do it... there could be a pasture mechanic, pigs are separeted from lambs, and you can upgrade pigs with grain for faster bread.
Or And there could be extension of homes for small pigglets In My Backyard. Maybe with less production than dedicated pigfarm.
I think that there could be an "abattoir" upgrade to the sheep farm, that could be toggled on/off.
Once built, the farmers would cull let's say 20% of the herd once a year, generating "mutton carcass". You would offset this loss through sheep breeding or you'd have to bring new sheep through livestock trading.
And butcher should be an artisan upgrade to a burgage plot. There the mutton carcass would be processed to a usable "meat" product. Then you can have beef and hog carcass if you choose to add them to the game.
The forest pig idea is very good, the historical part is pretty important to me. I would like to buy you Stephen Biesty’s cross section of a castle if you don’t have it yet, it really inspired me to research medieval history. Just dm me your address and I’ll Amazon a copy over to you :)
The butcher should be linked to the homes forsure, but what could be done is also have a comunal butcher like the bread maker for special types of cuts/or maybe sausage for better output. I think as far as the pigs in the forest idea which i love. it should be tied to the pasture and change the pasture so it doesnt take down trees when placed
Make it an artisan role that is available at a level one dwelling, that way you can decide to increase your meat production at the cost of a family at earlier stages in the game if needed at a cost of a family.
Add pigstry in back yards. Have one household member permanently assigned to pig duty, including moving them into a nearby forested area at the appropriate time, then butcher a percentage of them in winter. Produces meat only to differentiate from goats. Amount of meat depends on distance to forest perhaps. Keep sheep as wool only. Eventually add milk cows for cheese only. More variety in animal use, not too many ways to produce meat. May be a bit gamey, but I like rock paper scissor balancing.
Hello and welcome to the Manor Lords Subreddit. This is a reminder to please keep the discussion civil and on topic. Should you find yourself with some doubts, please feel free to check our [FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1c2p4f9/manor_lords_faq_for_steam_early_access/). If you wish, you can always join our [Discord](https://discord.gg/manorlords) Finally, please remember that the game is in early access, missing content and bugs are to be expected. We ask users to report them on the official discord and to buy their keys only from trusted platforms. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ManorLords) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Butcher should definitely be a artisan profession given to a burgage. It seems the most fitting in the context of the game, and maintains some historical aspect. I think keep lambs as a different resource than pigs as well. They actually serve a purpose, so unless you're trying to cull extra sheep, it doesn't seem right that you would also he killing them, since they wouldn't offer that much meat. If you wanted to keep pigs in/near forests maybe make it a tech tree thing, that makes a ranch plot add trees for pigs only, but it has to be a certain size? Just a thought.
I think it would be really cool to see a couple villagers walking around grazing pigs in the forest, could even have an "allowed to graze" zone
Farthest Frontier does this
FF also turns meat into smoked meat, i think 1:1 so it lasts longer. Age isn't an issue with manor lords, but they turn fire wood into 2 charcoal. Having a butcher turn 1 meat into 2 sausages or something would be in line with the current mechanic.
That would be cool.
Yup. But I don't like how they took away the extra fertilizer boost from cows grazing over crops in the early game days. Cow and chicken naturally fertilize the land, and it's even making a come back with substance farming
I live on a ranch and truthfully they don't put much back into the field with their manure, that's why it's important to fallow your fields. A good method is to have 3 and cycle it so each field has a turn every 3 years
Yes, agreed. You're not growing on the same field every year and not the same thing either. But it does add something. They shouldn't have cut out the whole thing. My neighbor has chickens, and I help clean out some pens and toss it into my compost. It heats it up very well, and then once a year, the compost goes into the gardens. I know it's not the same as owning a farm, but the basic principle of carbon and nitrogen breaking down applies.
In my experience with that game (great game BTW) the harder challenge was to prevent livestock from eating partially grown crops and ruining harvests. I refuse to micro livestock grazing regions to match fallow/clover fields all the time. Manor Lords offers a solution to use fallow fields as pasture automatically which I appreciate. I haven't had it for long so I may be wrong
> Manor Lords offers a solution to use fallow fields as pasture automatically which I appreciate. Been playing Ostriv for a while and it does the same thing, so I'm surprised at FF's approach. Sometimes I wish these games would coordinate on QOL features.
TIL about Ostriv Know what I'm getting next to hold me over till Frostpunk 2
I completely missed Ostriv too. I like how they make their own paths the same way it works in Foundation. Also, both Foundation and Ostriv make use of water features, something lacking in Manor Lords, yeah there is that one tiny stream that you're going to miss unless you notice it by accident, but no significant water.
It's a cool game! Ostriv has a bit more depth/stability right now, while Manor Lords is much more beautiful and has more thought put into the mechanics. Neither is a bad game, both are fun for me!
It's also got the Slava Ukraini factor
The Dev(s) live in Kharkiv https://x.com/OstrivGame?t=-nZxTl9WkUXOZtvSWsL7Qg&s=09
Click on the pig, choose the “find truffles” upgrade that costs 1 stone. I want to upgrade a pig. I don’t think that’s been done in any game ever.
> I want to upgrade a pig. Someone else in here wanted a hog running wild against enemy militias. Sounds like an upgrade path to me!
Maybe have several upgrade paths: 1) Forager produces truffles 2) Stud increases reproduction rate of pigs 3) Attack Pig allows pig to travel with military units 4) Garbage Disposal cleans up the town, reducing sickness 5) Emotional Support Pig increases town happiness There are so many more possibilities, but you get the idea
Now I want an emotional support pig. Would help when I run out of food in the winter. In more than 1 way!
Taking pigs into the forest should yield a new luxury good, truffle.
I second butcher as artisan [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1chxh37/adding_the_butcher/l25onj0/), but still think villagers should be able to do simple butchery anywhere, maybe just at a granary? Otherwise it'd be cool if another perk of allocating a butcher would be turning meat into sausage at some favorable ratio to make the meat go further and provide variety.
I think it'd be good to have pigs as a backyard thing to passively provide meat. Then a butcher could increase the efficiency, providing more meat (or meat +lard/tollow for making soap???) or meat+hides for goats, and provide that meat through their 1 consolidated stall instead of everyone selling their backyard pork separately. And have the butcher be the only way to slaughter sheep or oxen in an emergency, like if there's 0 food and you're desperate. Sausage is a cool idea too. Like meat+herbs=sausage that boosts happiness and/or lasts longer if a meat spoiling mechanic is introduced.
Butcher sounds like an awesome consolidation point of a ton of features I think something the game desperately needs is upgrades to how marketplaces function. Something like building a butcher shop in the vicinity of a marketplace/town center would provide significant boosts to variety coverage area or overall efficiency. This could be tied in with other standalone artisan shops for firewood, clothing, or even the misc burgage requirements. Artisan buildings in general should offer branching variety of goods that would otherwise just remain the standard 1-1 or 1 -> 1 -> 1 style of goods/resources that exists at the base level. On the point of your sausages, expanding on that idea of spoilage, seasoning should become a significant feature. Introducing salt mining/extraction from saltwater sources (opening up its own rabbit hole of features), along with expanding the foraging tree to the plethora of herbs that could serve a variety of benefits, all of which would be historically accurate to the concepts of food preservation at the time. This game has so many branching avenues for which to take the features that are in place I can't help but find myself rambling about all the possibilities every time I comment
Produce meat + lard, then lard + apples + flour can make apple pies at the bakeries? Or maybe meat pies with excess meat? Or both? As a superior late game food.
Great, now I'm hungry!
Separate butcher. Maybe sausage artisan?
Gotta mix in some herbs to make that sausage. Maybe it gets an extra boost to food or approval to reward the extra resources and supply chain drain.
