LadyWYT

No, that sounds about right, at least for grain. Some crops do give reduced yields on the next to last stages, but keep in mind that the cold damage will reduce that yield further. Grain yields already aren't that high, so the cold and premature harvest is enough to eat through whatever there was to harvest aside from seeds, assuming there was anything to harvest to start with.

Welcome to the game and forums! Currently, no. Animals will eventually respawn in an area, and the respawn rate tends to be faster in warmer months. The closest you can get to "extinction" in an area is overfishing a body of water, but even then the fish population will eventually be replenished. It's not quite that simple, but almost. The material you build the room out of does matter. Dirt and stone are what is needed for a cellar, with an air-tight door and no windows. Stone is slightly better than dirt. If you use other materials in the construction, such as wood, the spoilage rate will be higher. Bear pelts are mainly decorative, but the hides are useful for things that require really big hides, such as the crude bellows or the hides needed for sturdy leather later in the game. The armor itself is somewhat of a vanity piece, but it does provide a warmth bonus(other armors do not) and is a decent early game armor compared to other options. Each nutrition bar provides an extra 2.5 hitpoints when full, so you'll want to keep all the bars as full as possible in order to take advantage of the full health boost. An empty bar isn't a big deal, but it can be a problem depending on your game settings, since on harder difficulties the monsters hit harder and the player has less health, so those extra hitpoints can be pretty important to survival. As far as "health problems" caused by nutrition deficit...currently that's not a thing, but that may or may not change in the future. A status effect system is planned, as far as I'm aware, so when such a system is added it may introduce penalties for running a deficit on certain nutrition for a while, or other similar setbacks. Winter in Vintage Story depends on what band of climate you're in and the local chunk climate, which will match the general climate of the latitude but can vary by a few degrees. Altitude is also a factor, since the higher up you are the colder it will be. The default starting climate is temperate, which has a pretty even balance of seasons. Warmer climates will still experience winter, but may not get cold enough for ice and snow and may not have the days shortened as much. The tropics will be hot all year long. Do note that how long it takes to get from one climate to another depends heavily on what the polar-equator distance is set to. The default, I think, is 100k blocks, so you will need to travel for several days in order to reach warmer regions of the world. Picking "patchwork" climate instead of "realistic" will result in Minecraft-style biomes. I will note though, that as long as you put a little effort into storing food in a cellar prior to winter's arrival, winter shouldn't be an issue. A few shelves full of sealed crocks of meaty stew should be plenty, along with a couple of storage containers of grain and vegetables from your farms. It's not currently a thing in the vanilla game, no. The closest you get is salting meats and pickling vegetables for long-term storage. For storing fruit long-term, you'll want to turn it into jam or alcohol. Baking pies also works, although pies don't have as long of shelf life. Honey never spoils and counts as fruit nutrition, so that can be an option as well. If you want to go the modded route though, there's a handful of mods that adds more long-term food prep options, the most popular of which is Expanded Foods.

A different angle that crossed my mind...if the goal is to make long travels have more impact and thus require more planning, I'm not sure that changing the hunger is the answer. Currently, traveling has little impact on the player's plans aside from time, since there's very few circumstances where the player will be spending more than a few days away from home. And pies will stay fresh for a few days and are stackable, so supplies aren't usually an issue. The player can also cover a lot of ground on foot since sprinting is fast and has no time limits. I think in this case, the simpler solution is to increase the distance between story locations in the game settings, as well as potentially decrease the player's speed in order to make mounts and vehicles much more valuable. Adding a mod like Vigor to limit how long the player can sprint will further contribute to the value of a mount. As for food, the spoilage rate can be adjusted in the vanilla settings, but a mod that adjusts the spoilage of specific foods, like raw meat, would be better. Realistically, raw meat will spoil rather quickly in warmer weather, and when it comes to travel food the mainstays are going to be things like grains, salted/dried meats, dried fruits, or specific raw foods that keep very well, with freshly hunted/foraged foodstuffs supplementing those supplies whenever possible. Of course, changes like these also make changing the hunger to be more "realistic" have more value other than a simple way to exploit game mechanics, but even so, I would still argue that it's not very realistic/ideal to be deliberately planning to go days without food, especially when traveling.

