[TIP] How to force stacking of butchered demon items while in adventure maps.

[Overwatch]

EDIT:

It occurred to me that this should be in the guides section, so I just tried copying it over. But it keeps giving me an error.
Maybe it's because I don't own the game on Steam?
(I buy on GOG when I can because I ALWAYS prefer DRM free.)
Oh well. I guess I'll leave it here then. Maybe it will get linked in the pinned guide thread so it doesn't get buried and disappear.

---

I'm at the stage of my game where I can now easily kill core-shaping demons.
And since I was tired of having temperature problems on my minions, I decided to farm up some Demon Beast Hide.
So I take a quick solo trip to Bladesmith Tomb, which has 4x demons...
...only to realize that, even with the unluckiest of drops, I can't carry it all with 1 character.

This annoyed me.

Then, a magical accident happened. I killed a demon, and the second demon that had aggroed stepped forward onto the first demon's dying body.

I killed this second demon. Then I butchered them both.

At first, I thought that the game had bugged out and I'd only gotten the drops off one demon. But then I noticed that the items had STACKED THEMSELVES.

Then I spent FAR too much time trying to get more demons to die in the same place. It takes forever. WAY more time than you save by doing multiple trips.

So, I spent more time figuring out exactly how the stacking works. And I'm happy to say that it is COMPLETELY controllable. And you DON'T need to get the bodies to stack on the same tile.

Here is how the item dropping/generating rules work.

1. Items of the same type will stack if the newly created item is placed on the SAME tile as one that it can stack with.
   

2. When a new item is created, it will always go to the nearest available space in the following order.
   
   [_]  is the entity GENERATING the items.
   
    5  6  7 
    4 [1] 8 
    3  2  9
    

3. When a character drops an item, it will always go to the nearest available space in the following order.
   
   [_]  is the entity DROPPING the items.
   
    4  5  6 
    3 [_] 7 
    2  1  8
    

4. Newly created items are always created in the same order, based on the drop table. We can find the drop table for Demons under the creature definition in

   [GAME_FOLDER]\Settings\NPC\Race\Race_JYAnimal.xml

---

Let's look at the Rabbit Demon's drop table quickly.
(... indicates a bunch of removed lines. This is already a WALL of text. And I also don't want to overwhelm people who are unfamiliar with XML or coding in general. What I'm about to do is bad enough...)

<RaceDef Name="JYRabbit" Parent="JYBase">
	<DisplayName>妖兔</DisplayName>
...
...
	<EliteDrops>
		<Drop MinJinJie="1" MaxJinJie="12">
			<Items>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_MonsterBlood</ThingDef>
					<Count>3</Count>
					<Rate>0.25</Rate>
				</li>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_MonsterBlood</ThingDef>
					<Count>1</Count>
					<Rate>1</Rate>
				</li>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_YaoLeather</ThingDef>
					<Count>15</Count>
					<Rate>1</Rate>
				</li>
			</Items>
		</Drop>
		<Drop MinJinJie="4" MaxJinJie="9">
			<Items>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_YaoLeather</ThingDef>
					<Count>35</Count>
					<Rate>0.25</Rate>
				</li>
			</Items>
		</Drop>
		<Drop MinJinJie="7" MaxJinJie="12">
			<Items>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_SoulPearl</ThingDef>
					<Count>1</Count>
					<Rate>1</Rate>
				</li>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_MonsterBlood</ThingDef>
					<Count>2</Count>
					<Rate>0.25</Rate>
				</li>
			</Items>
		</Drop>
		<Drop MinJinJie="10" MaxJinJie="12">
			<Items>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_YaoLeather</ThingDef>
					<Count>40</Count>
					<Rate>1</Rate>
				</li>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_YaoLeather1</ThingDef>
					<Count>15</Count>
					<Rate>0.2</Rate>
				</li>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_MonsterBlood</ThingDef>
					<Count>5</Count>
					<Rate>0.25</Rate>
				</li>
			</Items>
		</Drop>
		
		<Drop MinJinJie="10" MaxJinJie="12">
			<Items>
				<li>
					<ThingDef>Item_Yao_RabbitLuck</ThingDef>
					<Count>1</Count>
					<Rate>0.1</Rate>
				</li>
			</Items>
		</Drop>
	</EliteDrops>
...
...
</RaceDef>

Now, if you aren't used to looking at code, that might look like a confusing mess. But it really IS pretty simple.

This is the

<EliteDrops>

section.

You can see that it is split into several sections called

<Drop ... >

Each of these sections contains a list of

<Items>

Each list item starts with a

<li>

ends with a

</li>

and contains

• <ThingDef>

  which is the "thing".
  

• <Count>

  which is how many of that "thing" to drop.
  

• <Rate>

  which is how likely the "thing" is to drop. 1.0 is 100%, 0.1 is 10%, etcetera.