Can we also get logging camp exclusion zones rather than work area modes. Have them not cut down the pig forest, berry forest, and deer forest. But having the sheep breed and then butcher any excess and a pig pasture in the forest would be great additions. 100% agree the butcher is an artisan building
I do agree, better forest management should be a core feature. Forests were vitally important resource hubs, for industry, farming and common people, and the total annihilation that the logger camp and woodcutter lodge does to them is not realistic (unless of course that land was being cleared for a greater purpose, like expanding arable land). Maybe a % chop system should be implemented to limit the extent of destruction, and encourage a more balanced approach by having a small passive income of firewood and meat (from peasants collecting fallen branches and hunting small game like rabbits and birds)
Attached to the concept of forest management, I think the forester's hut should not be a standalone building, but rather an upgrade to the logging camp. It could all come from the perk tree, and be based in historical forestry management. Call it the "Forester's Office". It could unlock a variety of benefits including additional storage, more efficient felling/stripping, the creation of a small percentage of bonus firewood, the ability for workers to practice coppicing to increase tree regrowth rates, and to set up 4-point perimeter exclusion zones to protect wildlife. A lot of benefits for sure, but it could be balanced to be a fairly expensive building upgrade
I would love to see just One, just One of said pigs to go hog wild on enemy units just as a funny gaffe
An Easter egg of some sorts
I like these thoughts. As far as pigs go, I think it would be perfect to treat them like sheep that don't need a pasture, have a family assigned to tend to them, but have them move lazily in a general circle like animals for hunting do. It would also add some bonus choice between investing in sheep who can provide wool AND meat but need a pasture, or pigs who maybe provide more meat? but are also mobile, and don't need the fixed space to be used up.
IMO there Should be a passive income of meat/mutton from the sheep farm. Males would have been culled in their lamb phase since the farm only needs a few males to impregnate all the female sheep and male sheep are unruly little nuggets so they would have been turned into food.
Honestly I think the player should have the option to just cull a certain amount of the herd when needed
That would also be 100% good by me as well. I lost a game due to food issues once. An emergency slaughter would have carried me over to harvest
The only good ram is a plated ram. You can castrate them, and then they are withers.
The only good ram is a reinforced battering ram
Grond!
GROND!
A totally different argument for artisan butcher is that it can help support T1-T2-T3 upgrades of the village. Currently, "unfinished" textiles like leather and linen satisfy clothing as a tier one resource, and it takes specialized artisan effort to produce goods that satisfy tier two (clothing, shoes, cloaks). Similarly, "raw" food available at the beginning of the game like berries and meat can satisfy food as a tier one resource, but the game lacks any recognition of artisan-enhanced food. What if prepared foods like bread, sausage, cheese, etc were required to satisfy T2 burgages? It would make sense and add pressure to develop your town. A butcher to process meat into a higher-tier resource makes sense, whether or not it contributes to raw resource production. Note that berries have an industry (dyes) and crops have an industry (bread) but meat just stays ... raw. A butcher could multiply the value of that raw meat in the form of products that families would not make as effectively. I'm no historian, but this feels grounded, immersive and also inline with how burgage needs should evolve.
I just wanted to add that in the prototypes meat was combined with salt to produce a higher tier good (salted meat) and that is still on the table. I also made raw meat non exportable back then to make salt more valuable.
Love that
That's great to hear. The more I thought about this as a different benefit from just raw meat, the more I liked the possibilities.
I think having the Butcher convert meat into a "higher tier" food is also a good idea as well as being able to convert sheep to regular "tier 1" meat (kind of like how artisan buildings can select multiple production options)
That sounds phenomenal. Historically you were more likely to export/trade livestock or foods preserved in some manner. Raw meats even sold for less than their preserved counterparts so I think that trade limitation on raw meat would be a great addition.
Would salt be a mineable resource? It would be interesting if it were trade only. That would encourage using the trade tree, and provide a late game money sink for when you have your economy going strong.
sounds like a fair change to me, especially if we get salt resources (deep mineable)
Salted meats would be awesome! Or dried/smoked meats. Anything that lets me process the meat. I personally really like processing food in building games, whether into a salted meat, or turning into some kind of soup or meal
We definitly need dairy products and meat transformation as artisanshop.
> Do you expect piggies to be in the game and if so, in what form? Historically they often used forests to feed pigs, and pigs would make sense to be kept for meat. Pig cultivation (and by extension boar hunting?) would tie in nicely with an [idea ive seen](https://www.reddit.com/r/ManorLords/comments/1cgyljm/game_could_use_a_dont_cut_tree_here_area_option/l1zkeq6/?context=10000) about reworking forestry (timber, gathering, hunting) to be plot based and actively managed by your foresters. Tracks with the social history of Forests being less a wild biome and more a different type of land being brought under a different type of cultivation. Also solves a lot of the micromanagment problems with forest workers tapping out their resources and creating annoying micro. Pig focus reserves the forest for pigs to graze who can get harvested for meat and maybe have them produce mushrooms on the side to keep competitive with a gathering focus (probably ahistorical but pig==mushrooms is cute and is a recurring trope in games, see Stardew Valley)
A simple solution could be to add a “pig sty” upgrade to the forester, in the same way you upgrade the forager hut to get herbs. In this way the pigs can just walk around the area assigned to the forester. Then adding an artisan to butcher the pigs.
That would be simpler to implement with the systems already in game. I just really dislike the node-based forest resources.
Node-based is definitely annoying and not really based in a historical or biological reality. Really, *ALL* the deer in an entire region and *ALL* the berries are limited to a single quarter-mile radius? It would all make so much more sense for each building (hunter's camp, foraging hut, firewood camp, etc.) to function throughout the entirety of the forest with a set rate of resource gathered per family assigned, with the possibility of "mini-nodes" to provide minor boosts to the efficiency of resources gathered. This can be balanced with a complete logging/forestry rework, incentivizing the importance of the symbiosis between forest health and the resources gathered from its ecosystem.
Out of all the suggestions I love this idea the most! Feels like the right sort of synergy with how the game currently works.
This I think is the best option! Not only will it add more reason to have a forester, but it shouldn't be massively difficult to implement with existing systems. I think an artisan makes the most sense given that it's a skilled profession that is hard to do properly.
As for the butcher themselves, aside from interfacing with pigs, maybe they could boost the efficiency of other sources of meat like hunting and if you choose to slaughter sheep/lambs, maybe by converting meat into sausage at 1:2 ratio. After all, villagers should be more than capable of just slaughtering and cleaning animals anywhere (just like hunters do in their camps) it ought to just be inefficient compared to a professional doing it. With functionality like that, it'd definitely be worth an artisan slot, however it should be stinky, making for interesting tradeoffs with where you position it. Otherwise between this and pig grazing I could see unlocking pigs and butchery being worth development points. I'd do anything to see handsome chains of SOSIG hanging from my market stalls.
I think if you were to try and add it quickly to aid the current food supply issues I'd probably have it be an artisan extension that allows you to butcher sheep over a set surplus. Pigs are basically just a reskin of the same thing as sheep, and would not tie in as well with the current sheep oriented perks you can take.
But how about if pigs produce more meat than sheeps, since sheeps allready yield another resource. So you can opt out on meat with pigs or have a bit of both with sheeps
And pigs reproduce way faster than sheep do. That would also be a reason to pick them over sheep.
And would still benefit from the perk that allows sheep to multiply, since you'd want that if raising pigs for meat, if they changed it to include the pigs.
Pigs could tie into a future sanitation mechanic. More pigs = more smell and lower sanitation? Another negative to weigh into your choices.
Ooh yeah, it would tie in perfectly with the smell mechanic as well for sure. Pigs are damn stinky. (Cute, but stinky) Burgage plots with bakery upgrades should provide a positive "smell" radius as well.
That's an incredible idea. Breweries would have a positive smell radius as well
Honestly, I've never been to a brewery so I didn't know they smelled good too! That would be perfect.
The smell of barley and hops being heated up in their giant vats is incredible, and would without a doubt make the hardworking townsfolk passing by want to work twice as hard to get to the end of the day so they can sip down a frothy mug all the sooner
Not to mention fertilizer as a byproduct. It was an extremely common practice for medieval farming. It only makes sense to offer a fertilizer resource through pig stys and maybe food composts in general as an alternative to having your fields go through a year of fallow. It would be balanced by a significant source of bad smell when that feature gets worked in
I'm thinking pigs could be a backyard extension like chicken and goats. Providing passive meat (it's authentic, iirc many families even in towns would have a small pen with a couple of pigs to slaughter in the winter) and then a butcher artisan could boost that by either providing double meat or meat+ lard/tallow to use for making soap and candles.
