Butcher Table

The Butcher Table breaks whole animals into the parts the rest of the colony cooks with. A carcass goes in and comes out as portions — 104 from a pig, 100 from a cow, 45 from a lamb, 35 from a deer and 25 from a chicken — and those portions are then cut into joints, steaks, trim and mince.

Nothing here starts from scratch: carcasses come from livestock and hunting, so the table depends on whoever is raising or bringing them in. Almost everything it turns out goes on to the kitchen, which makes this a quiet bottleneck in the food economy.

Every named cut is priced in portions, so a carcass is really a budget — pork blade takes fourteen where pork ear takes two. Mince is a three-step chain, portion to trim to mince, not a single cut. And level 2 is nearly free: a pork loin costs twelve portions and cuts again into twelve pork chops, for thirty experience instead of twenty.

Start on chicken — the cheapest carcass to replace, and every level-0 step takes a minute flat. Hides are not handled here; scrap hide belongs to the leather tanner.