Drying fruits

[TheRealMork]

Hi,

In real life, there's a lot of fruits that we can dry to preserve them longer. For instance, grapes can be dried into raisins and apples can be sliced and dried too. It would be useful too add a drying mechanism for fruits in the game, allowing a long term conservation of fruits when the player don't have access to honey (on some unlucky games it can take quite a while to find wild beehives).

I think that, for balance purposes, this process should take away some nutrition value from the fresh fruit, but less than wine/cider, making it an interesting option for long term preservation but not over-powered (and not replacing the usefulness of jam).

Thank you!

[Facethief]

I like this idea, but I’m not sure how the drying process could be started. I think a good starting point would be oven baking fruit, after which it can “spoil” to a lower satiation dried state in open storage, such as a shelf or basket on the ground.

Alternatively, the fruits could generically have a drying timer that takes longer to finish than their natural spoilage time (or maybe just less for pears and the other 21-day fruits), so you have to build open storage that also gives good spoilage reduction (read: shelves or something similar).

[MKMoose]

Gameplay-wise, frankly, I don't see much purpose. If you look at the current storage options assuming that you have a cellar:

• If you get your hands on apples, pears or breadfruit, they can sit in a cellar well over a year (orange, mango, lychee and pomegranate also stay fresh for over half a year).
• Even if all you have is common berries, you can make them into:
  • pies, which will last over four months,
  • or porridge, which will stay fresh for two months normally, or well over a year in a sealed crock.
• If you also have honey, jam lasts close to two years normally in a cellar, or virtually indefinitely (~15 years) in a sealed crock.
• Juicing and alcohol can be used to massively extend shelf life as well (and for cherry and lychee, juice is also the highest satiety per fruit return).

The only situation on default settings where fruit preservation is not already quite easy is when you don't have access to a cellar, but that will almost always only last a short amount of time within which it's easy to keep fruit fresh without a cellar or supplement the diet with wild fruit.

Of course, purely for the sake of variety and roleplaying and whatnot, or for the sake of high-difficulty playthroughs, it would be a perfectly fine addition. But balance-wise on standard settings, meh.

 

On 6/30/2026 at 7:09 AM, TheRealMork said:

I think that, for balance purposes, this process should take away some nutrition value from the fresh fruit, but less than wine/cider, making it an interesting option for long term preservation but not over-powered (and not replacing the usefulness of jam).

Personally, I've never even made jam, because it never seemed particularly useful for anything. Sure, it lasts a long time and it has very good satiety compared to raw fruit, but it's inefficient to store and carry, and it also requires honey which is almost entirely down to luck in the early to mid game.

Alcohol, which also lasts a long time, is not particularly useful for very similar reasons, even if you gloss over the huge 60% satiety loss compared to juice and even more compared to fruit used in meals or porridge - it's very inconvenient in storage and travel, and it also can take a very long time to make. Five buckets of alcohol worth 4000 satiety can be pretty nice compared to a bowl with a meal (which rarely even exceeds 1500 satiety) if you're fine juggling all those buckets, but all options are ultimately blown out of the water by the pie, easily capable of fitting 32x 480 satiety in a single slot even once sliced, or four times as much if not sliced.

Having a simple and cheap way to preserve fruit with no other resource requirements would make jam and alcohol even worse, and as long as you have a large enough farm, satiety loss wouldn't matter too much anyways.

And again, while it likely wouldn't be a functionally meaningful addition, it's certainly not something I would mind, especially for variety or roleplaying and so on, or for high-difficulty playthroughs. I feel like making dried fruit into a dedicated "travel food" could also make a lot of sense, to give it a new kind of niche, though I'm not really sure how it could be balanced - it could require to make their spoilage time unaffected by temperature and cellars by extension, or less affected at least.

[Slam]

On 6/30/2026 at 12:09 AM, TheRealMork said:

I think that, for balance purposes, this process should take away some nutrition value from the fresh fruit, but less than wine/cider, making it an interesting option for long term preservation but not over-powered (and not replacing the usefulness of jam).

Pickled version for fruits, that sounds nice, perhaps they could keep very well while in inventory, but less effective when stored in cellars?

Edit -

Didn’t see MKmoose post, guess we had pretty much the same idea though.

Edited July 1 by Slam
Should more time reading other commenters instead of being redundant.

[Hanril]

I like the seasonality of certain food sources, but apples and pears seem to be very sturdy in terms of storage. Can they really last that long irl? I feel like tree fruit and mushrooms slightly indicate they are being dried in storage.

I'm definitely not the first one to say this, but it would be cool if there was a sort of drying rack/string apparatus for meat, fruit and maybe mushrooms, that could need specific wind, humidity and temperature, maybe locked behind copper tier tools to slice and a long prep time. Not to make them too convenient, so that the fresh stuff is always a way better option.

[TheRealMork]

On 7/1/2026 at 6:15 PM, MKMoose said:

• If you get your hands on apples, pears or breadfruit, they can sit in a cellar well over a year (orange, mango, lychee and pomegranate also stay fresh for over half a year).
• Even if all you have is common berries, you can make them into:
  • pies, which will last over four months,
  • or porridge, which will stay fresh for two months normally, or well over a year in a sealed crock.
• If you also have honey, jam lasts close to two years normally in a cellar, or virtually indefinitely (~15 years) in a sealed crock.
• Juicing and alcohol can be used to massively extend shelf life as well (and for cherry and lychee, juice is also the highest satiety per fruit return).

I'll reply to each point, for clarification.
So, I was indeed mostly thinking mostly of berries, even if drying could be applied to apples and such, that can already be kept fresh for much longer in cellars.
You are right about porridge and pies, but I like to be able to stock ingredients in order to prepare food depending on my needs.
Juicing is not bad, but a bit too short on conservation, and the various wines/ciders give a very low amount of fruit nutrition, unless you're ready to drink multiple litters of it a day.

Concerning jam, my suggestion was specifically for those unlucky games were you won't find a single beehive for a long time. In fact, I had the idea of this drying fruit mechanic in a game where, I admit, I put myself in such a position: I set up a world with mostly sea, and some islands, in order to have a fresh challenge, and I was able to develop up to steel without finding bees on any island.
I think that even in less extreme cases, drying fruits could still be an interesting alternative.

I thank you for your long and detailed response that have some very valid points.

Edited 21 hours ago by TheRealMork