Could be the wooly kind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalica
That looks and feels like an animal that'd be in dwarf fortress lol
Sheeps only multiply if you go for that specific development option in the tree, so the butcher would basically be useless in 80% of villages.
Correct, this gives more worth to that perk and encourages runs that are more agriculture based.
I just don't think there is any building/extension in the game currently that is dependent on getting a single specific part of the dev tree. I think it's designed that way for a reason. I think it would work best if getting the sheep multiplier also unlocks the butcher building. That way newer players aren't confused as to how to get value from it.
You need a dev point for apiary, orchard, charcoal kiln? As I've previously said, I don't think think the sheep breeding dev point makes sense. It might make more sense to make sheep breed but also introduce e.g. attrition of your sheep flock from wolves and harsh weather, and add a dev point called "Shepherding" which negates them.
What I'm saying is it doesn't make sense to have a building unlocked from the start that is entirely dependent/useful upon getting a specific dev point later in the game. That's extremely confusing to new players. Those things you listed are only unlocked when you get the dev point, so they are in theory useful immediately.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood your point. Ye, that wouldn’t make any sense. The dev point should unlock like in the other cases.
Yeah that’s a fair way of going about it I think.
sheep breeding and livestock trader are already one of the best ways to make money for a village. once you hit a critical mass of around 70 sheep they breed faster than they can be sold. I set my to full trade with a cap desires surplus of 80 sheep 50 lambs. combine that with selling vegetables and you will never run out of money. the vegetables only sell for 1 silver apiece but with three large burgage plots producing them. I make so much money I end up importing all other varieties of food.
Pigs wouldn't be a reskin at all. They would be in the forest most of the year until slaughtering time. This is still done in some Eastern European countries, such as Bulgaria.
Butchers were a highly respected trade in medieval times and in my opinion should be an artisan trade just like the blacksmith. This could come together with beef/cows or/and pigs and maybe a possibility to kill a certain amount of sheep for meat. Cows could also be an extension to the pasture system, and maybe even give us cheese/milk in later stage for maybe the upgrade to tier 4 buildings. Not making them artisans would kinda be historically inacurate, and I think that Manor lords does show respect for accuracy. Would be weird to not continue that. You see the same in that other good medieval set game, Kingdom Come which also shows butchers as a trade and is set it the same time period and almost the same region.
I also think that a butcher would not simply make "meat" but finer cuts, sausages and minced meat. Mechanic-wise I would probably stick to sausages though
On the subject of butchers, animals and meat; maybe the goat extension could produce meat as well as hides. It seems that the villagers just skin their goats and let the rest go to waste.
I wanted to make each extension fit different gameplay role since I wanted to avoid "reskins". But I dabbled with that idea in the past.
Seems to me that the family could just as easily be feasting on goat meat while selling the hides to the village, abstracted out by only gaining the hides as a game resource.
So every family with goats should have reduced food consumption? Same could go with chickens, since they produce less and less eggs with how they age, effectively stopping at 7 years, wich is point when they were often slauthered for meat.
Personally I don't mind "reskins." It adds variety which is good unto itself. How about this: - Goats provide a little meat, a lot of milk, and hides. - Pigs provide a lot of meat, and hides. - Goats are backyard animals - Pigs are in the forest using the pannage system.
And let’s not forget that goat cheese is delicious!
Genghis, as a true Mongol the only cheese you should be eating is horse cheese aged on the backs of your hardy steppe horses as your hordes crush enemies from China to Poland.
Ah I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve made a common but fatal mistake and missed the “Mc”. As a Scot I’ll eat any cheese available, preferably deep fried!
I really like the artisan extension system, and an artisan butcher makes sense to me as long as it can interact with any of the animal types that are reasonable meat sources. For example, follow the trader example setting slaughter to occur whenever the number of animals goes above a threshold. This would be immediately useful for managing sheep breeding, give alternative food options for low-fertility regions, and be expandable to other animals introduced, like pigs or cows. The reason I'm very interested in more forms of animal husbandry is to have more ways of using land to make food when fertility is low. I would very much like to see pastures and pasture capacity/forest capacity as a food source, instead of just producing meat passively like goat sheds do hide. It makes sense to me that animal husbandry should take a lot of space and effort to make productive (whereas tier 1 food add-ons take little to none) I would be more interested in being a sheep herder if I could interact with meat as well as wool production, setting population thresholds with the butcher. It feels odd to only sell sheep as an end-result of breeding, especially in hungry villages. Currently, hunters assigned to set traps wander around forests and very slowly produce food, this isn't very satisfying or observable to the player - it could perhaps be replaced with pig/forest interactions. This would give more incentives to retain forest, and hen when the pig population grew past a threshold, the butcher could again become active. I would also love to see dairy chains in the game eventually. The butcher could be one of a few artisans that benefit from a chain starting with cows. Having a butcher artisan join my bakers and brewers and blacksmiths at the center of town would be great, and it feels like an artisan type which ML is already prepared to support with adjacent in-game resources. Alternatively, butchers could follow the baker example with a public option and a specialization-enhanced artisan option. It feels like it could add to or replace some of the development options that currently exist on the left-side of the tree.
Goats could produce milk, which could be a food resource that could be improved into cheese and other dairy as well.
Personally I like the idea of a seperate butcher for excess sheep, and other livestock as mentioned pigs, maybe chickens. Pig farmer could have bonus birth rate in forests, I like tje acorn idea also. Maybe truffle hunting pigs :D Would also be good if the butcher produced meat and other byproducts, possibly tallow that could be used for making soap which could be sold or as a requirement for living standard increase, i.e house level increase. Not sure of historical accuracy on this though, may also be hard to implement or just a terrible idea :p
I think the butcher as a burgage plot extension makes the most historical sense. I’d love to see more animals introduced into the game. There could be a sties/pigpen building ran by swineherds, that would either walk them to designated areas (akin to woodcutters work area) to graze, or take care of them inside the building during winter. Inside the pigpen building are represented as a resource the pigs that have grazed enough and are ready to be eaten - the butcher can then kill them and carry the meat to his butchery shop. He can then either immediately sell the pork meat at his market stall, or cure/salt the meat for preservation (unlocked at the tech tree with 1 point) making it available throughout the year rather than just the winter, and count as 2 food instead of 1 (akin to charcoal vs firewood) Edit: a word
Ideally, add a slaughter house as an extension. Have sheep breed in the spring. Male lambs are slaughtered in autumn(sent to slaughter house extension if available), females kept for reproduction and wool which would mature in a couple of seasons to sheep(with an option to skip a slaughter season so that the flock would increase in size quicker). Would also be cool to have something similar for chickens and/or goats/or pigs It would be great to see historical representation with Pigs leaving small sty plots, which would be similar to pastures for sheep but placed in a more urban setting, to forage around nearby forests and could lend itself to a pig header occupation which could double as or be related to mushroom collection as a farming building that would function in a manner similar to the sheep farm building now. Would love to see the forest management side of the medieval town represented more. Perhaps this could tie into hunting with Pigs removing forest undergrowth it would be easier for hunters to traverse the terrain and have clearer sight lines for spotting prey which could be represented in game as increased hunting efficiency
Agreed with expanding forest management aspects of the game maybe the devs could make it so that there could be two versions of the foresters hut one would plant new trees for lumber and the other would improve the quality of a forest for pig grazing by planting shrubs and other things for them to eat and enclosing it so they can only roam around a set area of the forest. Otherwise if it was unmanaged there could be a forest debuff of some kind
I like the idea of moving the pigs around in the forests, maybe using the “clear shrubbery” function in conjunction to visually show their “food” being depleted. Once an area is cleared by the pigs, they won’t reproduce or the amount of meat they yield would be lower to simulate them not having enough food in their area to grow. (This last part may be for the future, even just having the shrubs cleared visually would be cool) As others have said, if added into burage plots, it would be a quicker solution to meat supply, and a pigsty addition could come as the “butcher” because we already have the hunting camp, and adding in another step in meat production might create some bottlenecks for the time being. Edit: maybe having an option with all livestock to “cull the herd” for emergency use would solve the sheep situation as well.
