cellar food spoilage rate tanking when adding ebony slabs to the floor

[Kolyenka]

We dug out a cellar that was 5x5 and 2 tall with all surfaces being claystone rock and then I remembered I wanted to do a wood floor, so I dug out the floor all the way and added ebony slabs. The food spoilage rate got worse with every slab I put down (until it was at like .45 for nongrain/nonvegetable, which is worse than if I just had a storage vessel sitting outside). I took all the slabs back out replaced them with granite cobblestone and it went mostly back to normal, although now it's still not quite as good as it was before I did anything.

No idea why the mere presence of ebony slabs in a cellar should change it that drastically, but it definitely seemed like a bug.

Edited September 26, 2021 by goaliemagics
slightly less unhelpful title lol

[Streetwind]

1 hour ago, goaliemagics said:

No idea why the mere presence of ebony slabs in a cellar should change it that drastically, but it definitely seemed like a bug.

Not really a bug, no.

I can't really tell you how precisely cellars are coded, as I cannot read the code. But I can tell you how it works in practice in the game. Cellars are not truly 'rooms' - you don't need to build a completely enclosed space of certain specifications. No, they work through proximity of stone-type or soil-type blocks. Each storage vessel, chest, shelf, and so on will check around them in a radius of as much as five blocks away, to see if it can find valid cellar blocks. The greater the ratio of valid blocks to invalid blocks, the slower food spoils. The slowest possible food spoilage rate is achieved if the storage vessel detects only valid blocks - that is, there is a wall, floor, and ceiling made up of valid blocks in any and all directions, and none of them is more than five blocks away. It can be much closer - for example, a vessel buried underground by itself essentially occupies a perfect cellar of size 1x1x1. But if it's further away than five blocks in one direction, then it'll detect only air that way and it will no longer be perfect. This is why people tell you that cellars should be 5x5x5 rooms. Not because there's actually a room setup requirement, but because that ensures that there's valid blocks nearby in all directions.

By removing the valid blocks in the floor and replacing them with invalid blocks (wooden slabs), you reduced the effectiveness of the cellar significantly.

If you feel like you storage vessels aren't updating to the correct value, try picking them up and putting them back down.

 

Edited September 26, 2021 by Streetwind

[Kolyenka]

6 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

Not really a bug, no.

I can't really tell you how precisely cellars are coded, as I cannot read the code. But I can tell you how it works in practice in the game. Cellars are not truly 'rooms' - you don't need to build a completely enclosed space of certain specifications. No, they works through proximity of stone-type or soil-type blocks. Each storage vessel, chest, shelf, and so on will check around them in a radius of as much as five blocks away, to see if it can find valid cellar blocks. The greater the ratio of valid blocks to invalid blocks, the slower food spoils. The slowest possible food spoilage rate is achived if the storage vessel detects only valid blocks - that is, there is a wall, floor, or ceiling made up of valid blocks in any direction, and none of them is more than five blocks away. It can be much closer - for example, a vessel buried underground by itself essentially occupies a perfect cellar of size 1x1x1. But if it's further away than five blocks in one direction, then it'll detect only air that way and it will no longer be perfect. This is why people tell you that cellars should be 5x5x5 rooms. Not because there's actually a room setup requirement, but because that ensures that there's valid blocks nearby in all directions.

By removing the valid blocks in the floor and replacing them with invalid blocks (wooden slabs), you reduced the effectiveness of the cellar significantly.

If you feel like you storage vessels aren't updating to the correct value, try picking them up and putting them back down.

Ah, that's not at all how I assumed it worked. Thank you for explaining all of this--it makes a lot more sense now !