This would be super annoying.

And I find the opposite, corpses simply vanishing into the ether (sometimes almost as soon as they're killed) to be super annoying. At least this way you could still derive a little satiation from them, so it wouldn't be a total loss.

Pretty much this. I'd rather not have to drop piles of bones all the time.

[edit]FWIW, thematically it seems that dropped corpses have actually already been butchered in some way. A typical corpse weighs like 120s, which is like 6 kg. Presumably the PC only takes the edible bits, and leaves the bones, organs, etc. behind. Otherwise corpses should weigh ~10x as much as they currently do.

To be fair, you don't "have to" drop them. Personally, I eat them. I suppose it's all a matter of playing style.

I'm rarely so desperate for food that it's worthwhile to eat bones.

I disagree. The most annoying thing related to corpses is how fast they can pretty much 'evaporate', sometimes on the very next turn after picking them up. That's ridiculous and that's the really annoying stuff.

This RFE wouldn't make it annoying. How often do you actually carry corpses around with you until they rot away? I only do that in case I want/need to eat that corpse but can't since I'm bloated already.
How many corpses do you carry around as a food supply? I'd say no more than 3 since rations are very common and provide better satiation value at a fixed weight of 100s or 200s.
Consider that you get one bone every 30s or 60s of corpse weight. This is perfectly acceptable, I don't see a problem with this RFE, it would be a very nice feature, bones are light and stack. What's the big deal?
I would also simply drop the excessive bones, though occasionally they are useful early on when you find a blink dog and wish to tame it so it can summon more of its kind in combat. This in turn gives a chance to generate a useful corpse.
However, if most of the people actually vote against this, I will post an RFE that sets a minimum time that has to elapse before a corpse starts to rot and an additional, longer period of time before it rots away.
Something has to be done about corpses rotting on the spot, right after the creature dies.

I think this would be better. I have had many corpses rot 1 turn later, and a few disintegrating the second they're dropped.

In the early game, a PC with food preservation can easily go without rations at all and solely rely on corpses for food. If I'm playing a farmer or something, I might have one iron ration at most, and carry around eight or ten (preferably cooked) corpses. Corpses give as much satiation as rations, so you're much better of in terms of carrying capacity to be holding a bunch of goblin corpses than a few large rations--rations are basically emergency food, as far as I'm concerned, and corpses are my primary food source until I reach the Arena. Having them rot into bones is annoying because then you're stuck with a pile of useless bones in your inventory that you have to remember to drop all the time. I don't even bother to pick bones up.

If you don't want corpses to rot away quickly, get Food Preservation.

votes yes, I like the delay of rotting a bit longer than the bones - but I would pick up more edible corpses if I knew I could get a little satiation from the bones.

At the beginning I typically use iron and large rations as disposable balast to run around very strained and train strength. They don't decompose and can be found commonly.
I normally don't have any problems with lack of food with any characters even without food preservation. I eat corpses off the ground but prefer to carry rations.
I guess it's just a personal preference if you want to run around with a bunch of goblin corpses. On a side note, corpses should weigh much more than they do right now.
A crystal tower shield has 260s of weight but an ogre corpse has 240? Not to mention orcs, goblins etc, weighing between 60-120s. Doesn't make sense to me.

Also, two additional things: you can't get food preservation without a wish if you don't start with it.
Secondly, skill or no skill it's unacceptable to have a corpse rot away one turn after it was generated, there is simply nothing that can reasonably explain this.
Don't tell me it's a rare situation because it's not. I have this happen to me every game, on every character.
If not the first then second, third or tenth turn - any period of time in hours that for all intents and purposes is insufficient to even have the rotting started is just not right.
I'm not just talking about useful corpses like blink dogs, though it applies to them more than any other corpses.
I often have 2 blink dog corpses rot away right after picking them up or even before. Again, this isn't a case of food preservation or it's lack. It's just common sense which also does not affect game balance negatively.
I feel this thread at least in part addresses that issue. Rotting corpses should leave bones and that's it.

