Remove butchering, exsanguination

[and into]

One glorious day we may see food/hunger removal, but that requires changing something that (however we may feel about it) does occupy a big place in the game. In the meantime, I propose a more modest change that would be a very large convenience and quality of life improvement without requiring any real rebalancing.

Here's how it would work:

+ If you worship Gozag, there is no effective change. You get gold from killing and whatever items the enemy was carrying, nothing else.
+ For all species except vampire and mummy, chunks drop automatically upon killing any chunk-giving enemy. For mummy and vamps, no chunks are generated.
+ For Vp, blood-giving corpses automatically drop potions of blood.
+ Chunks are placed under other items rather than on top (reduces clutter). By default autopickup is set to gather up the chunks, as currently, and this can be turned off on the \ screen.
+ Hides are automatically generated and drop at current effective rate.
+ Kiku's Corpse Drop also gives chunks or blood in accordance with the above rules, but not hides.

This is an ever-so-tiny buff to Vp and maybe arguably Gh, if you have an active imagination (there are some very contrived situations you can come up with where this helps Gh). You also occasionally get like one more zombie rather than skeleton from animate dead, I suppose, but this eliminates what was in practice an uninteresting pseudo-choice anyway.

In return you get a huge interface improvement for everyone. Really this seems like merely a logical extension of all the other changes that have streamlined inventory management of chunks and those that removed interactions with chunks other than eating (e.g. sublimation of blood, simulucrum). It also improves on the convenience of eating directly off the floor.

I hope I don't need to run through all the bad interface hassles that come from current butchering and chunk mechanics, but if you want to stare into the abyss for a few moments, just envision the after-combat ritual a GhNe can be subjected to after killing a variety of mixed-strength enemies in a corridor.

Counterarguments: "lost flavor" and ...... ?

EDIT: To clarify, corpses would drop as currently, but chunks would automatically be generated with the corpses where appropriate, in accordance with the rules proposed above.

[Siegurt]

What about necromancy?

Are we animating chunks now?

And since chunks are all the same, what do we get a zombie of?

Do you mean to say that there are no more zombies for corpse eaters, only skeletons? (That is a pretty big nerf, skeletons are weaker than zombies by a not insignificant margin)

[and into]

Where did I say chunks replace corpses? You get corpses *and* chunks. Yes, this means you can get slightly more zombies than skeletons as a necromancer or Yred follower, but that's really a pseudo-choice anyway (as I said), because there is so much nutrition available in the game. In all cases where it matters you can already get the zombies you want, in practice, anyway. Even as TrNe or GhNe.

[Floodkiller]

Just get rid of chunks, e on an edible corpse eats the corpse.

[johlstei]

My proposal was that butchering and picking up chunks doesn't use a turn and takes no time if no monsters are in view. I stopped pushing for it because I found that auto_butcher was recently added, and I'm not a speedrunner so that was mostly sufficient for me to not worry about it. I'd still like to waste less piety though and I bet I could improve the heuristic beyond "every edible corpse".

[and into]

@Floodkiller: I would say that, if some (brave, really cool and awesome) developer were to take the time to streamline chunks further, he or she should just make that streamlining total rather than stopping at third base.

Under my proposal, chunks can be entirely automated. We should not make all non-mummies care about where corpses are located, when the only good reason to care about corpses (and actual decisions regarding them) involve a small subset of characters.

****

In general: I'd hope no one thinks that the "zombie" vs. "chunks + skeleton" is a meaningful decision in practice, but if so I'm happy to argue why it isn't.

[njvack]

It's slightly off-topic, but I'd suggest that if the "zombie or chunks + skele" pseudo-choice goes away, an added bonus might be that Animate Skeleton can more obviously go away.

[and into]

Yes, animate skeleton really should be removed, but that is somewhat tangential to removing butchering.

[dpeg]

This proposal sounds very good to me. I'll try to remember guiding ##crawl-dev towards it.

A word on history: a few versions ago, there was a dedicated effort to do something about food. This stalled, because it turned out that the visions were very different. What I had in mind (and probably badly communicated to boot): there should be only permafood. Playing lots of Gozag characters gets you a feeling for how far you can go with just permafood. (I suggested to make exceptions for the special-diet species Tr, Gh, Vp, just for simplicity of the code change.) As a matter of fact, for almost all characters food does matter, and it would be possible (if you don't have one of the feeding gods G, K, Z -- anyone else?), that players actually starve. This would happen regardless of the food generation rate, and is something not everyone was happy to look forward too. (I don't have such qualms.)
Such a change would not address the fact that hunger costs are splattered all over the place; this is because I think it's harder to get that right. Permafood-only means that players have to have access to more food items than now, and that's another point where opinions can depart...

Anyway, and into's proposal is very reasonable.

[archaeo]

Just heading this off at the pass, but let's keep this thread devoted to butchering and exsanguination and leave the wider food reform discussion to some other thread (preferably one in which everyone exclaims "archaeo was right" and food is removed forever).

