What do you do in the winter?

[Ari]

I'm mid-winter in my current playthrough, first time playing this long in a world since seasons were added to the game. Everything is covered with snow which is cool but makes exploration (mainly looking for borax so I can make steel) too difficult to be worth it. It's also cold enough and the days are short enough that travel is just a huge pain. So I'm hanging out at home. I built a barn and a chicken coop and rounded up some animals (kept indoors so they can't use the snow to escape their pens). Been shoveling away snow in grassy areas and cutting grass to feed my pigs, hoping for piglets before too long, but that's pretty tedious and I've gone through two iron shovels from the snow. Made backups of all my iron tools already. I spend some days smelting ingots of whatever metals I have and preparing more iron blooms, but that gets tedious after a while. I don't really have anything I need to make from clay, already have plenty of bowls and vessels and several tall stacks of fire bricks.

Basically I'm trying to think of something else interesting to do that doesn't involve travel/exploration. What do others do during the cold winter months?

[Ender Riens]

I personally use lategame winters to prospect (more prospecting never hurts) and find translocators, though if you don't really feel like traveling anywhere then you remove a lot of options. Considering you're lategame and have already done most things, I'd recommend giving some hopper/chute automation a try if you haven't already, or try larger-scale automation if you have. If you are truly endgame and out of things to do, then I've personally found microblock/multiblock chiseling to be somewhat entertaining, if sculpting is your thing. You could also peruse all the fancy craftable clothing you can make out of fabric and dyes.

[Maelstrom]

If you haven't already discovered the lore in the game, gather bony soil from ruins and begin panning it for books and scrolls.  Disclaimer: may require significant travel to gain sufficient supply.  Out of 9 blocks of bony soil I've found one book so far.

[Silent Shadow]

The underground is about the same temperature year round so mining side steps the issues with the cold. If you made your workshops count as enclosed room you can craft then too. You can also repair your clothes for more protection from the cold and buy even better ones from the merchants so you can continue working outside.

Usually I save up a bunch of work to do in the form of refining building materials (like polished stone) or saving up fire wood to convert to charcoal. I also work on building up my base since it is close to a fire I can quickly warm up at and any nearby water is frozen. If you establish a mine with some good ores you can spend the winter mining it out.

[Streetwind]

Prospecting and mining were my main winter occupations in my last world, yes. Also workshop building. Planning ahead, gathering materials...

That said, I did get impatient and antsy by the time February turned to March and winter still showed no signs of letting up. I think my world ended up unecpectedly cold, as the snow started falling in early November and only melted in mid-April despite me having moved five degrees south from spawn before settling down. That is a wee bit long to be twiddling one's thumbs. Next world I'll probably try even further south - or just try to get a warmer world in general.

 

Edited August 24, 2021 by Streetwind

[Ari]

Nice ideas, thanks. Automation is unfortunately held back for me due to a shortage of flax for windmills. I have one small one but it doesn't even move a lot of the time, and not enough flax to make it bigger. If I'm lucky it'll grind up a stack of chalk over the course of a few days. I got lucky and managed to find iron and tin close to my base so I progressed quickly through the metals but I'm still in my first game year and getting a proper farm set up took longer than expected (and I had bad luck finding flax seeds) so that removes a lot of options. What little flax materials I had left I had to save for repairing my clothes.

I suppose I could travel and search for borax and halite, do need both, but traveling in the winter is just miserable and prospecting is such a chore. I hate that it's so imprecise. Like, having a tool that tells you exactly where the metal is underground (like in Minecraft TFC) is unrealistic, sure, but so is the prospecting that exists in VS. They've made it difficult and imprecise just to add to the grind, not for realism. I wouldn't mind it so much if it were precise. Like, if the highest percentage of an ore meant dig down and you'll find that ore, cool. But instead it just means "here's your best shot, no guarantees" and half the time I dig down at the highest percentage and don't find anything at all, and when I actually find ore it's in an area with a lower percentage according to the propick. Makes me not want to bother. I also don't want to go too far since I'd like to get all my sows pregnant (and I'm out of grain and veg for them, so it's a lot of shoveling snow and cutting grass). And I only have the starting clothes, haven't found any more (or any clothing traders), so I don't have options for extra warmth when I go out.

There is a cave nearby where I found tin where I'm pretty sure there's more tin to be found, but I also spotted some locusts down below and I'm terrible at the combat and have no proper armor. I suppose I could spend a few days working on some iron armor (if I have enough leather, which is questionable, but I can kill some of the pigs and process more up) and then head over there to explore. I don't actually need more tin but maybe there's something interesting in the caves, ruins or some such. I just really hate caving, I don't enjoy the combat and don't want to die down there and lose my stuff.