Right, and despite the fact that pretty much anything goes when it comes to mods, I'm looking at it from the standpoint of balancing around default gameplay settings. Longer months means that the player will need more food to survive overall, and means that the player will need to wait longer for crops and livestock. However...longer months also means more time to get things done...which means that the player really shouldn't be going hungry at all, since they can more easily devote entire days to specific tasks and don't need to worry quite as much about multi-tasking. Though I suppose it could also be argued that this sort of change makes longer months even less forgiving, since players who fall into trap of getting lazy with food stores will find themselves suffering a lot more over the winter than they maybe would otherwise. Regarding temporal gears and base game starvation being solved by dying...that only kind of works. Death wipes out half the nutrition bars each time and the hunger bar itself is only half-full on respawn, so unless the player prioritizes food they really aren't going to get very far. Temporal gears also have limited respawns by default, and are hard to come by in the early game, so burning through respawns on frivolous deaths isn't recommended. In fairness, I'm not saying a mod that makes starvation "realistic" couldn't work. But at the end of the day, it is still a videogame, and trying to make the hunger "realistic" usually results in either overcomplicating the mechanic or making it almost negligible. A fair point, but depending on other settings, the health buff can be ignored, or built up easily enough before the player actually goes to do something. So I'm not sure the health buff alone is enough to keep players invested in the system, if the system itself can be exploited to avoid worrying about food almost entirely. It is a harsh penalty, yes, but I think the penalty needs to be a little harsh in order to keep the player from gaming the system and just eating a meal every now and then instead of actually establishing a food supply and keeping themselves properly fed. If the health never ticks down while the hunger bar is above zero, then all the player really has to do is eat the occasional flax grain or other cheap food, and only ever invest in full meals when they need the nutrition bar full for an adventure or something. That's not to say every player would do that, but I can see several players gaming the system in that fashion since there's not really a penalty for doing so. Same goes for the health being earned back twice as fast as it decreases. It's a mechanic that's very easy to exploit, since the player can just go days without before spending a day or two to recover and then going several more days without. I would also note that players often don't play the game in a realistic fashion, despite comments pointing out how various mechanics aren't very realistic. It's a videogame, it's to be expected. When it comes to "realistic" hunger systems, I think it's also fair to point out that just because the average human can go several days without food and not die...that really only happens in extreme circumstances. The average person tends to get at least one or two meals a day, and in the circumstances that starvation is actually occurring, it's not something one just recovers from after a meal or two. Skip a couple of meals and you'll generally feel more irritable, less focused, and weaker, even if you otherwise have a normal diet. Thus when it comes to videogame realism, I'm not sure it's really fair to argue that the player should be able to go days without food because it's "realistic", without also imposing some pretty steep penalties when it comes to recovering from days without food, or even softer penalties for skipping a meal or two. That doesn't mean that food supply needs to become an absolute chore either, but I don't think it should be something the player can just ignore as they wish and expect to succeed at the rest of the game. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to such a thing, and it's somewhat what I would expect if the hunger mechanic were overhauled to include something of a "starvation grace period". But I still think it's the kind of thing that's very difficult to balance. Too little penalty, and the player will just ignore the downsides in favor of gaming the system, no matter how unrealistic, simply because it's a videogame and easy options tend to be very attractive. Penalties that persist through death tend to be a pretty good motivator to avoid certain mistakes, but they can also be rather frustrating to deal with, especially for newer players who are still trying to master the game. To my knowledge, the only mods out there that really overhaul the hunger like this are Expanded Stomach, Tasshroom's Body Fat mod, and Max's Simple Starvation. There used to be another mod, Realistic Starvation, that basically did what it says on the tin--made it take days for the player to actually starve to death. The main problems with that mod though, was that there was absolutely no penalty for overeating(and thus no reason not to eat everything in sight), and food otherwise was no longer a challenge since it took so long for any penalties to actually occur. Tasshroom's Body Fat is probably the closest fit to what you're looking for, I'm guessing. It's rather straightforward in what it adds--you can overeat and store a certain amount of extra calories each day as fat. When the hunger bar is empty, it will burn through any fat first before it starts to damage player health. Most values, I think, are configurable...or at least they were when I last toyed with the mod, which was quite some time ago. For the vanilla game, I think there was some rudimentary ideas for fat and starvation mechanics buried deep in the code, that my friend ran across while we were working on Expanded Stomach. If I'm recalling correctly, the ratio was such that for each day the player went without food and relied on fat reserves to survive, it would take them seven days to recover those reserves, which seems pretty fair to me. It's enough to let the player go a little longer between meals if they're in the middle of a project, or survive a little longer in an emergency, but it's not so lenient that the player is going to game the system by regularly skipping meals and ignoring food supply.