BTW. In the more distant past I had several situations where heaps of 10 or more bones allowed me to avoid starvation until a merchant with food was reached.
I can reasonably imagine newbies finding themselves in that situation pretty often.

Basically this.

This is a really, really, really bad idea. I think JS has the right idea in that the corpses you pick up are already butchered in some way.

Well, I hate to tell you this, but it IS a rare situation. Granted, I'm usually spamming the left/right button to clear vaults in the endgame, so I'm unlikely to notice corpse disappearance there, but I haven't noticed this happen at all in my last two wins on p20 [most recent in my memory] and I recall rarely have a problem with it otherwise. It's nearly unheard of for me not to have a chance to eat a corpse I want to eat (and 70% of the time that I don't get a chance, I'm Bloated). There's no way this is happening to you every game or anywhere close to it and there's also no way it's a corpse you actually care about 90% of the time.

I'm pretty sure reasonable explanations have been posted about this in the past. Leaving bones certainly doesn't fix this problem, though - it's not like you suddenly get special corpse effects! It's a stupid solution if that's the actual problem (and it isn't an actual problem). The one or two times this happens to you per game, where you wanted to eat the corpse for satiation, the satiation you get from the bones will be very tiny and not have a real effect.

That's not really "it"; this would be a bad change.

I'm fine with changes that helps newbies, but this is going way overboard and would be very annoying to anyone who has solved food problems in the early game, which is one of the first things people solve. Bones are an enormous waste of inventory space (I'm pretty sure they give so little satiation that you get negative satiation when consuming them in the wilderness map).

No, it's not basically this. Food preservation is nice for keeping corpses from rotting for a longer period of time or for having more corpses generated overall.
But it has nothing to do with corpses not yet picked up or rotting away the moment they land in your inventory. These are unrelated elements of the game, don't mistake that.
I have nothing against corpses rotting away in the long run but everything against them rotting magically in 1 second without any explanation.

I believe I was the one playing those games so I know better. 3 wizards games in a row, 4 times I got blink dog corpse evaporating within 1-3 turns after it died. I won't even mention other, less useful corpses that rot away almost instantly after the monster's death.
Call it a freak occurrence or whatever you like, it's not rare. It happens and it is very annoying.

There is no explanation for this that would be reasonable. It is simply another of the many means to annoy a player and make the game a notch less exciting.

I'm somewhat certain food preservation also affects the chance of corpses to rot away on the ground while you're in the vicinity. At any rate, it certainly solves all problems related to corpse drops.

Well sure if you restrict your definition of "every game" to "these three wizard games in a row where it happened" you can say it happens every game. As someone who plays A LOT of non-wizard classes (much of the time w/o Food Pres), and also gets +TCtrl from blink dogs almost every game I get to TOEF in, this is not my experience at all. While I've had to kill 100 blink dogs before and been faked out by fortune cookies a few times, I've never had a blink dog corpse rot away before I had a CHANCE to eat it. I've screwed the pooch by trying to kill off blink dogs so they wouldn't be enraged by seeing me eat the corpse, but I've always had a chance. Anyway, I'm not going to claim my experience is universal - I'm sure people have had them rot away while trying to get to them - but over the long haul, it is quite rare for corpses to rot before you have any chance of consuming them, much less ones that you actually care about.

Yeah, I can't find this, but I definitely recall someone coming up with something pretty reasonable. You'd be surprised what rational explanations people can come up with. It isn't a means to annoy the player at all and I don't see why it can't be realistic.

Also, this RFE isn't even about special effects from corpses or corpses rotting away, so this entire argument is way off topic. Having corpses decay into bones would be extremely annoying.

I agree with JellySlayer, probably the corpses picked up are just the edible bits, and making them rot to bones would get tiresome if you carry lots of corpses around.

As for the evaporating corpses phenomenon: I've seen that happen often enough to find it annoying, it needs some fixing. Luckily, someone traveled back in time and created an RFE about the issue :)

That RFE has apparently been ignored. It dates back a year.