So if we look back at that section above, we see the following items, from top to bottom, in this order (I'm ignoring duplicates. If a duplicate is spawned it will be combined with any previous ones. All the actual "dropping" of items happens after all the loot is generated.)

1. Item_MonsterBlood

   which is Beast Blood.
   

2. Item_YaoLeather

   which is Demon Beast Hide.
   

3. Item_YaoLeather1

   which is Tough Demon Beast Hide.
   

4. Item_SoulPearl

   which is Soul Pearl. (I know, right?)
   

5. Item_Yao_RabbitLuck

   which is Rabbit Demon's Foot.

---

NOTE: There are Chinese AND English game files. The English ones follow the exact same location structure and naming as the Chinese ones, only they are in

[GAME_FOLDER]\Settings\Language\OfficialEnglish\Settings\...

instead. These English files ONLY contain the lines that need to be replaced. If you need to find something specific, you can look in the English files, find the Name= identifier , and then search the Chinese file of the same name for that identifier.

As an example, the Rabbit Demon definition above is 172 lines. But in the English file it is only the following 6 lines.

<Text Name="JYRabbit">
	<DisplayName>Monster Rabbit</DisplayName>
	<Desc>Animal that has gained power without awakening intelligence: Monster Rabbit</Desc>
	<MaleName>Male</MaleName>
	<FemaleName>Female</FemaleName>
</Text>

---

So, now that we know what items are going to drop, and the order that they drop, how do we make this work?

It's actually really easy.

1. Kill the Demons. Ideally you don't want them next to any walls/objects because it makes placing the items in the right places more of a pain. But it will work in any position EXCEPT if the corpse ends up on top of something, which CAN happen, but it's rare. One of the turtle demons got stuck standing on a lamp when it died a single time for me. That meant I couldn't drop the blood on the same tile, which screwed up the whole order. Knowing what I know now, I could have just adjusted everything forward by one number like I would for any other blocked tile. But I digress.
   
2. Butcher ONE of them. Pick the items up.
   
3. Now find the tile that the next demon is sitting on. It won't always be the center. The sprites for each kind of demon will put the "center" tile in different places. Just highlight the corpse and find the one with the square.
   
4. Move your character to the tile NORTH of the demon corpse.
   
5. Drop the Demon Blood you picked up from the first butchering. It should end up on the SAME tile as the corpse. If not, pick it up and check your position. NOTE: sometimes things end up a little "higher" than normal. that is OK. If an item looks a LITTLE off, less than half a square or so, it is fine. They are still on the same "tile" It's just perspective screwing with you.
   
6. Now move down 1 square to stand on top of the Blood and the corpse.
   
7. Drop the Demon Beast Hide. It should now be directly south of the corpse.
   
8. If you were lucky enough to get any Tough Demon Beast Hide, drop it next. It should go in the next available drop position.
   
9. If you use a stacking mod that includes items like Soul Pearls and the Demon trinkets... Drop the Pearls next, then the trinkets. If you aren't using a mod, those items can't stack anyway so don't worry.
   
10. You should still be standing on the corpse. You can now butcher it.
    
11. Pick up the items that should have stacked.

This will cause the newly generated Beast Blood to land on the same tile as the corpse, which also has the first stack of Blood on it, and it will stack.
The Demon Beast Hide comes next and stacks.
Then, if you get rare hide and there is already some from a previous kill, it will stack. If you didn't get it on an earlier kill, and you get it now, it will be placed in the next open spot.

Once you do it a few times, it should be really fast, unless you have to fiddle with items to push them around corners or something.

Now I can come home with a stack of 90+ Demon Beast Hides AND still have room for all the Blood. And still have room for lucky Pearls, Rare Hides, trinkets, or even map loot.

[Overwatch]

UPDATE:
It also works for animals on those maps.
It might actually be useful RIGHT AWAY since you can double the meat from Nanping if you kill the 6-8 wild boars on the map(with your DOG. Not your cultivator or you will get the negative karma for "killing mortals")

[iguana]

A good detailed write up.
Some points that could be clarified:

Slaughtering V Butchering
The process of converting corpses to materials is referred as Butchering in the Official English version. Related properties also use that terminology. Slaughtering could be understood as turning the beast into a corpse.

Simplification of the loot list
JinJie is referring to the state of the beast. Since the state of beasts on maps isn't that high, leaving out the higher drops can reduce the amount of information the reader needs to go through.

Alternatives
Instead of understanding that detailed write up, a similar effect can be accomplished by sending another disciple, just to carry the drops. Or more if two aren't enough.

[WabbaCat]

Originally posted by iguana:

Alternatives
Instead of understanding that detailed write up, a similar effect can be accomplished by sending another disciple, just to carry the drops. Or more if two aren't enough.

This is what I was thinking....
Doesnt seem worth the trouble to go through in most cases.

However, there were a few times where the info would have helped. So, thanks Overwatch!