This isn't true. It depends heavily on player skill, player preference, class choice, and current equipment. The boss itself is quite predictable, having three different attacks, all of which have a rather long wind-up and are clearly telegraphed in order to give the player a chance to deal with it. I will also note that the boss reacts, at least somewhat, to what the player does during the fight. If you're in melee range, the boss will favor melee strikes. If you step out of range, the boss will favor throwing junk or slamming the ground. If you're not within the boss's LoS then it tends to favor the slam in order to launch you out of cover. The only counter-intuitive part I can really think of is that jumping before the slam ability will prevent you from being launched. As for gear, the minimum requirement is bronze. However, the better the equipment, the easier the fight will generally be. With steel chain and a high-powered steel falx, healing isn't really necessary, but with lesser equipment you might need to heal a time or two during the fight. It's also worth noting that when the boss begins to get low on health, it will summon locusts at a steady pace; at this point, you need to focus on killing the boss, since trying to kill all the locusts or stay healed up to full will only sap your remaining resources and likely end up killing you instead. The general strategy I use for the fight is to remain within melee range to bait out the melee attacks, stepping back at the right moment to dodge before attacking the boss. Sometimes I equip the shield and just sit there in front of the boss, slicing away with my falx. When the boss telegraphs the slam ability, I jump right before the boss actually hits the ground. If I need to heal, I back off to relative safety and apply a bandage or two as needed, if I can. No, but there is an in-game handbook with almost all the information the player needs about the various general items and gameplay. Vintage Story is a very meaty game, with complex systems that often intertwine with one another, and it's also not a game to hold the player's hand and tell them exactly what to do at any given moment or otherwise make sure they never truly get in over their head. As for the wiki and online guides, they aren't necessary for playing the game, but they're still useful resources. Players who prefer step-by-step guides or just want more in-depth information than what the handbook can offer will find these resources very useful. What kind of improvements though? While it's fine to say you didn't like the design, that's just a personal opinion, and "it needs improving" is an incredibly broad statement that could mean very different things depending on who you ask. I will note that I went into the Resonance Archive blind on my first time, and figured out everything just fine, so I mean...I'm with @Rainbow Fresh. The puzzles aren't very hard, and the design is such that it's not possible to get things out of order since parts of the location are locked until you've fixed the appropriate part of the machinery. Examining the machinery itself will tell you what's missing, and paying attention to the notes scattered around the Archive(as well as the set design itself) will give you clues on where to find certain things and what challenges may be ahead. Much of Vintage Story is like this--the lore bits, set designs, and NPC dialogue aren't just there for aesthetics, and the player ignores those details at their own risk. Regarding torches specifically...the player will have probably figured out long before ever setting foot in the Archive that torches can easily be extinguished in a handful of ways. It's probably not a good idea to rely on a fragile light source like that, or to at least bring multiple torches as backups and split the one you're using from the stack in case something does happen. The "ladder in the kitchen" also clearly leads to a well/reservoir, and climbing down VS ladders is a relatively slow process, so even then the player has some warning about what's coming and an opportunity to correct it.

They may be free for now, but things do change. Software can change hands, or go under entirely. I'm not saying that would happen, of course, or that Blockbench and Blender are bad programs. But it's not a risk I would rule out entirely either. Ultimately, I'm not sure that it's very wise to change direction and invest that many resources into a change that isn't really necessary, especially since that kind of decision can easily set back a project, if not break it. However, for those who really want to use Blockbench for Vintage Story modding, there's already a plugin for it: https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/19838

Welcome to the game and forums! Keeping in mind that replacing entire systems like this is a massive amount of work, since it likely means redoing almost every animation and model in the entire game. And time and resources spent reworking this specific system is time and resources that isn't being used to development other areas of the game...areas that may be more lacking. It's not that animations and models aren't important, however, they are primarily cosmetic, and not exactly a priority when there are still entire systems of gameplay missing or otherwise unfinished. Blockbench and Blender are also third-party software, so while they might be useful programs there's also the risk that the TOS for those programs could change, and not in a good way. To my knowledge, the VS Model Creator is software owned by Anego Studios, so one distinct advantage of using it is that the devs can tune it for their exact purposes and don't need to worry about fees or TOS changes when using it. It's also worth noting that many models and animations currently in the game are simply placeholders until the devs have time to add more polish to those things, and many have already been polished compared to what they used to be in previous game versions. In any case, as convenient as this kind of rework might be for some, I don't think it's worth it. It pulls too much time and resources away from developing more critical aspects of the game, and relying too heavily on third-party software can be rather risky.

