Ice cutting in winter for cold food storage!

[SnapJelly]

Hello friends,

I would like to suggest an option for ice cutting, reffering to the historical practice of sawing great big blocks of ice out of lakes in winter to keep their cellars more cold to increase shelflife of their food for a little longer.
Temperature and cellar mechanics are already in place so ''ice houses or iceboxes'' could easily fit in to keep the temperature slightly lower aand increase the shelflife of foods slightly.

It wouldn't be a very early game mechanic because you would need a saw and of course the ice would slowly melt so it wouldn't last all year long but it would be a great addition to make your first spring fruits last juuuust a little longer and it would also add something for the player to do/look forward to in winter.
Also keeping great big blocks of ice in your cellar would take up a lot of space so it would be a type of investment, giving up space in favor of having a colder cellar.

Pics for reference

[Momito]

I agree with this. My first playthrough, I can't remember how but I ended up with some glacier ice. I put it down in my cellar and was very disappointed to find out it did nothing, as I just sort of assumed this mechanic had been included! I also think it either encourages exploration (e.g if you are in a warm clime, its worth it to head north and find some ice) and gives winter another interesting thing.

Edited August 5 by Momito
thought of something else to say

[Emma Christenson]

i totally think we need this! I hate mass producing a ton of food only for it to go bad before I can use it. I feel it also wouldnt be "too" much work, considering we have similar features already( temp causing a change in shelf life)

[Steppe King]

How we feelin about ice cream

[KevenG]

diagram of an ice house, this one has the ice on top, but they could also be a room with the walls and floors being covered in ice:

Edited Thursday at 10:52 AM by KevenG

[Andospe]

It reminds me of "oxygen not included" in which every item has a temperature and because of that increases its temperature other time by consuming the sorrounding energy in form of higher temperatures till the pound of changing phases. for example, ice in a storage container will melt at some point if the storage is in an area with higher temperature then the ice.

Perhaps something like this is applyable in the code some day. 

[SnapJelly]

1 hour ago, Andospe said:

It reminds me of "oxygen not included" in which every item has a temperature and because of that increases its temperature other time by consuming the sorrounding energy in form of higher temperatures till the pound of changing phases. for example, ice in a storage container will melt at some point if the storage is in an area with higher temperature then the ice.

Oh I love oni!! I should launch that game up again some day!

Though I don't even think such complex temp exchange mechanics are required to make this work in the case of VS; the game already checks for rooms and ajusts the temprature accordingly in the case of a cellar or greenhouse, the same way this affects the spoil rates of your food it could also affect the hypothetical melting rates of iceblocks.

I also wouldn't mind if the mechanic is limited for balancing reasons, for example ice only cooling down a room if it's placed on the floor and not it it's inside a container so you can't easily stack hundreds of blocks of ice for near infinite storage.

 

And while we're speculating: I also just imagined I would totally vibe with something like a ''chilled drink'' bonus, make wine or beer be slightly better if it's cold instead of room temp.

[Mac Mcleod]

One simple option is to simply treat cellars as 5C cooler when they are checked, if they have ice blocks in them.  
Have a message as for greenhouses, "This cellar is 5C cooler due to Ice."

Slightly more complex would be to require a certain number of ice blocks based on the size of the celler.

To be renewable, you could cut ice blocks from ponds with a saw.   

Simple options for thawing include:
1) Ice in cellars thaws in any Fall month that it is loaded.
2) Use a modified version of the thawing option for pond ice.

 

[Facethief]

4 minutes ago, Mac Mcleod said:

One simple option is to simply treat cellars as 5C cooler when they are checked, if they have ice blocks in them.  
Have a message as for greenhouses, "This cellar is 5C cooler due to Ice."

Slightly more complex would be to require a certain number of ice blocks based on the size of the celler.

To be renewable, you could cut ice blocks from ponds with a saw.   

Simple options for thawing include:
1) Ice in cellars thaws in any Fall month that it is loaded.
2) Use a modified version of the thawing option for pond ice.

 

That would make sense, since the -5 degrees would put the cellar temperature at freezing (I believe the base cellar temperature is 5 degrees celcius).

[Argakyan]

This + windcatchers would be cool
(pun intended)

[MKMoose]

As much as the idea is interesting and could be quite historically accurate, I'm not confident that it wouldn't be a net negative for gameplay. I think it could work, and that's at the bottom of the post.

Cellars are already an extremely cheap and effective method of food preservation. From a design perspective, they are really quite boring - they work all the time, entirely free besides a low initial setup cost, for every single spoilable item in the game. Fruit? Cellar. Vegetables? Cellar. Grains? Cellar. Meat? Cellar. Dairy? Cellar. Hides and raw fat? Cellar.