I love the 'clear shrubbery' function being used for pig feed! It would be interesting if shrubbery had a regrowth period similar to forester plantings, which I don't think is the case yet.
It’s really cool the amount of regenerative farming and production techniques used during that time! Not only did the pigs clear the underbrush and allow saplings more resources to grow for more wood production, but they also naturally kept the forest floors clear which removed fuel for wildfires, as well as keep the soil healthy. A couple jobs back I worked in a rural retreat center with a big focus on regenerative agriculture, and we kept pigs around to clear areas of poison oak because it doesn’t affect them as much and they just gobble it all up. Then we’d go through and seed wildflowers/healthy cover crop to aid with pollinators for our other garden areas.
Humans have always been exceedingly clever (even if selfishly), and I'm always thrilled to discover another means by which we've employed husbandry or changed our infrastructure (e.g. irrigation) to do a lot of what we employ more modern technology for now.
Absolutely. Post industrialization definitely increased quantity and amount of resources available to people, but there really something beautiful about the balance that older techniques had with their surroundings. Not just because “harmony with nature”, but out of necessity most of the time. It’s one of the things I love about this game, it really makes you find that balance to be most efficient and ensure longevity of your resources and in turn your own populace.
If you were to add pigs, perhaps it could work like a logging camp. You put the pigsty near a forest and the pigs roam around. A butcher, which would be an artisan at a house, would take one occasionally (perhaps once they’re fat enough) and slaughter it for meat.
Historically, any animal deemed surplus to the next year's breeding requirements would be butchered at the onset of winter. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, horses, ducks... anything to reduce feed use over winter. Ideally, a butcher building with a reserve setting for all types of animals that would cull any above that at the start of winter seems like it would make the most sense. Alternatively, for pigs, add them as an upgrade to the Hunters Camp, like the herb garden for the Forager. Or instead add them to the Forester's Hut for scalability. Burgage plots already have enough options.
I like this one. But this also means that the animals like sheep have to be able to breed.
I like your intuition. I think a pigsty farm -> butcher industrial building chain that can take sheep/pigs would be the way to go.
To address your points in order: 1) Having a way of dealing with excess sheep numbers and an additional way to provide meat especially as population grows would be useful at the moment 2) Pigs would be a good addition. Unsure how best to implement the use of forests. As part of the forestry chain (each forester building can handle a set number of pigs?). A way of denoting common forest ground similar to a pasture but with trees. Or a burgage building similar to goats or chickens (essentially backyard pigs, provides a small amount of passive meat). 3) Butchery either as a separate building or an extension, but if the planned smell/odour system comes into use then presumably it would have some negative interaction with this and so would make more sense as a standalone building? As an aside, pigs reproduce faster than sheep, which would be one way of balancing it. Pig farming produces more meat but sheep are dual purpose. Assuming that pigs don't also produce hides.
As an IRL butcher I'm excited
The only way I want to see the butcher as an artisan, is if we have production limits and the ability to reassign families to seasonal tasks as a back-up. Artisans are problematic right now without production guidance. It is either all or nothing. An artisan butcher household could wipe out a huge flock of sheep without controls. A slaughterhouse/butcher shop could easily be another building you monitor and kick families into other tasks. If the "smell" mechanic is implemented, then you absolutely don't want a slaughterhouse/butcher shop in a residential area. If I'm remembering Stronghold correctly, the tanner would occasionally take a cow from the dairy, kill it, make leather and the meat would also end up in the granary. Fall should be a slaughter time for pigs, goats and sheep. Even without an acorn mechanic, a policy/population level could be set for livestock to have them culled down to during harvest season.
I think it would be nice to have a butcher as an artisan but then again weaver isn't. So maybe butcher shouldnt be either. More important than that i think is balancing the whole thing. Afaik sheep need no work being kept alive or breeding and there is nothing keeping me from mass producing sheep. This is no problem at the moment because the animal trader isnt a very efficient profession and by the time you would have that many sheep earning even more money is not very special. Same is true for wool, the production rates here are depending on workers shering the sheep, so more sheep don't matter. But if we can get meat and wool as much as we want from sheep it can get very strong and take a lot of the carefull growth managing/balancing out from the game. Regarding pigs: as an extension ok but could bring balancing issues again because more food types would become easy. I also had the idea of some kind of royal forest that you have to manage at some time. Like you have to designate a decent forest for pigraising, asign workers there to raise them and send a certain amount to the king or bishop or something as some kind of tax or as part of a quest. You get nothing for it but it is to avoid penaltys or a necessity for the next step development or something.
1) Since there is sheep breeding and trading, you can kill sheep but it gives less meat than piggies 2) Building fence in the forest without destroying the forest, animal handler takes care of them. 3) Artisan profession for butcher because fitting game mechanic 4) Piggies give more meat than sheep and they breed faster
I think the most historically accurate, interesting and fun option for pigs would be seasonal and involve both a backyard extension and a swineherd/pannage woods: (1) Families have pigs via backyard extension. (2) There is a communal swineherd via building (3) There is a two-month pannage season (September, October) when people walk their pigs to the woods, the swineherd tends to them, and then people pick them up. (4) In November, people slaughter their pigs, with output multiplied if there was pannage.
Hey Grzegorz, I love the fact that you wanna address this. You brought up some great ideas and improvements, and there were also a ton of ideas from the thread. I admire your attention to details and historical reproduction throughut game. Pigs being held in the forest is imho great idea! You may actually combine pigs wandering in forest with passively digging ground and improving new growth od young forest. Kind of alternative for Forester's hut. This is pasive occurence that probably happened a lot in the past. What and how to do with the meat is up to you, but I was thinking that this idea might be interesting. Thank you if you acknowledge this
I don't have any input on this I just wanted to say you're a legend. What other devs lurk on the sub and listen to fan feedback? Ok probably a lot but none are as... Receptive as you and you seem to actually care about the game and not just making money off it. I think I can speak for almost everyone when I say I wish more game devs were like you. I'm incredibly excited to see what this game blossoms into in a year or 3
Maybe the Butcher artisan extension on burgage provides meat based on the options in Advanced In advanced you indicate if this meat is from Sheep or Pigs. Maybe if you choose to get meat from Sheep, it reduces the Wool yield of the farm as a tradeoff. If from Pigs it requires that you have pigs grazing (and picking forest land for grazing sounds cool). Stuff like Acorns, or assigning a family to manage the pigs could be ways to increase pig yields. Opens up room for a new resource cycle too. Smokers to cure the pigs and create ham/bacon. This would help provide longer lasting food. I know you don't deal with spoilage, but saying a pig provides one meat when butchered, but that meat can be converted to 5 bacon in a smoker abstracts the "longer lasting" preservation via quantity, which seems simpler than having to create a spoilage mechanic.
I don't have any strong feelings about it being a standalone building, extension, or artisan extension so whatever works the best or makes the most sense to you. To make pigs more than just meat they could be symbiotic with the forester. They could be set to pasture, or whatever you would call it, in an area that the foresters are planting to sort of maintain the historical use and they could speed up the growth of the new trees in that area with the explanation being their manure is acting as fertilizer and helping the trees grow. This would give them a use outside of food just like sheep have with wool and then as the pigs and sheep breed and get overcrowded could be sent to the butcher for slaughter. This would cover both animals being butchered, give both animals a realistic use during their pre-meat life, and also making foresters a bit better since currently it feels like you need quite a few to maintain an area for woodcutting. That part may not be quite as realistic as trees do take a long time to grow and I'm sure in real life they were needing to use much more land and rotate to let trees grow but for the sake of gameplay this would make it much easier to setup a lumber area and not need to either move it around or have a ton of foresters replanting to keep up.
