Guide to Butchering in Warhammer Online post-1.2 Call to Arms

Of the several different gathering skills available to your character on Warhammer Online, Butchering is the skill for the resourceful player looking to gain the most from his (or her) kills. Butchering yields bounty from a corpse otherwise unavailable characters without this skill.

So how do you butcher? Butchering is one of the easiest skills to perform in Warhammer Online. Before butchering can take place, you need to have a body to butcher. Go kill something. Besides being dead, the two things required of a corpse before looting can take place are as follows:

a) The corpse needs to first be fully looted. If there's anything left for you to take, you won't be able to butcher it.

b) Flies need to be surrounding the corpse. Once you're sure these two points have been met, hold your curser over the corpse you'd like to chop up. If it's good to go, your curser will change into a butcher's knife and it's time to go Sweeney Todd on that body.

Just like in all the skill categories, your skill level will determine the level of the animals that you can butcher. When you first begin, you will be able to butcher non-sentient creatures up to level five. As your personal skill level increases, so will the level limit of the creatures you can butcher.

In order to gain more skill points, you will need to butcher animals that are within the range appropriate for your level. In other words, the creature will need to be at least a green level in order for you to gain any sort of forward momentum. While you can still butcher creatures below you for their yields, you will not increase your skill.

An important thing to keep in mind when attempting to butcher in Warhammer Online – not everything you kill can be butchered. The game differentiates between sentient and non-sentient creatures . A sentient creature is one that has an attributed sense of higher intelligence – these are the creatures that wear clothes, speak, or are in some way humanoid. While you can kill a sentient creature, you cannot butcher one. Non-sentient creatures, however, are ripe for your knife. Animals are fair game for the butcher, so have at it. As you will read below, humanoids must be scavenged, rather than butchered.