making tempature underground be consistent as to help with crop growth,animal husbandry, etc.

[Angry parZival]

we all know permafrost is a thing i am suggesting that the underground temps never go below 5c and never go above a certain temp depending on your y level
(simmilar to the geothermal insanity mod that has been abandoned for quite some time now)

[Professor Dragon]

Does the Geothermal Insanity mod still work? It may well do. Or do exactly what you want with a little tweaking.

As far as the general suggestion goes, I'd probably recommend this as either a mod or an option, not a vanilla game change.

It would mean that in any polar region or snowball world or mountain top that there is an "easy out" to sub-zero temperatures, which I don't think will ever be an intended base mechanic. Even though it might be how our real world works. If they did implement it in vanilla, then go whole hog and refine the underground temperature differences better.

However, great to have as either a mod or an option.

 

[Angry parZival]

1 hour ago, Professor Dragon said:

Does the Geothermal Insanity mod still work? It may well do. Or do exactly what you want with a little tweaking.

As far as the general suggestion goes, I'd probably recommend this as either a mod or an option, not a vanilla game change.

It would mean that in any polar region or snowball world or mountain top that there is an "easy out" to sub-zero temperatures, which I don't think will ever be an intended base mechanic. Even though it might be how our real world works. If they did implement it in vanilla, then go whole hog and refine the underground temperature differences better.

However, great to have as either a mod or an option.

 

geothermal was outdated a while back and isnt even available for download on the mod db anymore 
the game already gives you an option for that (allow underground farming) although it only lets you use light below sea level currently 
and there is no "easy out" because you need copper tools at the least to get to a suitable depth ~4blocks underground with no soil directly above 

[Facethief]

13 hours ago, Angry parZival said:

and there is no "easy out" because you need copper tools at the least to get to a suitable depth ~4blocks underground with no soil directly above 

Caves much?

[MKMoose]

It may be a good thing to consider if only for the sake of realism and immersion, but it also has a few undesirable side effects that would have to be addressed.

It may also be useful to make it clear in some way to the player what "underground" is and what "enclosed space, but not counted as underground" is, as well as clarify how cellars fit into all that. Cellars are already a little finnicky as is.

Food spoilage currently reaches the minimum rate at -5°C, which would mean that cellars may effectively increase food spoilage rates relative to outside, making them counterproductive in low temperatures and incentivizing finnicky food management. One potential fix here is to reduce food satiety once frozen (and reduce spoilage rate while frozen), which would make cellars and caves useful even in the arctic while allowing to deliberately freeze food to let it last longer.

Seraphs can only freeze while the temperature is lower than 0°C, and various plants have their own temperature requirements. With the underground always being no less than 5°C, freezing and crops dying would become much less threatening or even almost a non-issue, even in the arctic, once the player finds a suitable cave - no need to even dig one. The easy solution here may be to add some sort of consequences to staying in positive but close to freezing temperatures, and reworking plant growth to avoid exploits, but that would again have downstream balance implications.

Edited November 4, 2025 by MKMoose
Mention plants.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

On 11/2/2025 at 2:09 PM, Angry parZival said:

we all know permafrost is a thing

As it says on the tin, the ground stays frozen, effectively creating an insulating barrier between the ground above and the warm earth below. Digging is impossible and as it thaws, it turns into mud as the water above cannot permeate the ice below. Effectively rendering dirt undiggable without a pickaxe would be humorous, but would get very old, very very fast, especially with no way to make mining tools in the stone age.

On 11/2/2025 at 2:09 PM, Angry parZival said:

i am suggesting that the underground temps never go below 5c and never go above a certain temp depending on your y level

How it really works is that just below the surface, temps are cooler than the hot summer air, meaning cellars are great for storing food because the cooler air inhibits bacteria growth. It also inhibits growth of pretty much all other kinds of plant life including crops which need warmth and sunlight to grow (with variations and exception. There ARE some cooler weather crops like turnips, but they still need sunlight). However the ground can and will freeze. Once you get to a certain depth, however, things start to warm up. The deeper you go, the warmer it gets as you get closer to the earth's mantle. Overall, the earth's temperature will hover between 20-40C depending on how deep you go with the upper 20m of earth relying on outside temps to regulate itself and anything below that relying on the earth's core and the decay of various radioactive nuclides hidden in the crust. Tectonic activity will increase the temperature underneath as well as proximity to volcanic activity where the core naturally vents to the surface.