Welcome to the forums! It's due to how much copper you have in the crucible, and it's a LOT. The more material you try to smelt at once, the longer it will take to both get it up to temperature and actually smelt it. This also applies to other items cooked in the firepit. The temperature no longer resets when a new item starts cooking, but the trade-off is that the stack will heat up in proportion to its size. When a crucible reaches smelting temperature, it still needs time to actually smelt. Once the progress arrow fills completely, the crucible of molten metal will appear in the output slot and be ready for pouring into molds. Make sure that you keep the firepit fueled properly during the smelting process. If it runs out of fuel the smelting process will continue as long as the material itself is at the appropriate temperature, however, after a few moments the material will begin to cool. If it drops below the smelting temperature then any progress made will be quickly lost, and you'll need to bring the material back up to temperature and start the process again. Also make sure that you're using fuel that will burn hot enough to smelt the material; it's not enough to simply bring the crucible to temperature and then switch to a cheaper fuel.

I think the "no bears for the first few days" was a change made in 1.22. However, it's also bugged at the moment, since bears will still spawn immediately on world creation.

This is no longer true. Yes, you can capture them this way, however, it's dangerous since sheep hit rather hard and are quite fast. It's not necessary to get them to chase you though, since they will begin to move away on their own if you start to get too close. The same holds true for pigs as well--start getting too close, and they will move away. This behavior makes them quite easy to herd without too much risk to yourself. Animals that are already tamed can be picked up in reed chests and moved as needed, provided they are babies(or otherwise small enough to fit in said chest) and at least generation 5(or tame enough to no longer flee from the player, not sure).

There's two main hurdles to overcome, I think, the most important of which is...what happens to the penalties if the player dies, and is it possible for the player to softlock themselves out of playing the game thanks to penalties incurred. If the penalties are reset on death, then starvation isn't much of a threat since the player can just use death as an easy reset rather than put in the effort to actually recover. However, if the penalties persist through death then you risk the player, inexperienced players especially, getting themselves into a situation where they're still struggling to stay alive because they're too weak to actually stay alive long enough to get food. It's also important to consider that the default month length is nine days. Given what you've outlined, the player would probably die from other causes thanks to the lowered health before they manage to actually die of starvation, however, preserving food for the winter is one of the major challenges of the game(even if a simple one). Allowing the player to go over a month without any food at all is a fairly generous amount of time, and one that could encourage players to get lazy about how they approach tasks like food storage or supplies for travel. One problem here--by "immediately halt the clock" do you mean avoiding the health penalty for that day? If so, then "any food" means that all the player has to do is eat a single flax grain or other low-value food item to avoid taking any sort of penalty. In which case, the player doesn't actually need to concern themselves with storing food or otherwise establishing a food supply except for filling nutrition bars. There's also the aspect of...if it takes a full day without food to lose a point of health, but one full day to regain two points of lost health back, then starvation means very little since the player can earn back the health faster than it's lost. Which again leads to the situation of the player being encouraged to ignore securing a good food supply, since any penalties incurred are so easily mitigated. I think for starvation to actually mean something in regards to the proposed health loss, you need to make it easier for the player to lose health to starvation and harder for them to gain that health back once it's lost. For example, if they lose a hitpoint of health for each day they go without food, it should take them two days of steady meals--no starvation ticks--in order to gain that point of health back. To avoid death as an easy out, the penalty should also persist through death, albeit with a limit in order to ensure that the player will still be reasonably strong enough on respawn to dig themselves out of the mess they've gotten themselves into without needing to start a new game.

Worst Treasure EVER So after reading @ifoz's assessment of treasure map tables the other day, I decided to put a little more effort into buying maps and seeing what kind of goodies I could get. After all, what could it hurt? I've a couple years into this world, have steel, and I've seen the story several times by now so while it never gets old, I'm not in a hurry to actually do it either. With this in mind, I loaded up my dragon and made my trading rounds, making sure that I stopped by the friendly local treasure hunter to see if there were any treasure maps for sale. As luck would have it, he had one! For the bargain price of only eleven gears! I bought it, and couldn't believe my luck either--the treasure was basically buried in the man's own backyard! Excited about such luck, I ran over to the indicated spot and started digging, inwardly lamenting not bringing a shovel and being too lazy to just knap one from the nearby stones. As it turns out though, I didn't have to dig very far, for the treasure chest itself was buried just underneath the surface. Now what was in that chest, you might ask? Gold? Silver? Gems? Fine clothing? Long lost contraptions or miscellaneous keepsakes? NOPE! If you guessed any of the above, you'd be wrong. If you guessed something else other than the above, you'd probably still be wrong, unless, of course, the something else you guessed was an empty box. For you see, dear reader, that is what I found. No treasure, just a rickety wooden box that collapsed as soon as I tried to open it, and the sense that maybe, just maybe, those traders aren't as honest as they'd like you to think they are.

