Idea For Non-Gruesome Butchery

[MKMoose]

10 hours ago, williams_482 said:

I think Vintage Story, like TOBG, taking a highly abstracted approach to harvesting dead animals is why I don't have any problem with it. Both games totally gloss over showing any kind of blood or gore, and simplifies meat down to supermarket like items of "red meat," "raw pork," or what have you. Similarly, stuff like drifters mutated bodies, bony soil, apparent sacrificial altar ruins with skeletons scattered about, etc, all hint very strongly at things which would be very uncomfortable to encounter in real life, but are streamlined enough to be merely creepy. I think that's the right zone for this game to inhabit, and the devs seem to agree.

9 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

In any case, if the squeamishness is due to the grisly nature of a skinned carcass, but the raw cuts of meat themselves aren't a problem, then it seems like different cuts of meat could be added as hunting drops to give hunting a little more depth, without grossing the devs or players out in the process. If the issue is with realistic cuts of meat though, then more realistic butchering should be left to the modded realm for the time being. If the development team gets shuffled in the future and there's no reservations about such depictions though, then maybe it could change in the future, but I don't think it's something worth hiring or firing specific devs over.

I would like to mention a point which people seem to notoriously disregard anytime butchering comes up, which is that the purpose of butchering is not limited to gory, realistic animal corpses and detailed range of various cuts and offal. Butchering also serves a very specific gameplay function which does not at any point require gruesome visuals. Unless vague knife movements near an animal lying on a butchering table or hanging off a hook count as such, but I think it really doesn't seem that much worse than the same vague movements over a corpse lying in the grass, does it? And there's a lot of ways to mitigate risk further or add simple accessibility options like modified color palettes and textures. Granted, I'd have to double-check if the table and hook itself is a significant trigger, but again, it doesn't have to go anywhere near "detailed butchering and skinning".

Even the Butchering mod, if skinning and a couple other details were removed or adjusted, I think would be very much suitable, while delivering the frequently requested gameplay functionality - it makes the player carry hunted animals back home and break them down on a hook and table, instead of just cutting off a couple chunks of meat in the field. It's a much deeper and more rewarding process that significantly changes the hunting dynamics, given that the player can only carry a limited number of animals with them and has to invest a much larger chunk of time and effort into processing the hunted animals, with an appropriately higher reward.

 

With that, I want to suggest a more specific system that could achieve this with limited added mechanical complexity over the base game and easy integration of accessibility features. I'm not making a new thread here to avoid clutter, but I'm also making a post on Discord since that's where the whole discussion started for me.

Disclaimer:

I do not wish to discuss whether butchering should be detailed and gruesome or not. Feel free to consult Red Ram's explanation. Even if there was no concern about team members, gore can be an accessibility issue - look into something like BII reactions or particularly hemophobia. Also, for many other people gore is simply uncomfortable or undesired in spite of not causing a strong involuntary reaction. I'd be interested to hear if my simplified proposition would be satisfactory relative to something like the Butchering mod.

Motivation:

1. Increase mechanical depth of hunting and animal harvesting.
2. Rework animal loot for more realistic meat yield, but require more effort to make the most of them.

Features:

1. Implement multistage harvesting, requiring to harvest animals multiple times, each time returning different resources in sequence (antlers, hide, fat, meat etc.), with no loot container, making the process more involved and immersive. Certain harvesting stages may require a different tool, or benefit from a specialized tool with a boost to yield or speed. The animal may change appearance at each stage (at least after skinning), but this could be easily disabled for accessibility or not implemented at all. Slight changes to model scale or color would be sufficient to indicate difference between the harvesting stages without any gruesome visuals beyond the existing animal corpses, and presumably at vastly lower development cost.
2. Allow the player to carry dead animals back home (the Butchering mod implements this quite well).
3. Add a butchering table, on which animals could be placed to harvest them more efficiently. Several harvesting stages would be only possible on a butchering table and not in the field, or have increased yield on the table.

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Motivation:

1. Increase mechanical depth of hunting and animal harvesting.
2. Rework animal loot for more realistic meat yield, but require more effort to make the most of them.

Features:

1. Implement multistage harvesting, requiring to harvest animals multiple times, each time returning different resources in sequence (antlers, hide, fat, meat etc.), with no loot container, making the process more involved and immersive. Certain harvesting stages may require a different tool, or benefit from a specialized tool with a boost to yield or speed. The animal may change appearance at each stage (at least after skinning), but this could be easily disabled for accessibility or not implemented at all. Slight changes to model scale or color would be sufficient to indicate difference between the harvesting stages without any gruesome visuals beyond the existing animal corpses, and presumably at vastly lower development cost.
2. Allow the player to carry dead animals back home (the Butchering mod implements this quite well).
3. Add a butchering table, on which animals could be placed to harvest them more efficiently. Several harvesting stages would be only possible on a butchering table and not in the field, or have increased yield on the table.

I was actually thinking about this yesterday when playing Skyrim. The old Hunterborn mod operated in a very similar fashion, requiring the player to dress the carcass and then spend time harvesting the hide, meat, and ingredients independently. The player could also carry carcasses to other locations(like a campsite) if they so chose. Very customizable, more realistic than just taking random drops from the carcass, and there wasn't any gore involved--a short animation would play and the screen would fade to black while skipping the appropriate amount of time. If the carcass was very large, the player might need to spend extra time harvesting all the hide and meat.

[Tabbot95]

the butchery mod is frankly the ideal; would maybe add some more stuff to it, skulls, hooves, horns, tusks, teeth, and brains and other organs that can be used for things.. maybe have that be something you can disable, lots of decorating/engraving/inlay potential that shouldn't be ignored or locked behind some arbitrary "rare mob" nonsense.

 

idk I think that lowpoly, low texture res,  pink carcass just isn't gory, it's not like it flops around. worse comes to worse, the animals have bright green or neon blue blood.

 

having organs or whatever might make hunting more interesting because it might make shot placement actually matter

Edited February 14 by Tabbot95
added some alterations regarding some of the sensitivities that might arise from having animals drain blood

[Topminator]

here is my 2 cents as a killing floor player who still wouldn't enjoy detailed butchering:

fighting is fast and chaotic (theoretically) so you don't focus too much on the detail, meanwhile butchering is slow and calm, so it's harder to not focus on the detail while you do your thing.

and the only problem is organs and carcasses, bones are not animal shaped enough to count, while chicken legs and steaks are food shaped so they're fine.

 

On 2/13/2026 at 1:29 PM, Yakkob said:

my thoughts exactly. its about time people grow a backbone.

that's not how you sell a product, the devs' job is to make a product that appeals to many people.

Not many people kill animals nowadays, expecially videogame players, so being a bit squeamish of that is pretty common, and the devs are already targetting a niche (people who find minecraft too brainless), which means the devs would target a niche of a niche.with that

imo having a hook and a silly hold right click with a knife/cleaver to drop items not all at once but a bit at a time (kinda like the falx does with drifters) is in my opinion the better option for both players and devs (no extra models needed and a reward for home processing) if you want blood draining then holding right click with a knife until the animal starts to release particles and putting a bucket under the hook is an idea to not add any new models

[Entaris]

On 2/14/2026 at 7:13 PM, Topminator said:

Not many people kill animals nowadays, expecially videogame players

Especially*

 

Also, HAH, what a strange take. Everyone I know (in a capital city in the Midwest) both hunts and plays video games.

 

Know what games they play? Hunting games.