[neil]

Do try out auto_butcher = true. It has some of the UI benefits of your proposal, though it does still take a (non-realtime) turn. The reasons it isn't on by default are animation and Fedhas. So think the important gameplay implications of your proposal are the ones that would also "fix" auto_butcher:

• Fedhas doesn't have a food-piety/toadstool tradeoff.
• Necromancy doesn't have a food-ally tradeoff.

elliptic pointed out one UI problem with monsters giving both corpses and chunks, which is that you're now guaranteed to have a multi-item stack, with all the annoyances that implies (having to step on the square to see what's there, needing a menu for interactions, longer messages). Then again, if corpses become only relevant for Fedhas and Necromancy, they could perhaps be special-cased to always be revealed, even under other items (just as they are already special-cased to be non-pickuppable).

[goodcoolguy]

Just get rid of chunks, e on an edible corpse eats the corpse.

This is the right idea. I don't get the proposal in the OP. The problem with chunks as I see it is not so much fiddling with the corpses via c, but with the interaction between inventory and the temporary food items generated, as well as the horribly short interval of playtime you get between having to butcher and eat more chunks.

[Rast]

Then, supposedly, people would travel back to corses to eat them.

[goodcoolguy]

You may be surprised to hear that people already do this...

[Midn8]

Honestly Id be happy if they just made chunks not take up inventory space because I have to keep figuring out what random piece of trash was autopickedup.

[Siegurt]

Honestly Id be happy if they just made chunks not take up inventory space because I have to keep figuring out what random piece of trash was autopickedup.

Shift d drops the last thing you picked up, if that is helpful to you.

[Airwolf]

...

elliptic pointed out one UI problem with monsters giving both corpses and chunks, which is that you're now guaranteed to have a multi-item stack, with all the annoyances that implies (having to step on the square to see what's there, needing a menu for interactions, longer messages). Then again, if corpses become only relevant for Fedhas and Necromancy, they could perhaps be special-cased to always be revealed, even under other items (just as they are already special-cased to be non-pickuppable).

FR: reveal all items in a stack without walking onto the tile.

[dpeg]

FR: reveal all items in a stack without walking onto the tile.

I am sure this is not the solution.


The reason is that this change would incentivise the following, very unfun behaviour: check all contents of all (newly created) piles in LOS. The shortest way would probably be Ctrl-X, but it'd mean that you look over many Ctrl-X lists in a game. It is much better to have move (whether manually or automatically) to piles and look at their contents one by one. (Of course, one could think of more radical solutions, such as splashing items to avoid piles in the first place, but let's not digress that far...)

[duvessa]

It'd be best to not have piles.

[VeryAngryFelid]

It is not that different from current crawl.

  Code:

There is a staircase leading out of the dungeon, spattered with blood here.
Items here: % :: ? [[[[ |

you still need to press either ',' or ctrl+x to see what those are.

[VeryAngryFelid]

It'd be best to not have piles.

Are you suggesting to nerf fighting in kill holes by removing all loot from previously killed monsters when another monster dies in the same place? I agree.

[duvessa]

No, I'm not suggesting that. That would be insane. But it would be good if monsters dropped few or no items, and items dropped by monsters would try to land on a nearby empty square if the square under the monster already has an item.

[goodcoolguy]

FR: reveal all items in a stack without walking onto the tile.

I am sure this is not the solution.


The reason is that this change would incentivise the following, very unfun behaviour: check all contents of all (newly created) piles in LOS. The shortest way would probably be Ctrl-X, but it'd mean that you look over many Ctrl-X lists in a game. It is much better to have move (whether manually or automatically) to piles and look at their contents one by one. (Of course, one could think of more radical solutions, such as splashing items to avoid piles in the first place, but let's not digress that far...)

At present, your choices are manually move over all piles to look at what's in them or trust your character's life to autoexplore. Improved ctrl-X obviously offers a better alternative. But you know what would be really, really keen? If you didn't have to hit ctrl-X to see what the stuff is in the first place. Kind of like how you don't have to look at the map to see there are monsters around.

[Quazifuji]

I fully support this proposal. Sounds like it's basically the same as auto-butcher, except with all the situations where auto butcher is bad removed. It's a slight but mostly insignificant buff to necromancers and going for low turn count, and maybe a slightly larger but to Fedhas (but still very small overall), but Fedhas can always have his/her piety generation lowered to compensate if necessary, and the convenience of the change seems worth it to me.

It's slightly off-topic, but I'd suggest that if the "zombie or chunks + skele" pseudo-choice goes away, an added bonus might be that Animate Skeleton can more obviously go away.

If Animate Skeleton's only reason for being in the game is that it makes it slightly less of a sacrifice for necromancers when they need to get chunks/hides out of a corpse, then it should have been removed from the game years ago. But out of all the various debates about animate skeleton I've seen over the years, I don't think I've ever seen that defense, and if I have it certainly isn't anywhere close to the top of the list.

That's not to say animate skeleton doesn't need changing/removal, just that the changing/removal of animate skeleton is unrelated to butchering changes.

[jwoodward48ss]

Just have every butchered corpse produce a skeleton. Now you can achieve what Animate Skeleton used to do by butchering that fire dragon corpse, then animating its guaranteed skeleton.