But yeah, I suppose grindy tasks are a reasonable choice. Make more iron blooms and work them into ingots, spend a day traveling to the nearest forest and gathering wood for charcoal, maybe chiseling a sculpture or two. I toyed with the idea of making a greenhouse and trying to grow some of the more cold-tolerant crops but it's cold enough that I don't think the extra 5 degrees are going to help. I guess I could set up a greenhouse for early spring, at least. I have actually already panned about a stack of bony soil and have a stack of books I could read on a particularly cold day. Or I can just spend a day or two panning some sand or gravel, see if I get lucky and find something rare.

[Maelstrom]

Tangential question about winters, specifically the option regarding harsh winters in world setup options.  What makes a harsh winter, well... harsh?

[allstreets]

I'm playing through a seriously long winter (so far about 100 in-game days on a part of the map surrounded by water and high mountains, so very difficult to travel through), and chiseling and panning have been my main activities - as well as making a nice armor set to explore all of the deeper caves nearby. The days are very short right now, so I tend to do an hour or two of exploring in the morning and afternoon (mostly going out on the ice to harvest meat from all the foxes and rabbits that the wolves are killing), some panning, chiseling in the evening, and then lots of sleep.

 

[allstreets]

49 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

Tangential question about winters, specifically the option regarding harsh winters in world setup options.  What makes a harsh winter, well... harsh?

According to an update log from last August: "Crop damage from low temperature, Reduced meat from animal harvest during winter and disabled sheep and boar spawning during winter." Not sure if the newer additions of berry bushes not growing at cold temperatures is included in that now, though.

[Maelstrom]

Interesting.  I thought those aspects would be part of a normal winter.  I was afeared that harsh winters would be more like colder temps, last longer, etc.  Guess I'll enable harsh winter in my next playthrough.

[Ari]

So I decided to make myself some iron chain armor and.... This is gonna keep me busy for a while. Wow does the chain take a long time to make, and it's 2 ingots a piece. 20 are needed for the full set. I'm going to need to make a run for wood for charcoal, I'm gonna run out. Also gonna run out of leather - so much is required for armor!

[Maelstrom]

Pounding iron into plates before crafting chain helps reduce the grind some.

[Thalius]

I enjoy mining,and have large projects I work on as I delve into rocky mountains and down into the depths.  I do a lot of that in winter months. And, winter on my server lasts for nearly one full real life month, if no nights are slept through, so I have lots of time to do that.

Rest of the year is exploring, terraforming, building, hunting, working on server community projects, and stocking up food, firewood, and  other resources for the winter.

[Silent Shadow]

On 8/25/2021 at 3:51 AM, Ari said:

So I decided to make myself some iron chain armor and.... This is gonna keep me busy for a while. Wow does the chain take a long time to make, and it's 2 ingots a piece. 20 are needed for the full set. I'm going to need to make a run for wood for charcoal, I'm gonna run out. Also gonna run out of leather - so much is required for armor!

Keep in mind that you can roll damaged sets of armor into the next tier for full durability (1% Hp chainmail into 100% Hp scalemail, for example). You can also save your nearly broken bronze tools to sell to traders for some free gears. Best way to stretch your metal out.

[Pestilence]

On 8/24/2021 at 3:15 AM, Ari said:

And I only have the starting clothes, haven't found any more (or any clothing traders), so I don't have options for extra warmth when I go out.

I saw someone on YouTube craft fur clothing using pelts (fat + animal hide).  I'm not at my PC and there's no mention of it in the wiki, so I can't confirm it, but I don't think there was a mod involved.  Maybe someone else can confirm?

[Ari]

Crafting most clothes requires a sewing kit, which can only be crafted by clothier class characters (I'm just a commoner). It does appear that you can make some fur clothing without it but it requires quite a lot of hides. At this point it's nearly the end of February and it's warming up anyway, so it's probably not worth doing, but I'll have to keep that in mind for next time. I don't remember that being added to the game at all, must not have gotten much fanfare.

In any case, I've been keeping busy making chain and doing a bit of not-too-far exploring (always bringing what I need to make a campfire when I get too cold). I actually managed to find some halite, which was handy. Still searching for borax... I swear I used to see borax EVERYWHERE. I used to be tripping over the stuff back when it had no use. But now there's none to be found! I'm exploring a big area of sedimentary stone and crossing my fingers. Seems like you only need one piece to start steelmaking...

