Butchering is its own skill in Build 42. It turns trapped rabbits, hunted deer and farm animals into meat, bones, organs and leather, and leather feeds tailoring and blacksmithing. Raising and hunting animals is on the animals page. Updated for Build 42.21 Stable and 42.22 Pre-Release, November 2026.
About 34 tools can butcher: kitchen, hunting, fillet, pocket and stone knives, meat cleavers, hatchets and machetes, plus their forged versions. The blade must be sharp; dull ones do not work.
The butcher hook is for large animals. It needs Carpentry 3, 2 planks, 2 nails, 1 large hook and a hammer. One recipe page lists 5 nails and 1 plank instead, so check the build menu. Build it outdoors or in a shed: butchering is messy.
Rabbits, rats, squirrels, birds, mice and frogs use the Butcher Small Animal recipe with a sharp knife or cleaver. No hook needed. Fish use Slice Fillet, which gives two fillets per fish and has no skill requirement (game files). Both give 10 base XP.
A Steam forum report says some dead animals arrive as inventory items rather than corpses and can only be cooked whole; we could not confirm that for 42.21. Catching them is on trapping and fishing.
Build 42's animals include chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, rabbits, deer and rats. Hang a large carcass on the hook and work through the steps: drain the blood, take the head, skin it, then take the meat. The hook gives leather or feathers, blood, organs, meat and bones, scaled by the animal's size and weight.
Crude-tanned leather is what the blacksmithing bellows needs.
Small animals and fish fillets give 10 XP each. On large animals XP comes from each step and scales with the yield, though the exact numbers are unconfirmed. Starting skill: Rancher +3, Chef +2, Fishing Guide +1, and the Hunter and Keen Cook traits +1 each. Books run from "Butchering Basics" (I) to "The Ergonomics of Tools in Meat Cutting Operations" (V), x3 to x16 (skill books).
Opinion Level on fish and rabbits until you have a hook, then save the big animals for when the book bonus is active.
Only for large animals. Small animals and fish just need a sharp blade.
Most sharp knives, cleavers, hatchets and machetes, including forged ones, as long as they are not dull.
Scrape the hide on a softening beam, tan it with brain tan in a barrel, then dry it on a rack.
Rancher, with +3 Butchering.
Yes. The hook gives bones along with meat, blood and organs.
Butchering details come from The Indie Stone's blog (the hook and its outputs), pzfans.com's recipe database and PinDrop, with projectzomboid.wiki for the leather steps. Sources: PinDrop: Butchering · The Indie Stone: D'ya Like Them Grapplez · pzfans: butcher hook · pzfans: small animals · projectzomboid.wiki: Butchering. Your game is the final word: if it disagrees with us, tell us and we will fix the page.