Human meat

See also: Meat (disambiguation), Meat, and Insect meat

Human meat is meat obtained when a cook butchers humans.

Acquisition

Human meat is obtained when a cook butchers humans. Humans have a base Meat Yield of 140, but the actual number depends on the Butchery Efficiency of the butcher, damage of the corpse, and a number of other factors.

Summary

Human meat is like any other raw food. It can be used to create meals, or combined with other ingredients to produce fine, lavish meals, pemmican and kibble. However, most humans despise eating human meat, which is cannibalism.

The colony receives a -6 moodlet simply by butchering a human, while the butcher themselves receives a social penalty and another -5 mood. Actually eating raw human flesh gives a massive -20 mood penalty, which is only reduced to -15 mood if cooked. Psychopaths and pawns with bloodlust ignore the butchering penalty, but hate cannibalism all the same. A nutrient paste dispenser won't mask human meat, and pawns receive debuffs for both human meat and nutrient paste.

Meanwhile, Cannibals enjoy human meat, gaining +20 mood for eating it raw or +15 for eating it cooked. Both the raw and cooked cannibalism (de)buffs can apply at the same time. Mood can also be swayed (positive or negative) by a pawn's Ideoligion.

Processing human meat, once it has been butchered, incurs no penalties. Human meat can be made into meals, used for animal feed, processed in biofuel refinery for chemfuel, or put in a biosculpter pod and won't feel bad about it.

Analysis

Butchering a human is already upsetting for a good majority of colonists. So in a colony not filled with cannibals, eating it should only be for absolute emergencies, in extreme biomes like sea ice, or to please a cannibal on verge of mental break. For a cannibal, cooking the meat into a fine meal or carnivore fine meal gives the same net buff (+20) as eating raw, and either meal is more efficient than raw food for nutrition. Alternatively, the massive mood debuff might make human meat situationally useful. It may force a tortured artist into a mental break, or help make ideoligious conversion easier, namely from a Crisis of Belief.

Using human meat for carnivorous animals (whenever raw or kibble) isn't cannibalism, so the animals won't mind. It may be wiser to leave corpses unbutchered, as the butchering itself has a fairly large penalty to both the butcher and the colony. Note that colonists still don't like seeing corpses, so watch out for your haulers.

Its market value is only 0.8 silver, or 40% of regular meat. However, processing it into meals or chemfuel will ignore its origin when considering market value.

Ideoligion makes this a different story. With the Cannibalism meme and/or precept, raiders become a completely viable source of both food and positive moodlets. Setting the precept to Required (Ravenous) gives the greatest mood buffs, +6 per meal, but also gives a strong debuff when human meat isn't available. This is also possible in the base game with a colony entirely comprised of the cannibal trait, though there's no way to "convert" future recruits.