Not sure why you can’t butcher a corpse or animal in RimWorld? There are a few different reasons, of course. You might have even gotten the “Cannot butcher creature: need material” message. Despite having some prospective meat ready to go in your stockpile zone! The problem is a lot simpler than it might seem at first. Though, like so much of RimWorld, the solution is far from obvious. That’s what this quick guide is for! Let’s take a look at the issues.
Obviously, the RimWorld “Cannot butcher creature: need material” message means you don’t have a creature to butcher. Full stop. What makes this confusing is the way that dead animals (yes, that includes humans) behave differently from other stuff that goes into your stockpiles.
Let’s assume you’ve done all the basic stuff. You should have an animal corpse (probably one that you killed) laying around. You should have then set it to “allow” so that your colonists (or Pawns as the game calls them) can collect it. The body should wind up in your stockpile zone. Assuming you set one up, of course.
Storing Animal Corpses in RimWorld
Your colonists will usually haul a corpse to the dumping stockpile first before taking it to the butcher table, which can lead to some confusion. You can potentially sidestep this possibility by selecting a specific colonist and telling them to prioritize butchering a creature. This will tell them to skip everything but that specific task. Yet it does need to be a colonist with Cook set as a work type.
A standard stockpile zone is meant for what RimWorld considers resources. That’s anything immediately useful for crafting. The latter, the dumping area, is meant for “junk.” Though that’s a bit of a misnomer. Junk just refers to anything that isn’t immediately useful. This commonly includes any kind of “chunks,” such as limestone chunks and steel slag chunks, which can be further refined into resources. They just require intermediary work. Like stonecutting.
In RimWorld, animal corpses are considered junk by default. That’s because they’re meant to be butchered into meat, which you can finally convert into meals. If left in the open too long, however, corpses will eventually deteriorate, just like any object you own. You can see it for yourself by looking at the health bar below the items’ names.
Rotting Vs. Deteriorating in RimWorld
However, carcasses also have a unique property. They can rot. This is separate from the deteriorating gauge and thus not as obvious. You need to instead keep an eye on whether the meat is “fresh” or “rotting.”
On the bright side, the game tells you how long you have left before a creature spoils. Just look under the “fresh” or “rotting” text in the info box. The process can take up to a few days without intervention in some cases.
On the not-so-bright side… Temperature also affects this value. RimWorld does a good job of informing you that meat kept in a cooler won’t spoil as quickly. However, it doesn’t draw as much attention to the fact that the reverse is also true. High temperatures — such as those caused by the heat wave event — will force food to spoil extremely fast.
This is why you can go from a valuable piece of meat to a useless piece of trash taking up space so quickly. The item might look fine. It might even make it to your standard stockpile! However, it can quickly rot into what the game considers junk. Your colonists won’t move it because it’s technically already stored and there’s nothing further to do with it. It just sits around taking up space and looking ugly.
In such cases, you can elect to burn rotting corpses with fire. This means, well, intentionally starting a fire near or inside your base. Not always the best move! Though you can also get rid of unwanted corpses via the crematorium. This helps keep your beauty level high.
Cooling Animal Corpses in RimWorld
TL;DR? Rotting and deteriorating are two different concepts with independent timers. Deteriorating will destroy an object outright (including food items and corpses). Yet rotting takes affect much faster and makes creatures unusable by the butcher table. There’s simply no good warning message to notify you this is the issue when you try. Meanwhile, if you already stored the corpse before or after it started rotting, your only options left are to burn it or let it disintegrate on its own.
Always set up refrigerated areas to avoid spoilage! You can do this by building a simple Cooler unit (though this requires electricity). Once that’s in place, set a stockpile or dumping stockpile that allows for corpses. Like so:
- Click on the stockpile area
- Click the brown “Storage” button above the info box
- Check “animal corpses” under the Corpses tab (and/or humanlike corpses if that’s your bag)
- Uncheck anything you don’t want to go in the fridge
- Set the priority higher than the default
That should hopefully help you figure out why you can’t butcher creatures in RimWorld! At the very least, it’s one of the more common issues that trips up questioning new players. Best of luck keeping those colonists fed quickly!
