Mark Jacobs gave an odd example regarding mobs and the difference between butchering and scavenging: “If it’s naked you have to butcher it. If it’s smart enough to have clothes, then you have to scavenge”. We have to say that definitely is a good way to distinguish between the two skills because technically scavenging and butchering are like reflections in a mirror.
To butcher a mob, three conditions should be met. First, the corpse must be completely rotten (flies around the corpse are a good cue). Second, the player needs to know the proper skill, because without it the corpse will be useless. Finally, the player or mob needs to be at least level five to six to execute one of the two skills; at the beginning the skill won’t be available to all if you are playing in a group, but after the skill is learned by someone in the group it will become known to the rest of the individuals some time later.
The items received from Scavenging are used mostly in the crafts of skills as well as cultivating (a trait shared with Butchering whose items are mostly for Apothecary recipes); one cool piece of information about Scavenging is that you will find items that will help the growth of harvest, as well as gold dust (50% chance of finding according to my experience). Even if Scavengers help a lot to contribute to the growth of other skills, most of the time they are practically useless as skills can be acquired or bought in other places and Scavenging is not as useless sometimes as Butchering or Salvaging.
But, there are positive aspects to Scavenging and Butchering; scavengers can interact with more corpses than butchers as butchers need to find the proper NPC mobs before doing anything, they won’t interact very well with “more intelligent” mobs.
Check the next page for a few hints and tricks you can use while scavenging.