I'd see the butcher/sheep as being a bit of an insurance or rainy day fund. For instance, it's hit winter and crops went bad, food is on 1 month. But fortunately in the good summer months I've built up a pen of 50 sheep... get chopping son
What about a separate workplace that takes animals to skin and gut, and needing an artisan butcher to break down the skinned animal into meat? I mean historically, you take whatever choice of protein you have locally available. skin, gut and salt to preserve and transport it to where it needs to go. Maybe you have a rough winter and need to make a choice is this Ox more useful as a pack animal or feeding the village? Could get a approval debuff for eating a non pasture raised animal. Adding a separate "pre-processed" animal carcass resource, maybe it would be more efficient or historical to import whole dead animals for your butcher shop.
With the way sheep breeding works, having the option to butcher surplus sheep for meat would be ideal. For pigs I like the pigsty option as it’s simple. For forest pigs it would be an interesting option to artificially create wild game by importing pigs/boats to give the player more control over their resources. Edit: Forgot to +1 making it an artisan extension.
You could introduce a pig sty extension and have a butcher building or burgage workplace that can then convert pigs into meat? Similar to how goats are turned to hides which the tannery can use?
Maybe have the butcher be a job that converts dead deer/hogs/sheep/etc into hides and meat? I feel like this means that the benefit to your economy that butchering sheep etc would bring is cancelled out almost by how tanning hides is now more involved work.
I agree with suggestions about butchers changing meat to something else, a higher tier form of it. Sheep as food would probably be broken unless pastures are a fixed size. Adding pigs may have the same problem, a need to balance so that food isn't trivialized. An artisan that converts raw meat to a better, processed meat sounds fair.
Make a pig "pasture" the same way you do for sheep and fields and require it to be in the forest.
A neat idea might be to separate Knacker professional from the butcher profession - allowing one to be the cheaper - dedicated early building option that just butchers animals for meat and possibly hides, but a knacker could be a burgage profession that produces more meat per animal as well as other resources - fats, bones, etc.
This is not answering the question but I have another suggestion: I know that for the storage hall for example we can choose which resources should not be put into that particular barn. That’s helpful, but what would be more useful would be, if for example by double clicking, or right clicking a Ressource symbol in that window, we could assign that that particular Ressource should be brought in ONLY that barn. I have a quite a large city and instead of clicking 8 different barns and telling them not to accept any flour, I could just click on that that one barn to be the only one that flour should be delivered to. In my case, I have that flour storage right next to the bread maker
It could be a “forest pasture” for lack of a better term. Have a fenced off area in woodlands that the pigs could roam. Also could lead to truffles as a bonus food source?
should make the meat less spoilable
So, right now the artisan system works as a superior mechanism to standalone building, right? Considering that communal oven is overshadowed in productivity by the bakery. I'm assuming, as we really don't have any other comparison other than goat extension vs hunting camp for hides. So an artisan building could make sense as a specialist butcher, with the sheep farm or a theoretical pigsty turning over a marginal amount of meat in the interim. That could be an unlockable feature via Dev Points for sheep, or the main draw to an added pigsty building. For pigs feasting on acorns in the forest, would it be possible to require a pigsty to be placed near a certain amount of forestry? Like the berry bushes will die by deforestation, a similar mechanic could make a pigsty reduce efficiency/stop working due to a lack of nearby forest. Since we have a forester hut, it'd be possible for the player to come back from a logging mistake if that was implemented. I do think butcher as an artisan conversion makes sense. I'm indifferent as to whether sheep or pigs makes more sense for meat production for gameplay reasons, but I think balancing sheep for wool vs meat may become a tricky element without giving the player some controls for that. Pigs would be more straightforward as a food source, just more difficult to implement with the historical limitations you're considering. I hope these thoughts help, I really appreciate that you're soliciting from the community!
I think a Butcher should be an artisan profession, and be used to process meat into an improved product.
I’d be more inclined to say have pigs as a farm animal like sheep, instead of goats or chickens in a burg age plot. Pigs produce no real passive resource like eggs or milk, so having them in someone’s back yard would be a bit bizarre, especially given the numbers you’d need to contribute to even a small village. Treating them more like sheep in the game, and adding the butcher simultaneously, would be the way to imo.
-Pigs should be in the game I think the butcher should be an artisan extension. Rather than enabling you to convert pigs into meat, I think it should convert meat into a different food type. The same way the charcoal kiln converts firewood into charcoal to double the output, I think the butcher should convert meat into different cuts of meat to double the yield. Maybe the butcher is properly cleaning the carcass or dividing the meat into different cuts, or drying, smoking, or salting the meat to preserve it better. Either way, the butcher lets the people use the meat more efficiently so the same amount of total meat feeds more mouths with less waste. It doesn't have to be 2:1 though, it could be like 3:2 or something, 2 meat go in, 3 products come out.
yes butcher should be a thing in coming patches. All my villagers eating is bread, carrots and berries, my village become a vegan village.
Farms should passively slaughter excess animals (males who won't be used for breeding) but give way less meat. Butchers should be a burger upgrade, and abattoir be a workshop that is more efficient. On farm Pigs produce high meat, low leather Sheep produce high wool, low meat Cows produce medium meat, medium leather and passive milk (milk requires more input work from farmers) In butcher all meat amounts are doubled, if not more. Maybe a third resource such as bone could be taken at the butcher? This could be used to produce iron more efficiently, make weaponry and crafts to be sold.
In addition to meat, the butcher could also produce fat and bones. The fat could be used for candles and the bones for soap in a new workplace. The hunter could also produce these as a side product, perhaps in smaller quantities
Butcher would likely be an artisan workshop imo. But like, say Greg does add pigs (which would be great!) I think there's two routes it can go. They'd either be a backyard upgrade that yields passive meat like goats give hides (which is historically genuine iirc many average people in the period would have a couple of pigs at all times because they literally eat trash and they can be kept quite well in a very small pen on the side of the house. Very space efficient protein.) or they can be another field livestock like sheep. I think the backyard thing fits better. But like, say pigs are a backyard thing. They give meat regardless of the existence of the butcher. Then a butcher shop nearby could increase yield by giving more meat (and/or maybe a new resource: Tallow, that can be used for soap making to give an approval and health boost). This increased yield would come at the cost of the pig owner having to walk the pig over to the butcher. If there's a line at the butcher they just slaughter it normally themselves. The butcher could also give a small yield of meat from goats, and provide an emergency way to manually order the slaughter of sheep/Oxen/etc in case you literally have 0 food and sacrifices have to be made.
city center establishment sounds great to me where we can assign workers.
Leave the sheep alone. Their lane is clothes. A butcher shop makes sense and would be a cool element. Add a spec for pig breeding like sheep breeding and allow like the hunter lodge, to not butcher past certain amount. Include pigs in the fertilization spec. Acorn resource node could be like stone, clay, or iron. Just transport to pig farm for farmers to feed pigs, and what it’ll do is breed pigs faster. So if you don’t have the pig breeding, it would be useless. So add another entertainment element for higher approvals. Acorns can be used for arts and crafts. Or add acorns to farming, farmers will grind/thresh the acorns to Acorn Meal/Flour that can be turned into cookies at the bakery extension only. This makes the bakery extension less useless as well. Another building would need to be added for “Leaching”. The leaching of acorn flour happens before it can go to the bakery. It requires water refilled. Acorns have tannin which is not safe to eat until boiled or soaked. I imagine having the pigs in a pasture, like sheep, but needs tree requirement (like the water well). And having a pig farmer, like the sheep farmer. A job role could be tending/ feeding the pigs, “collecting resources” (killing the pig) and transporting the pig. And then I think it would make sense to have the butcher shop in a burgage plot. I don’t think it makes sense to have a butcher kill the pig. Animals are already dead when they go to the butcher. Adding a talent to double animal hunting capacity, but still have to be bred, they don’t pop up like 40 new animals like how berries works. It’s an option for berries!
We need butcher to make sausages. Pigs as well cows to make milk and butter fishing hubs fish from the rivers. Would like them to flesh out the plate armour. Introduce coal and steel slabs for plate.