If cellars weren't in the game, food preservation could be difficult. But as it is, cellars largely trivialize food preservation and arguably make some other methods thereof largely useless, at least on standard world configuration. Especially the already-weak preservation methods like alcohol, pickled vegetables or cheese, since they (1) apply a large satiety debuff, (2) have an additional cost to process, and (3) don't always actually meaningfully extend the spoilage timer relative to the base time or to how frequently new food can be acquired, so as a result are mostly delegated to vanity.

Cellars also have a flaw - they can't move. If you stay in a stable home, you will often not have to worry about food spoilage at all, but otherwise you are at a massive disadvantage. This is just one of the factors which makes nomadic lifestyles a pain, because you just end up with ~4x shorter spoil times (potentially more or less depending on climate) for pretty much everything.

Cellars are very nice thematically, but purely for gameplay purposes they tend to just be one thing on the checklist that has to be ticked off relatively quickly on every single world which then provides ubiquitous, universal benefits.

 

How do iceboxes tie into this?

In terms of effectiveness, they are largely just a better cellar, and they inherit most of the cellar's benefits and flaws. If cellars already trivialize food preservation, then iceboxes just add on to that.

If you wanted to preserve some of your food further than a cellar allows and had to choose between other, potentially costly food preservation methods which may also apply satiety debuffs, which have to be done separately for every food in the game, or a single, universal buff which just extends the spoil time of anything you put in the cellar even further, what reason besides vanity or maybe travel food is there to ever choose the former?

There are also two other matters:

• Does the ice melt?
  • If it doesn't, then you're just adding on to the checklist of things that eventually need to be done on every single world.
  • If it does, then it can easily become a tedious chore when not balanced properly.
• How much does it take to acquire the ice in the first place?
  • If it's difficult, then you may just end up rendering iceboxes useless due to excessive upkeep costs for too little benefit over a regular cellar (keep in mind, regular cellars already allow you to store apples or similar fruit and most vegetables for over a year, and grains for several years - increasing it further just doesn't provide a meaningful benefit). I've seen suggestions to use glacier ice for this, but that is nearly objectively a bad idea simply because you don't want to make people search for mountains or go to cold climates just to get ice.
  • If it's relatively simple, then you've just made the already-ubiquitous cellars even better, and you've made nomadic playstyles even more disadvantaged.

 

How I would go about this

The main motivation here is that iceboxes need to be an interesting and useful preservation method, but they shouldn't overshadow other methods or compete with them in the exact same gameplay space. I think the best way to do this is just to make cellars and iceboxes less ubiquitous and less universal:

• Make cellars and iceboxes most useful for extending short spoilage times for freshly-obtained items prior to processing, primarily for live animals, meat, and probably a couple other item categories. This makes them in part a matter of convenience by allowing to organize time better instead of having to process everything quickly before it spoils, but generally requires other preservation methods for long-term food security.
• Reduce the effect of cellars on foods preserved in other ways and on intrinsically dry foods, and on some other foods where refrigeration is not necessary to keep them shelf-stable. This especially applies to grains which would be more intuitive to store in a granary and not in a cellar, but could also apply more or less to salted, sugared, pickled, fermented or sealed foods. This would also allow to implement drying as an alternative to cellars, not a multiplier, and it introduces a natural distinction between "homestead food" and "travel food". Keep in mind that this is entirely based on real food preservation.
• Introduce a way to obtain ice blocks for iceboxes from lake ice using a saw. Ensure that obtaining ice is restricted seasonally to winter, and likely do not allow using dirty glacier ice in iceboxes because it's just not a fun gameplay incentive. This may require revising the current snow and ice system.
• Make the icebox ice melt within less than a year, so that it functions as wintertime preparation for hotter months, not an upgrade that stays over multiple years.

Edited 15 hours ago by MKMoose

[SnapJelly]

@MKMoose I honestly can not tell if you're on board or not because you frame the start of your post as if you are concerned it wouldn't work but then in the rest of your post a lot of the things you say are exactly what I suggested in my origional post?

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

one thing on the checklist that has to be ticked off relatively quickly

''It wouldn't be a very early game mechanic because you would need a saw''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Does the ice melt?

''and of course the ice would slowly melt so it wouldn't last all year long''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

How much does it take to acquire the ice in the first place?

''in winter''
''you would need a saw''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

If it's difficult, then you may just end up rendering iceboxes useless due to excessive upkeep costs for too little benefit over a regular cellar

''it would also add something for the player to do/look forward to in winter.''
''to make your first spring fruits last juuuust a little longer''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Make cellars and iceboxes most useful for extending short spoilage times for freshly-obtained items prior to processing

''to keep the temperature slightly lower aand increase the shelflife of foods slightly.''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Introduce a way to obtain ice blocks for iceboxes from lake ice using a saw.

''the historical practice of sawing great big blocks of ice out of lakes in winter to keep their cellars more cold''

 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Make the icebox ice melt within less than a year

''and of course the ice would slowly melt so it wouldn't last all year long''

Edited 14 hours ago by SnapJelly
spelling

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

I honestly can not tell if you're on board or not because you frame the start of your post as if you are concerned it wouldn't work but then in the rest of your post a lot of the things you say are exactly what I suggested in my origional post?