I have noticed that the seasonal changes are totally unconnected with the temperature. It's still consistently hitting -16 or so, but all the snow and ice is melting. I suppose that must just happen based on the core temperature of the area and the calendar date. But if it's warm enough for snow and ice to melt, the temperature should be higher so I'm not freezing to death if I fall in the now-exposed water!

[Dziga Walker]

On 8/27/2021 at 5:26 PM, Ryan Thomas said:

I personally like the euchre night. If we get avocado in the game, you could put out like guacamole and chips and stuff for the guys.

I was thinking Euchre was  a Cornish only thing! Great idea to get that incorporated into multiplayer VS servers - I'd definitely pop around for winter Euchre nights

[Buggi]

Travel south to a warmer climate and set up a winter base to craft/farm during the winter.

Typically only works for realistic climate.

[Windego]

Chiseling. Chiseling various shapes can be a good time spent if you have nothing else to do in the winter.
Think of a project, a build of some sorts, a monument for example. Grave stones, decorative statues.
A designated panic room for temporal storms. And if you already have that to a simple degree, maybe think about making it visually better, more comfortable.
Search for Halite.
Do some clay forming for shingles or some extra pots.
Try designing a cellar above ground level IN your kitchen for ease of access.
Amongst other things....

[clifford bowles]

Roads. I play co-op with my wife, we go gather stone and dirt to make path blocks, then we make runs to extend them further and further N-S-E-W.

Explore. We run around in cloth armor but carry a set of iron plate. Look for caves, switch armor, start exploring quickly. Hopefully try to find exposed ore or a translocator, then see where that goes. (make sure to label them on the map... something like 1A for the waypoint of the translocator you find, then 1B for the translocator you emerge at. It can get confusing trying to get more limestone and it took two translocator hops to get to the limestone area if you didn't mark them well). Hell, we have roads going halfway across the map, we have about 8 translocators and still haven't found a desert or jungle biome. It's now a goal to find them just because.

Smithing. It takes a bit to get to the iron age. It takes twice the effort and materials to get to the steel age. Spring through Fall there's a lot of work with the crops, so the winter is a good time to chop down a lot of trees for coal, gather fire clay, quartz, olivine, ilminite (if you can find it) and limestone for refractory bricks, and then generally start the laborious process of making steel tools and armor pieces. If you're already at that point, then winter's the time to just crank out ingots so you can replace the tools during the warmer months more quickly.

Prospecting. While you're extending roads, pause to take ore samples... it comes in handy when you need something if you make descriptive waypoints.

Quarrying and Crafting.. all the time-consuming work to make things look better than the starting cobblestone and dirt blocks.

[SaltySpecula]

I'm in a pretty terrible area, where water starts to freeze over before it's even finished thawing from the winter before.

My winters are usually spent caving through the huge cave system under my home, tending to my livestock or making home improvements. Summer is usually used for storing away and preparing food for winter, because hunting/scavenging becomes a net loss of satiation come winter.

Edited October 27, 2021 by SaltySpecula

[Hal13]

First things first, if you have trouble getting your livestock fed, wait for spring, they won't starve to death and you go through way less metal, of course if you want to go realism and feed them anyway, i recommend to keep their numbers somewhat low through winter.

 

The higher you place the windmill, the more likely it always catches enough wind to turn, hence the windmills should be pretty high up (use one of the highes points of your base for them).

A greenhouse does do wonders, the additional 5°C might be enough to keep some crops/berries growing (though with less yield) or at least not dying, and as you can keep flowers in it the whole year, you can use it to get a pretty decent honey/wax supply, make sure there are skeps to seed the other skeps all the time though. and if you don't plant anything on the fields in your greenhouses tall grass and horsetail will grow on the fields too.

Build a drifter farm underground for a small flax/temporal gear gain.

Mining and processing ores of course are best done through night and winter, when being underground or working for long times doesn't matter, if you don't have anything else to do in winter nights sleep, any bed let's you skip several hours. though you do use up saturation as if you'd just stand around for the same time. you could do tunnel roads for winter exploration. and you can pan all the sand and gravel you don't need for anything else...

 

tbh. in the newest world i don't know yet what to do in winter, as that winter will be LONG, i think i had set it to 12 days a month and one ingame day being 48h irl long... i'm sure i will sleep daily... skipping 19h irl each day...

Edited November 22, 2021 by Hal13

[Nii P.]

Same as I do in summer, spring or autumn, which is "same same" IRL.

Greetings from the jungle! 
(Northern Thailand)

 

Edited December 26, 2021 by Nii P.

[Philtre]

2 hours ago, lOgAnmalONE said:

How does winter affect wolves and drifters?

If you're in a climate where it gets cold in the winter, wolves will have lower body weight and drop less meat and fat. Otherwise no difference.