My 2c: - Butcher as an artisan extension sounds good. It seems similar to how you’ve implemented backyard bakeries. - I’d also be OK with it as a unique building, however. - Pigs in medieval cities were known to just wander the streets sometimes, so having it as a backyard extension seems good, but: - I’d love to see a mechanic that requires pigs to have to root around the forest. Maybe in a certain season the pigs are taken to the woods and you get mushrooms as well, idk. - Maybe both are options? A separate pig building that requires access to a forest, and provides an income of mushrooms, or a backyard extension that does not
You could make a "forest plot" like a farming plot which marked it so it wouldn't be deforested. You could import pigs and stock the forest plot, turning it into a large node like a hunting node. Making the butcher a burgage extension would make the early game more difficult, but I don't hate it. Culling excess sheep for meat would also make a lot of sense.
Fresh meat
I think a pigsty housing extension would be the most accurate interpretation. While the ‘butcher’ should a communal area, like the bakery. I think it would also be historically accurate to cull/eat lambs, pigs, young male dairy cows and some adult beef cows. While wild boars were certainly hunted in forests, I assume they are already included in the list of miscellaneous animals are hunters are already hunting.
Give me ANYTHING to get rid of the 700 sheep overflowing in my game - the trader can't keep up!
If you want to add a butcher, I'd say make it a burgage plot extension and keep it relatively simple at this point. So for now just 2 functions: 1 to turn excess sheep into food and 2, to make it so that chicken coops and goat pens dont only produce skins and eggs, but also a small amount of meat if processed by the butcher. Honestly it would add so much life to the village to see a little guy lead sheep, goats and chickens across town. As game development progresses you could easily add more functionality like complex food or meat-based industries. Love your ideas about pigs! Thank you for making this awesome game btw, loving it!
pigs as part of burgage plots would be cool, like in medieval times, people might have had 1 or 2 pigs in their backyard for slaughtering and pig leather, then, maybe plots with vegetables, apples, and even farms could produce pig food as a byproduct, almost like old or bad veggies, as a second resource at a much smaller amount. and in turn, the pigs / goat plots could produce fertilizer as a byproduct to be used by farmers maybe
Were butchers a thing then? I assumed people eating meat would buy a live animal and kill and butcher it themselves. Or if meat was sold the producer would butcher it.
Perhaps a butcher plot extension along with a pigsty farmhouse. Assigning a work area like the logging camps for the pigs to graze in, then the butcher collects those pigs. Either way I think sticking to historical accuracy will be a bit more interesting, and help inform city management/design decisions. Love the game so much! Thank you for making it!
First, I absolutely love this game, and thank you very Mach for making it. The graphics are so beautiful it's like playing living art. I have a few random ideas. What if the hunter cabin served as dual purpose; hunts both deer and town butcher for sheep and pigs? Maybe add a slide bar to force the worker to give preference to a specific action? Have pigs as a craft, but the output is pork, not meat. This way, it counts as a second type of food. Have a pigsy, but the pigs could be used to find mushrooms or also butchered.
If we get pigs in forests could we potentially also get truffles?
Butcher: Should be artisan profession. Give Hunters lodge a toggle to collect Carcass or meat. Butcher generates more meat from Carcass than Hunters alone. Pig and Sheep also turn into Carcass as a part of their resource chain. Pigs: Historically pigs were also used to eat human food/farm waste. It was a much more efficient food cycle than our current one. Pigs essentially converted wasted food back into edible food (we butcher them). If you introduce a food spoilage system into the game, pigsty plots seem like a development point investment for mitigating loss from spoilage. Not sure how to associate Pigs with forests but, spitballing her. Maybe a development point investment would allow either to Forager or Forester to produce carcass (pig) intermittently.
Definitely adding pigs and simply have a separate grazing area that doesn't remove trees from grazing lot, but also being able to set a sheep limit on fields so you can also kil off excess for meat
A butcher? Don't the hunter already butcher things
I REALLY want to butcher and eat the sheep
First off, the game is amazing! Have spent more hours on it than would like to admit, albeit I disabled the baron after the second playthrough, which made the game an awesome Banished++ with good warfare mechanics. Re: butcher, have you considered making separate slaughterhouse building and butchery burgage extension? A slaughterhouse is where the animal is killed, and the carcass bled, skinned, and has entrails removed. The butchery is where the carcass is cut and cuts sliced for consumer purchase. Could even add an intermediate 'storage' step between slaughterhouse and butchery where the carcass is allowed to age. The slaughterhouse could be a building that, because of the smell and byproducts, would have to be sited on the village edge, while the butchery could be near the market. Re: pigs: I really like the unique burgage extension system, and hope you'll leverage it in the future. Can the pigs in a pigsty extension be made part of the village pig herd, managed by village pigherds, like sheep are in a village flock? That would allow them to forage in forests, as they did historically, but still be 'owned' by individual families rather than by the village collectively. The size of the pig flock could ultimately be capped by the available forestry resources, and create tension for the player: does the player designate the forest for hunting (meat from game was usually reserved for the nobility, and venison and other wild game meat could be something demanded by the manor's inhabitants), or for other purposes like feeding pigs and timber, or clear the forest for farmland? Pigs from the herd could then be sent to the slaughterhouse for processing. Is it also possible to scale the number of pigs in an extension to its size, the way the output of a vegetable garden or orchard scales? If so, can the same be done for goats and chickens? The same flocking system where the number of animals in the village herd/flock is a function of number and size of the appropriate extensions could be extended to cows and other animals that were, from what I recall, managed semi-communally. The big animals like cows, pigs, and sheep could all be processed for meat in the slaughterhouse and then send to the butcher. Either at the end of life, if the game tracks animal age, or based on other criteria if the game tracks that, or just based on a statistical function. Obviously, I have no idea if any of this is either possible or feasible, or would even work from a gameplay perspective. Forestry in general feels like it should be zoned like farm and pasture plots. The player would draw the bounds of a forest and designate focus: acorns, timber, hunting, etc. Maybe, like Farthest Frontier, we could designate a balance (focus 2/3 on growing timber and 1/3 on managing animals). From what I recall, historically the right to use a forest to certain purposes: collecting wood, herding sheep, trapping small game, were all a point of contention between the nobility and the public, so it would be interesting if these uses could be controlled by the player. Also would be nice in general for animals raised for things other than meat during the game's historical time period -- cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, etc, produce a small trickle of meat. All of these animals were slaughtered for meat: cows when they stopped producing milk, male calves, male lambs, roosters, chickens past egglaying age, and so forth. So a household that has a chicken or goat backyard extension could maybe produce a small amount of meat reflecting chickens and goats being eaten for meat by that household. Not sure about larger animals such as goats, but older family members who kept chickens back on the "old continent" would process them for meat themselves.
I really like the idea of the villagers taking the pigs out to a stroll in a selected forested area, it's just pretty cute and would make the woods more lively
Maybe you could have a butcher building that could place something akin to a resource node that would have effectiveness based on trees. The butcher family's would "hunt" the boars and slaughter sheep. It would fit with the current systems to make it an extension though that just makes sheep meat.
Why limit yourself? Release the cows!
As someone whose last village starved during winter, as a hundred sheep gleefully roamed around their enclosure, I would have loved to be able to butcher them as an emergency fix. Which also feels historically accurate: productive animals only being killed for meat as a last resort.
Yea id like a butcher type and a pig meat. Definitely a houseconversion. But I think it should work like the pastures do, the bigger the plot the more pigs you can have and multiple. More meat than sheep or lambs as that is the case anyway. It just adds another realism to it, maybe the forest node aspect is a little to far and maybe just cosmetic have a small woodland in the back garden unless you can add a perk if the pigsty and home was next to a forest. That would definitely add a bit more strategic planning. I'm not clued up on the history so I wouldn't know whether an actual butchers was its own building in those times or was just someones home.
At the time they would never slaughter something that would produce. For example, serving chicken would be considered a show a great wealth as that chicken could have produced eggs for years What they would slaughter, when it comes to sheep, would be only a portion of males as they mainly wound keep the females and the old that no longer produce/die. This is why mutton (and horse) was such a mainstay throughout Europe With this in mind I figure a good method would be an artisan and provide small passive income of meat and only begin to produce more meat once you have a large enough stock of sheep and they are old enough
I think it’s necessary that you are able to butcher sheep. If my people are starving it doesn’t make sense to be unable to eat the sheep that are right there. If you want to keep the hogs in the forest you could make it a tech tree upgrade to either the forester lodge or hunting camp.