All in all to say, what you're suggesting sounds realistic but I don't really see much of a use for it in the game since hotter weather doesn't seem to affect the player outside of mods. You would need:

• a mechanic to measure player hydration
• a mechanic to measure player stamina
• a mechanic to combine the two so that the hotter the player is, the quicker hydration depletes and exhaustion accumulates
• a list of penalties for heat exhaustion
• a list of penalties for dehydration

That's a lot of work just to make the terrain have different temperature qualities and I didn't even start on what it would to do stored food, and livestock. I would think it interesting to have it as an optional mod, but I don't think I would enjoy having this in the base game. I would need to see it in action because on paper it looks too tedious to deal with to actually have fun playing the game. Remember VS is a game, not a real life simulator. It needs to be fun, first.

If all you're looking for is a food source during the winter, then I would recommend making your farms oversized and storing the excess in storage vessels and sealed crocks during the autumn months.

Edited November 4, 2025 by Teh Pizza Lady

[Guimoute]

On 11/2/2025 at 9:50 PM, Professor Dragon said:

It would mean that in any polar region or snowball world or mountain top that there is an "easy out" to sub-zero temperatures

You can already make a room of any material and be safe from the cold. 

[Angry parZival]

On 11/3/2025 at 7:16 AM, Facethief said:

Caves much?

you still need copper tools to make a space big enough for agriculture 

[Angry parZival]

On 11/4/2025 at 10:27 AM, Teh Pizza Lady said:

How it really works is that just below the surface, temps are cooler than the hot summer air, 

yes but also they typically dont get cooler than the above ground temps in winter 
the thing with this is it makes the temps underground stable for crops and  instead of having them be insulated from the surface
the closest my ag room got to the surface was ~16 meters it still got overheated AND chilled to sub zero temps 
 

[Angry parZival]

On 11/4/2025 at 6:46 AM, MKMoose said:

It may be a good thing to consider if only for the sake of realism and immersion, but it also has a few undesirable side effects that would have to be addressed.

It may also be useful to make it clear in some way to the player what "underground" is and what "enclosed space, but not counted as underground" is, as well as clarify how cellars fit into all that. Cellars are already a little finnicky as is.

Food spoilage currently reaches the minimum rate at -5°C, which would mean that cellars may effectively increase food spoilage rates relative to outside, making them counterproductive in low temperatures and incentivizing finnicky food management. One potential fix here is to reduce food satiety once frozen (and reduce spoilage rate while frozen), which would make cellars and caves useful even in the arctic while allowing to deliberately freeze food to let it last longer.

Seraphs can only freeze while the temperature is lower than 0°C, and various plants have their own temperature requirements. With the underground always being no less than 5°C, freezing and crops dying would become much less threatening or even almost a non-issue, even in the arctic, once the player finds a suitable cave - no need to even dig one. The easy solution here may be to add some sort of consequences to staying in positive but close to freezing temperatures, and reworking plant growth to avoid exploits, but that would again have downstream balance implications.

look up forced rhubarb it may give you some idea of what plants can and will do for even the slightest bit of light and with even the smallest amount of nutrients
while yes there is an issue with the cellars being hampered if a mechanic that allows ice blocks in a cellar to cool it down(like what was done in the colonial era) is implemented this becomes a non issue (we are talking about a cubic meter of ice here)
the freezing thing would be rather interesting but irl freezing food of most kinds does not affect its nutritional value (especially once it has been cooked)
the main thing affected by that i would think be fresh (non root) veggies (squashes, tomatoes(yes i know they are technically a fruit) etc) and even then they maintain most of the attributes they had (even taste for the most part)
irl hypothermia can set in at any temp below ~4c (i am not a doctor this is just guesswork actual values might be higher or lower. probably not the latter and i cant be arsed to be flashbanged by wikipedia rn)
but these values i have proposed are simply a suggestion they do not have to be final and as long as something to this degree gets implemented i will be happy 

[Thorfinn]

On 11/2/2025 at 4:29 PM, Angry parZival said:

there is no "easy out" because you need copper tools at the least to get to a suitable depth

Nope. Not remotely true. There are plenty of lakes and oceans more than deep enough that you can simply build down, using hay or dirt to get rid of the water.

Personally, not a huge fan of underground farming anyway. I'd make an exception for mushrooms, but I don't want an "easy out" for iceball runs or polar starts.

[Angry parZival]

On 11/11/2025 at 2:36 PM, Thorfinn said:

Nope. Not remotely true. There are plenty of lakes and oceans more than deep enough that you can simply build down, using hay or dirt to get rid of the water.