Then my apologies for failing to deliberately clarify that I'm not just replying to your suggestion.

This is among the most common ideas in the community, so I'm broadly speaking about the concept and giving some background in regards to how I believe it should be done from a design perspective and why some commonly-suggested ideas wouldn't work too well. Those design considerations are almost entirely absent from the explicit contents of your post, even if they were a factor in its writing.

It's a fine suggestion, but I think it could easily be a net negative for the game if implemented carelessly or without certain other changes prior to or alongside its introduction. Your suggestion doesn't have as much to criticize as some other suggestions that I've seen, but also doesn't include any changes that would aim to allow cooling with ice to fit the game better. And it doesn't need to, just to be clear - it's my preference when I'm talking about game design, but it's nowhere near necessary for more casual suggestions. 

 

The main difference between my thoughts on the topic and common suggestions seems to be that, to me, cooling with ice is above all else a method of increasing the game's variety and depth in gameplay, whereas increasing shelf life is essentially incidental. Your idea as you've presented it appears to focus primarily on the thematic and historical inspirations as well as on increasing shelf life of foods - which is a fine direction to take, naturally, but not quite what I was going for. What I try to achieve is more or less to give the player distinct means to manage varied gameplay problems or allow different food preservation methods to shine in their own unique niches. The primary high-level distinction here is between:

• maintaining low temperature through cellars optionally with the use of ice, mainly in short-term and local storage,
• maintaining low moisture through granaries and drying, primarily in long-term storage or travel food,

though, naturally, there's a lot of middle ground and combinations between the two. Ice especially could be particularly effective for certain items, but actually harmful for some produce.

What I think is also important here is the cycle of tension and relief when preserving freshly obtained food, which currently isn't significantly emphasized in VS, in large part precisely because of cellars which allow even fresh meat to stay that way for a whole 6 days and then freshly-made meals for ~2 months.

You could say that my post is actually focused on setting up cellars and food preservation in general in such a way that your suggestion would have the best chances to shine.

 

4 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

If it's difficult, then you may just end up rendering iceboxes useless due to excessive upkeep costs for too little benefit over a regular cellar

''it would also add something for the player to do/look forward to in winter.''
''to make your first spring fruits last juuuust a little longer''

Let me be more explicit, then: I would find a simple implementation of ice cooling almost entirely useless on standard settings, and not much better even on much more difficult settings, even if the ice is fairly cheap. A regular cellar on standard settings easily preserves every type of nutrition for at least for as long as is necessary to get more of it, assuming your food choices don't include strictly suboptimal options, and you'd need to at least roughly double all spoilage rates for that to become noticeably patchy. While ice for food preservation could be an interesting addition, I just don't see myself using it in the current balance if the game doesn't change more significantly.

 

4 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Make cellars and iceboxes most useful for extending short spoilage times for freshly-obtained items prior to processing

''to keep the temperature slightly lower aand increase the shelflife of foods slightly.''

I'm saying that it should be specifically effective for freshly obtained food prior to processing, and especially recently-killed animals, but less impactful for already-processed foods and certain shelf-stable foods. Having exactly the same multiplicative effect on the shelf life of already shelf-stable foods is largely pointless, not to mention in some aspects unrealistic. This way, cellars and especially ice primarily take the role of short-term food preservation and allow more freedom and convenience in time management, instead of just being equally useful for all spoilable items in the game.

 

4 hours ago, SnapJelly said:

6 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Make the icebox ice melt within less than a year

''and of course the ice would slowly melt so it wouldn't last all year long''

You've also mentioned icehouses, though, which were often used to preserve ice all year long. I'm not certain about the specific arrangement that would be ideal here - I don't think it's worth the hassle to specifically allow creating icehouses to then move ice into cellars. The main historical method seems to be to store ice in icehouses, then place the ice in or around containers when something needs to be cooled, so that is an option. Using it to cool the cellar with ice, closer to what you've described, seems like it was also done reasonably frequently and seems more practical in gameplay. Iceboxes proper are generally a 19th century thing, now that I've checked more precisely, so I probably wouldn't turn to those.

 

On 8/5/2026 at 1:39 PM, SnapJelly said:

Also keeping great big blocks of ice in your cellar would take up a lot of space so it would be a type of investment, giving up space in favor of having a colder cellar.

Keep in mind that:

• A single player only needs a couple storage containers, a couple shelves, a couple barrels - you'd have to require an absurd number of ice blocks to make this not fit in the footprint of a standard cellar. Especially if the ice blocks can be placed on the floor, ceiling or walls, and I see no reason why they wouldn't.
• Even if a single cellar is not enough, making a second cellar is not difficult. Taking up space is a hassle more than it is a tradeoff.

Edited 10 hours ago by MKMoose