“The wiki says I should be able to hook a large boar.” That is not a player being wrong about the wiki. It is a player who read a page that lists what a cut can produce without listing what has to be true first for it to produce it. “How to butcher Turkeys?” gets asked the same way a few days later, for the same underlying reason: the yield tables that circulate are organized by animal, when the thing that actually determines what you get is organized by gate.
Three gates, not one
Every animal-processing failure people report on the subreddit traces back to one of three independent checks, and a guide organized by animal cannot show you which one you failed because it never separates them:
- Tool tier. A dull or improvised blade caps what a cut can yield regardless of skill or animal size — this is the gate people forget exists, because the game lets the action complete and just quietly shorts the result.
- Skill level. Some cuts and some byproducts (hide condition, bone yield) are locked behind a butchering or foraging skill threshold, not behind the tool at all.
- Handling capacity. Larger animals — boar sits at the top of this — require a hook, a hanging point, or a strength/carry threshold before certain cuts are available, independent of both the tool and the skill.
A greyed cut or a disappointing yield on a boar is almost always gate 3. The same symptom on a chicken or a rabbit is almost never gate 3, because there is nothing to hang — which is exactly why “hook a large boar” shows up as its own distinct complaint instead of folding into the general butchering threads.
Which gate to check, by animal
This is organized by the axis that actually matters — which gate is load-bearing for that animal — rather than alphabetically like a wiki page, because that is the information a stuck player needs and a species list does not give them.
| Animal | Load-bearing gate | What people mistake it for | Check this first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken, rabbit | Tool tier only | “The skill isn’t high enough” | Blade condition, not your skill level |
| Turkey | Tool tier + skill | “The recipe is bugged” | Both blade and skill — turkey fails on either one alone |
| Deer | Skill level | “I need a better knife” | Your butchering skill first; the knife is rarely the blocker here |
| Boar (large) | Handling capacity | “The wiki is wrong” | Hook or hanging point access before anything else |
| Livestock (owned) | Skill level + handling | “Same as wild animals” | Domesticated animals route through a different check than wild ones — do not assume parity |
This per-animal breakdown is our read of the recurring complaint threads, not a developer-published table — the wiki confirms the three gates exist and that the hook is what unlocks large-animal handling, but it does not itself rank which gate is load-bearing per species. Treat the mapping as an observation built from repeated reports, and re-check it against your own attempts if a patch changes the underlying behavior.
The boar and livestock rows are the two that give opposite advice from the chicken row: on a chicken, buying a better knife fixes almost everything. On a boar, a better knife fixes nothing if you cannot hang it, and on livestock the wild-animal advice can send you looking for a handling gate that does not apply the same way. Applying the chicken fix to the boar problem is the single most common version of this complaint.
Why we are not publishing a yield-weight table
Every “expected meat/hide/bone yield in kilograms” table circulating right now was measured against a build or a mod configuration nobody can verify from outside, and treating one of those numbers as fact would be exactly the kind of unverifiable constant the rest of this site refuses to assert. What is stable, because it is a mechanic rather than a tuned number, is which gate governs which animal — that is what the table above gives you, and it does not go stale when a patch retunes a yield number underneath it.
What to do when all three gates check out
If your tool, skill and handling all clear and the cut is still missing, the two remaining candidates are narrow: a mod changing butchering behavior (test in an unmodded sandbox before concluding anything), or a specific animal state — already-decayed corpses lose yield options the fresher ones still have, which is a timing gate none of the three above cover, and the same decay clock that governs how fast a base needs clearing of corpses in the first place.
Sources
- Butchering — PZwiki — confirms butchering skill level changes cut quality/yield and that a butcher hook (not skill alone) unlocks more meat and unprocessed leather from an animal.
- Butcher Hook — PZwiki — the hook is a built, Carpentry-gated tile; large-animal handling routes through it rather than through the knife or the butchering skill.
- Butchering chickens — Steam Community discussions — friction evidence that players attribute low or confusing butchering results to skill level without knowing which gate is actually load-bearing; not used as a source for the mechanic itself.
