Sell your livestock as meat instead of hauling them to the dealer.
⚠️ CURRENTLY DOES NOT WORK WITH REALISTIC LIVESTOCK
If you run Realistic Livestock, do not install this yet.
I'm actively working on a fix and hope to have compatibility available before long.
Fully compatible with both the Animal Package – Vanilla Edition and Animal Package – AgroZone Edition.
What it does
The animal dealer pays you for a cow. The Mobile Butcher pays you for what's on the cow.
Call the butcher out to any pen on your farm, pick your animals, and a butcher's truck turns up and does the work on site. What you get back is boxed meat on pallets, sitting on your own farm, ready to sell wherever you like — the Farmers Market, a restaurant, the kiosk, anywhere that buys food products.
It's a better return than the dealer for most animals, and it gives your livestock somewhere to go besides a trailer.
Six products, one per animal
Animal Product
Cattle Beef
Water buffalo Buffalo
Pigs Pork
Chickens Chicken
Goats Goat
Sheep Mutton
No production chains, no intermediate steps, no half-finished goods cluttering your yard. One animal in, one product out.
Water buffalo pays a premium over beef — leaner, rarer, and less meat per animal.
Horses are not butcherable. Their pens don't even appear in the menu.
Build a Meat Pickup first
Before you can place an order, you need somewhere for the meat to go.
Open Construction → Production → Factories and place a Meat Pickup. It's cheap, it's one per farm, and it's where every pallet the butcher produces will be delivered.
Put it somewhere with decent access. That matters more than you'd think — see below.
Placing an order
Hit Left Shift + B anywhere on foot, or use the console command mbButcher.
Pick a pen, pick your animals, pick how many. Before you confirm you'll see exactly what you're getting:
how many kilograms of meat
what it's worth
the butcher's fee
what you'll actually clear
a warning if the animal dealer would pay you more
The animals leave your pen and the fee comes out of your account the moment you confirm — the butcher's already on his way, so you can't sell the same animals twice while he's driving.
Rules the butcher works to
Minimum age. Cattle and buffalo 12 months, pigs, sheep and goats 6 months, chickens 3 months. Under-age animals still show in the list, greyed out, with the age they need to reach. No slaughtering day-old lambs for a quick profit.
Minimum health. Below 50% health the butcher won't take the animal. At or above 50%, health makes no difference to what you're paid — a healthy animal is a healthy animal.
Difficulty. Prices are balanced so meat pays the same on Easy, Normal and Hard. No exploiting the difficulty bonus.
The truck, and what happens when the farm's in the way
This is the part I'm most pleased with, and the part that took the longest.
When you place an order, a box truck spawns out on the road network and drives to your Meat Pickup under AI control. He parks a short distance short of it, does the work, and then drives away again. It's a nice bit of theatre and it makes the whole thing feel like a service you called rather than a menu you clicked.
But farms are farms. Some are down a track the AI doesn't know about. Some yards are too tight for a truck to turn round in. Some maps just have patchy AI networks. Across four maps and eight farms in testing, the truck struggled to get in or out of most of them.
So the driving is best effort, and it never blocks your order:
He tries to drive in. If the route won't validate, or he gets wedged, or he simply isn't making progress, he stops trying and appears parked at the pickup instead.
Same on the way out. If he can't drive off, he just leaves.
Either way the work gets done, the meat gets delivered, and you're never left waiting on a truck stuck against a fence.
On a farm with good road access you'll see the whole trip. On a tight yard you'll see him turn up and get on with it. Both are fine and neither costs you anything.
Where he parks is chosen at run time — he stands off from the pickup rather than parking on top of it, so he isn't sitting on your pallets and has room to pull away.
The Meat Pickup itself
Marked on the ground so you can find it, and it'll take a stack of pallets across two rows before it fills up.
Walk up to it and you'll see what's waiting. If it ever backs up because the pallets aren't being cleared, it tells you rather than silently dropping your meat — and it releases everything the moment you move a pallet out of the way, like a silo would.
Anything queued survives a save and quit.
Configurable
butcherConfig.xml sits in the mod folder and is plain, commented XML. You can change:
the value multiplier, globally or per animal
the butcher's fee per animal
how many animals per visit
minimum ages
the minimum health threshold
how long the work takes, and whether he drives in at all
If you'd rather he just appeared and got on with it, turn the driving off and he will.
Notes
Multiplayer — untested. Everything here was built and tested in single player. I haven't been able to test it in multiplayer at all, so I genuinely don't know how it behaves there. If you play MP and you're willing to give it a go, I'd appreciate it — send me anything that breaks and I'll get it sorted.
Realistic Livestock — not compatible yet. See the warning at the top. A fix is in progress.
Fully compatible with both the Animal Package – Vanilla Edition and Animal Package – AgroZone Edition.
No other mods required.
Bug reports welcome. Tell me the map, the farm, and what you were butchering.