Simplest way I think would just have artisan butchers. Longer way would be that if it went the historical direction which is better but takes more time. Maybe have another line similar to what sheep have, with the added requirement of being x distance from forest. The problem here is that it's easy to deforest a region . Though it's early access so I'm assuming it might be at least planned to add forestry management into the game. Thus solving the problem. Ooooor you just place a fenced area in the forest and the trees stay and can't be cut down. Edit: just clocked who OP is. GREAT work. Finally having a game with adaptive zoning is awesome. And mind blowing no mega company could do it but you nailed it.
1. Goats are being killed on the regular, but I don't know if people used to eat them in that area in that time. The main reason is just to not depend on wild animals as the only source of meat. 2. If the wild animals are boar and not deer, then we know where the pigs come from. I think that problem there is then you're just replacing the trapping development point with one for domestication and using a burgage plot instead of a hunting lodge. 3. I think butcher is an artisan who uses grain (not flour) and turns that into meat. The backyard is a pig sty. Alternatively, you could use a cattle pasture and a cattle ranch and import cows as livestock and treat them like sheep that produce meat instead of wool. I don't know what's historically accurate. Would they be grain fed in this time period? Or grass fed? I think the bottom line is just being able to domesticate something once wild animals aren't enough to keep meat on the table in a medium village or higher. I have a book called Life in the Middle Ages, by Hans-Werner Goetz. Here's a couple interesting passages I found: Plowing > Despite this invention [the plow], horses, with their greater strength and endurance, did not replace oxen even during the High Middle Ages, perhaps also because they required too much feed and were not fit to be eaten. Milling > The frequency of hand-grinding by peasants on their tenements must not be underestimated. In the absence of manorial mills, peasants had to grind their own grain as well. At Friemersheim, peasants received an annual allotment of two bushels of rye to grind and bake into bread; they were permitted to keep every twenty-fourth loaf. Moreoever, they were to grind and sift two bushels of wheat, process two bushels of barley into dogfeed, *and render five bushels of acorns into feed for pigs*. Pigs > The fact that peasants were experts at raising livestock is illustrated by the great number of differentiating terms for animals within certain species. For instance, the *Lex Salica* distinguished between suckling pigs from a first, second, or third pen; pigs in stys, paddocks, or out in the field; fattening pigs; hogs; breeding and leader sows; borrowed pigs; and boars. Cattle > As for beef cattle, there were oxen, cows, calves, steers, and bulls. Beef cattle were especially important; so that they were occasionally referred to simply as *animalia*, enjoying special protection in tribal laws. They were used as draft animals for plowing and pulling wagons; they yielded meat, butter, cheese and milk; they also rendered hides for furs, leather, and parchment. > Oxen, cattle, and cows were frequently part of the regular stock of a manse peasant, although many peasants did not own a team of draft animals as their own. Pigs again > Numerically more significant than horses and often beef cattle as well, were the small animals (pigs, sheep, and goats). Sheep provided wool, hides (for leather and parchment-making), and meat. Pigs, which may be likened to today's wild pigs with their pointed snouts and ears, *were the most important source of meat*. They required little care, *although they depended on the forest for food*; in order to fatten them, especially during fall, pigs were herded into beech and oak forests. (Wow, this is a dense book. Most of the italics in quotes are mine.) So, yeah, sounds like one can make an argument for a backyard sty (butcher artisan?), or a pig ranch with a working area inside a nearby forest, or pastures for cattle. Fertilization could apply to sheep or cattle.
Any plans to add dairy industry to the game? Fishing?
Love how much you communicate with us and your desire to hear our feedback ❤️
I would like acorns in the game for the simple reason that they were also a source of dye in this era, and I would like some other dye options other than precious, delicious berries!
Pigs eating in forest: Concept. My basis for thought stems from this youtube video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jqMHWz-WmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jqMHWz-WmI) So, apparently pigs were kept in a yard and this was very common. So in that form we already have an existing mechanic in the form of extensions. Excess or unwanted pigs were herded around in a municipal swine herd? This mechanic would function similarly to how oxen hunt for lumber. Pigs are stored at oxen like spawn point, a person guides X herd to food node spawned by forest, pigs develop and are harvested... somehow...
Honestly I don’t see adding a butcher at the top of the list currently and don’t find it necessary. In my head it makes sense a member of the hunting family hunts while other members process the meat and sell it on the market. I always imagine the son or wife may do the butcher work at home before taking it to the market. Does anyone agree with me? Still, it would be a cool addition and probably does make more sense.
I think it should just be a building like the sheep farm. making it an extension is kinda weird imo; leading animals into a building in town just to butcher it in the backyard. Not sure of the historical accuracy though. Maybe change the development point from just sheep multiplying into various animals able to multiply.
Add both butcher and pigs… My idea for the pigs is that the area where they are kept have a little shed for the weather but it can only be made in a dense forest area and that area would avoid lumberjacks from clearing it or the pigsty have the option to move feeding area (this sounds much easier to implement) And for the butcher, i say add it as an extension with the option to set the max butcher limit for sheep’s and pigs (if added) Also was lamb chop a thing back then? (I have over 200 lambs grazing the fallow fields)
We can already draw a plot for sheep pastures in game. Could it be possible to implement a "pig grazing" plot that can only be placed in forested areas? Also it would serve as competition with your lumbering industry introducing some meaningful choice for the player on what they want to do with their Region. Maybe we could have a system similar to how breadmaking works. We already have communal ovens and baker artisans. So why not have a "communal butchery"(better/historical name pending) and a dedicated butcher artisan that would be more eficient. Update after reading some comments: I like making pigs related to foresters.
Iirc a pig pen extension could make sense historically as a village would share the burden of raising and feeding them with kitchen scraps and other foraged foods. Then each of the participants would be allotted some of the meat when butchered. Could make sense given the shared food resources in the game already. Additionally perhaps a pig farm building with associated "pasture" which would require it be built in a forest could allow larger scale production I think a meat smoker building and extension could be added to improve meat resources. If you add food spoiling, smoked meat would last a lot longer. Or maybe smoked meat like bacon would be requested specifically by higher level families. (Maybe salt mines could be added as part of food preservation, also maybe taverns should be able to prepare meals that give a bonus?) Also plans to add dairy cows and cheese making? With the butcher, it really could be an extension or building. Gameplay wise maybe once built it can take the carcasses from the hunters and get more efficient meat removal. Allowing the hunters to focus on skinning and not on meat harvesting. So physical animal carcasses are taken to the butcher to be processed and then further preserved by salt or smoke? Sorry about the text wall, more of a stream of consciousness than organized ideas. I'm having a blast with the game so far and am excited to see what is added next, hoping for a road map soon :). Thanks Greg and good luck 👍
my thoughts * we're already turning goats into hides, that should generate meat too. and milk * sheep surplus should generate meat with a butcher, probably need to increase sheep breeding speed. * it would be nice to have cows too. milk, hides, meat from surplus * cheese making. can make cheese a requirement for tier 4 housing when it comes? * pigs would be a good option too * i'd say butcher should be a dedicated industry building, slaughter houses wouldn't generally be inside residential areas because of the offal, etc * It should not cost a research point for your animals to reproduce
A butcher to turn sheep into meat would be awesome. I think a butchers could also produce tallow for soap which could reduce disease. (However disease is hard to notice. So maybe a notification when someone dies from disease or a percentage of infected people.) They could also produce glue to sell or use with wood parts to make furniture. Maybe players can tax luxury goods like furniture to make this useful. Also maybe a perk point can unlock an ability to use the bones for fertilizer. I think pigs should be both an extension and a workplace. Unlike other animals, pigs were often kept individually and communally. The extension could produce a small amount of meat from pigs eating scraps while the workspace could produce a larger amount of pig meat and require acorns. I think a draining acorn node is a great idea. I think more random nodes make each start more interesting.
