Butchering and preserving

Look at a carcass with ALT. Work goes in order: Field dress it, Skin it, then Quarter and take meat. Small game can be cleaned where it lies or picked up whole. You can also Drag a carcass or load it into a vehicle.

• You need a knife in your pockets. A hunting knife is best: it's faster and gives better pelts. A machete, hatchet or axe works, but slowly. Your gun is put away for you while you work and handed back after.
• Field dressing takes about fourteen seconds, skinning eighteen and each quartering pass sixteen. A bone saw makes quartering much quicker.
• Each pass lays the joints on the ground beside you: hindquarter, shoulder, backstraps, and neck and trim. Pick them up before they're lost, about half an hour later.
• Pelts come out Pristine, Good or Poor, and a poor one only gives scraps. A good knife makes better pelts.

Why speed matters

Meat starts to go off until the animal is gutted, and it goes off twice as fast for every ten degrees of heat. On a hot desert day, gut it first and worry about the rest after. An infected animal carries the Bloom: handling it bare-handed or eating its meat doses you.

Smoking rack

Craft a Smoking Rack Kit by hand and build it within three meters of a fire. Look at it and choose Salt and hang raw meat. It holds six joints of venison, pork, beef, mutton or other red meat, and uses one salt for every three joints. Keep the fire lit and, after about forty-five minutes of smoke, you get Smoked Meat that keeps for about a week. Without a fire the meat spoils on the rack, and finished meat left hanging for a day goes rotten. Fish go on a Fish Drying Rack instead.

Salt curing at the fire

At a fire, one raw meat and one salt make three strips of jerky, which never spoils, and three raw meat with a salt make three smoked meat. Pemmican keeps for about two weeks.

Rabbit and fowl are too small for the rack. Cook them fresh, or cure them into jerky at the fire.