Personally, not a huge fan of underground farming anyway. I'd make an exception for mushrooms, but I don't want an "easy out" for iceball runs or polar starts.

 

you dont HAVE to use this feature 
if you dont want to use this feature you are more than welcome to use the surface 
 

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, Angry parZival said:

you dont HAVE to use this feature 
if you dont want to use this feature you are more than welcome to use the surface 

You think this is some occult knowledge that only you possess?

My post was largely about the first bit, though. You can make an underground farm without having a pickaxe. Your assertion to the contrary was wrong. Make some underground farming. Knock yourself out. But base game? So it would be a part of vanilla servers? No thanks. Great mod, but if you put easy mode into the default game, why stop there? Put bubble wrap on everything.

[Angry parZival]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

 why stop there? Put bubble wrap on everything.

ahh i see 
you are too shortsighted and ignorant 
let me spell it out for you in big bold letters
T H E R E   I S   A N   O P T I O N   I N   T H E   G A M E   S E T T I N G S   T H A T   D I S A B L E S   U N D E R G R O N D   F A R M I N G 
do i make myself PERFECTLY clear

[Teh Pizza Lady]

34 minutes ago, Angry parZival said:

T H E R E   I S   A N   O P T I O N   I N   T H E   G A M E   S E T T I N G S   T H A T   D I S A B L E S   U N D E R G R O N D   F A R M I N G 
do i make myself PERFECTLY clear

no, because the option is actually to enable underground farming... At least if you bother to hover over it, that's what it says.

[LadyWYT]

The main issue I see with this, is that it requires a lot of code tinkering in order to even make it work, and that's not something you just toggle on and off. There is an option already there to allow underground farming, which doesn't require code tinkering other than just removing the requirement for natural light and allowing artificial light to be sufficient instead. 

Otherwise, the idea works as a mod, but not for the base game, due to the amount of tinkering likely required to implement it, and the fact that the core game design just doesn't support this kind of farming. What's being proposed here, is essentially just allowing most any crops to be farmed anywhere, at any time of year, which is way too easy. Honestly, even for the modded route, it's likely easier to just remove temperature requirements from crops entirely, or otherwise give them a wide enough range that anything goes, instead of trying to modify the entire world itself.

[Angry parZival]

13 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

no, because the option is actually to enable underground farming... At least if you bother to hover over it, that's what it says.

the particular wording does not matter what matters is theres a toggle for it

[Teh Pizza Lady]

6 minutes ago, Angry parZival said:

the particular wording does not matter what matters is theres a toggle for it

Well you said in big bold letters that the option was to disable it. That means it's active by default. Then you asked if what you said was perfectly clear. So I was just replying that it wasn't because what you had actually said was backwards from how it really is. That is why I took a screenshot to show everyone so that no one would get confused by the big bold letters that you pointed out were intended to spell things out for those who didn't know. We wouldn't want anyone to be misled by false information that was highlighted in big bold letters with the intention of setting things right, now would we? It wasn't perfectly clear at all!

If you had said that there was an option to toggle it, then I would have left it alone, but you said that the option was to DISABLE it and that was just simply false. So the wording does matter, especially when you're attempting to set things straight in an incorrect manner with incorrect wording and misspelling the word "underground". Wording is everything on a forum where tone is completely lost.

Edited November 13, 2025 by Teh Pizza Lady

[Thorfinn]

I don't know what has you jazzed up, dude. You want underground farming, you can have underground farming. You want underground farming that doesn't require a pickaxe, you can have underground farming that doesn't require a pickaxe. Why are you so hostile to, well, anyone who tells you, "Go ahead. Make your farm." The only thing it doesn't explicitly do is set the temperature to 5C. The temperature is just the weathermap temperature adjusted by elevation. So far as I can tell, by more than enough, because I use caves to warm up in the winter, even in polar regions. Which on Wilderness settings means it is above 10C.

You appear to be the one incapable of understanding that how you thought the game works is not how it really works.

Edited November 13, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

11 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

it requires a lot of code tinkering in order to even make it work

I haven't really looked at how much it would take. But since the game already does that, more or less, by just going up or down a few y-levels, I don't see the point of wasting time changing it.

[EDIT]

I don't remember who it was, but someone dug a shaft deep enough to grow oranges in the polar regions. I don't know what more one might want. Shangri-La is not particularly "immersive".

Edited November 13, 2025 by Thorfinn