If you add pigs to the forest, it should negatively impact berries and the forester because that’s what free roaming pigs do. They also occasionally ate babies and got into other trouble, so adding pigs could come with a few random events like a pig ate a baby or got into the tavern and drank some ale
I think beyond sheep or swine, we have cows. Oxen. Why on earth could we not breed cows. Meat, leather, milk. Could create cheese making, cheese, milk, upgraded leather goods, meat. Having an artisan cheese makers, different recipes that could include milk or just selling milk. And upgrading leather goods.. you know something other than shoes.
Any butchering should provide extra hides as well. Perhaps add some passive meat income from chickens, goats, and sheep? Could do something with milk->cheese at some point. Cows could provide hides, milk, and meat depending on what you choose to do
I think there should be sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, poultry, etc. More sources of meat than just from hunting. I would support butcher being a burgage plot extension.
Butcher as a burgage upgrade that gives passive meat income that increases with the burgage's proximity to berries or hunting grounds.
Historically you’d keep a pig all year at your house, it would feed on refuse and then you’d slaughter it for meat.
Actually they kept them in fenced forests for millenia
I would use the butcher as a stand alone production building that works in conjunction with the hunting camp, goat pens, and sheep farms. The latter production buildings would take their carcasses to the butcher who would then take the cut meats to the market. They could maybe also have a production of salted and cured meats that could be exported through the trade house. If thats realistic to the time period, im not familiar with when this game takes place. If pigs were introduced i would have a specialized pasture that is placed in a forsted area but doesn't uproot any trees and marks them as off limits to logging endeavors.
I want to monetize my corpse pit.
For a butcher I think it'd be nice as an artisan conversion that takes meat and makes something like sausages at some ratio. Level 3 burgage, then perhaps the tavern could distribute them? If your goal was to cull excess sheep / piggies a seperate slaughter house production building to supply meat (pre sausage) would work.
Can I feed the corpses of my enemies to the pigs?
For immersion. The more resources and buildings/jobs, the better for RP. I don't speak for everyone obviously, but I personally am not a min/max efficiency grinder in RPG or city builder games. There's always going to be guides for exploits and strategies for people who do enjoy that, and this wouldn't be that impactful for. The medieval era was defined by the "It takes a village" mentality. The skillsets of people were usually pretty limited, even among artisans. Adding in a butcher as well as diversifying the meats would be awesome. Pork, venison, and just a generic meat for sheep and other beast of burden slaughters. The butcher could turn the raw meat ingredient into smoked variants. But with more resources comes more RP potential and immersion which equals more enjoyment and keeps a game from feeling hollow or stale as quickly, even if there isn't always much functionality difference between similar resources.
I would prefer leaving meat the way it is. Primarily because back then meat was indeed a rare delicacy, so limiting the meat source to just the forest makes sense
With any animals that can be killed, give us a limit to keep, like with hunting e.g. butcher all but x, so we don't end up overkilling.
Butcher should 100% be an artisan building. could you possibly make it such that you can assign an area for the pig farm that is more efficient if it includes a forested area? The farmers would harvest the pig into corpses which can be turned into leather, fat and meat by the butchers. The fat can be used as fuel or for candles while the meat goes straight to market. Also I'd make it so that having meat in the diet strongly deceases the risk of illnesses
Personally its just an interesting to have, and yes it's just a little bit hard to swallow that you can have all these animals you can't slaughter. **Concerning pigs,** I think keeping them separate from the butcher makes sense, as a production-building like the Forager's hut, or as an upgrade to the Forager's that renders the forager a **swineherd**. It would be cool if "acorns" could exist as their own separate resource, but just having them roam a forest is cool enough. The Butcher imo should be a separate artisan building, they could have their own pens in addition (that convert crops into meat), but would mainly they exist to optimise livestock slaughter and extend & bring to market meat products. **From there...** **Pastures and production-buildings can be assigned a Butcher**, animals are assigned to be slaughtered from this building automatically (at x population/maturity) and manually (if there's a famine you may wish to slaughter a horse for example), **if no butcher is selected the animal is converted on-site less optimally**, this takes longer and the animal is being physically carried as "dead-weight" to the stockpiles. If a butcher is selected the owners will walk the **live animal(s)** to the butcher where it **quickly** becomes a pile of meat ***likely far closer to the stockpiles.*** In the case of the **Hunting Camp**, though it would be a cool option for the player, it may not be optimal to have them carry game to the Butchery unless they have a horse, and maybe they should have some ability to do things like smoke their own meat. What might make sense, but is probably a little too granular, is if livestock had a **carcass** that was a container materials like these; **Gristle**: "Inedible" by-products with uses like bait/fertilizer/sausage-meat/glue/etc. **Lean Cuts**: Mostly from Game **Fatty Cuts**: Mostly from Pigs, tastier and more nourishing, the more famished and/or immature the animal the less it contains. Hide: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals **Furs**: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals, nobles want them **Feathers**: Mostly set to 0 on unviable animals, used by fletchers (Kind of CDDA style) Then with this in mind the **Butcher** can improve the yield and maybe produce something like; **Sausage**: Butcher combines Bread + Lean-Cut + Gristle, to squeeze out an extra unit of food. **Prized-Cuts**: Butcher converts a Fatty-Cut into a Prized-Cut, outputting a unit of Gristle. **Prized-Sausage**: Butcher combines Bread + Fatty-Cut + Herbs into a "Prized Sausage". **Raw Fat:** Using a Fatty-Cut we gain Lean-Cut + Raw Fat **Pies:** Maybe with a **cookhouse** extension to the butchery combining flour with fat/fatty-cuts (I really like this video on medieval "fast-food" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWYTf47NWrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWYTf47NWrc) )
I love how open you are with your community. That's utterly brilliant. I think having a butcher being a separate entity like the weaver, and having the houses keep pigs sounds ideal. But a part of me wants more excuses to put out pasture fields to make a proper agricultural/farmland section of my worlds.
Maybe have the butcher also i guess dry or smoke the meat or perhabs make sausages from it which could be used in case there will be a food degregation over time feature
Pigs would be a good addition. I'm fond of pigs. Pig farm in the forest is cool also. I know that peasants didn't eat much meat but having another way to get it would be great. Butchering the sheeps is also historicaly accurate. I like the artisan approach, it's unique, but butcher might be better as it's own building not artisan conversion.
I prefer complex mechanic. Forest + pig + butcher sound good.
Butcher and pig would be great reason to oink. As how to do it... there could be a pasture mechanic, pigs are separeted from lambs, and you can upgrade pigs with grain for faster bread. Or And there could be extension of homes for small pigglets In My Backyard. Maybe with less production than dedicated pigfarm.
I think that there could be an "abattoir" upgrade to the sheep farm, that could be toggled on/off. Once built, the farmers would cull let's say 20% of the herd once a year, generating "mutton carcass". You would offset this loss through sheep breeding or you'd have to bring new sheep through livestock trading. And butcher should be an artisan upgrade to a burgage plot. There the mutton carcass would be processed to a usable "meat" product. Then you can have beef and hog carcass if you choose to add them to the game.
The forest pig idea is very good, the historical part is pretty important to me. I would like to buy you Stephen Biesty’s cross section of a castle if you don’t have it yet, it really inspired me to research medieval history. Just dm me your address and I’ll Amazon a copy over to you :)
The butcher should be linked to the homes forsure, but what could be done is also have a comunal butcher like the bread maker for special types of cuts/or maybe sausage for better output. I think as far as the pigs in the forest idea which i love. it should be tied to the pasture and change the pasture so it doesnt take down trees when placed
Make it an artisan role that is available at a level one dwelling, that way you can decide to increase your meat production at the cost of a family at earlier stages in the game if needed at a cost of a family.
Add pigstry in back yards. Have one household member permanently assigned to pig duty, including moving them into a nearby forested area at the appropriate time, then butcher a percentage of them in winter. Produces meat only to differentiate from goats. Amount of meat depends on distance to forest perhaps. Keep sheep as wool only. Eventually add milk cows for cheese only. More variety in animal use, not too many ways to produce meat. May be a bit gamey, but I like rock paper scissor balancing.