Welcome to the game and forums! There are already ways to do this in the game, though some are still very much being worked on. The general method is to catch the babies in a trap and transport them to the pen in question. You can also place a trough with food in a pen to lure in the adults, or herd the adult animals into the pen since most animals will run away if you get too close. Rope can also be used to lead animals around, however, it's important to note a couple of things: 1. Ropes are still very buggy when used as leads for animals, so trying to use one in this fashion can easily create more problems than it solves. 2. If I'm not mistaken, only semi-tame animals are meant to be lead around via a rope, presumably to reflect that the animals are wild and thus require the player to put some effort into actually taming the animals before having livestock that can be easily managed. Most wild animals also get defensive when the player comes too close, so trying to rope and lead one is also going to be quite dangerous.

I would say it's the kind of thing you really only do just to see if you can/say that you've done it. Waterwheels are very nice to have, but they're most useful for things that both need a lot of power and that you'll want to use regularly, such as the helve hammer. Windmills tend to be just fine for things that don't require active supervision to use, such as the quern or pulverizer. That being said, if you decide to go for multiple waterwheels, I highly recommend making sure that the streams you've got marked are actually rapids, since a regular stream of water isn't powerful enough for a waterwheel but can be mistaken for rapids. The main differences between them are that rapids are much louder, and tend to have a brighter, slightly more opaque coloring along with a lot more particle effects.

I'm guessing that player-defined translocators are a likely candidate for future Jonas tech, though it could just be that the player is restricted to predefined translocators for specific story locations as well. As far as bouncing back and forth between climates without shortening the polar-equator distance or playing with patchwork climate...I'm not sure that I would really want that. On the one hand, it would be a nice feature, and one you'd have to work at to acquire. However, part of what makes the current world design interesting is that some things are climate-specific, and there's no easy way to acquire them without living there. I'm not sure I'd want to lose that feature.

I completed the Resonance Archive earlier and was thinking about this. Not so much that it would be more convenient to have an elevator for hauling loot out, but rather how both of the current story chapters have roughly the same general completion time, as well as the general outlook Vintage Story seems to have on loot. Regarding the loot factor, the game has plenty of goodies to find, some of them junk, some of them valuable, and some of them simply interesting oddities to collect. However, the player's limited inventory means that they might need to be careful what they choose to take with them if they are pressed for time, and/or that they may need to plan for another trip or two if they insist on hauling away absolutely everything(pack animals would make this easier). It's an interesting balance, in my opinion, since it places more importance on the player's choices, and makes it possible for a player to get too greedy and suffer the consequences. In contrast, many games tend to end up giving the player some gold and a treasure item or two--never more than the player can really carry--or give the player a convenient way to scour the location of anything valuable and quickly sell it all in the nearest town. As far as the completion time, I think each story chapter is probably going to end up taking the player several in-game days, on average, to complete. The Resonance Archive doesn't feel like it takes that long, partly due to the fact that it's entirely underground so it's very easy for the player to lose track of how much time has actually passed. It's also rather compact, with lots of lore to read, details to study, and secrets to find. And of course, loot to haul out, if the player is so inclined, which will end up chewing through quite a lot of time on top of whatever time the player spent exploring the location and reading all the lore involved. Chapter Two ends up feeling longer than it actually is, I think, mainly because it takes place above ground and thus allows the player a better sense of time's passing. There's also the fact that the really impressive ruins(dungeons) have only begun to be added, so there's not all that much for the player to really see while traveling. Chapter Three, when it arrives, I'm guessing will probably take a similar amount of time to complete as the first two--about an in-game week, and if it involves some travel I'm also guess that part will feel better than the travel did at Chapter Two's launch, since the game will have been more fleshed out since.

Welcome to the forums! Correct. And the doors need to be solid as well; the only door that doesn't qualify as a solid door, to my knowledge, is the crude door and maybe the trapdoors that have gaps in them. Also make sure that if you used slabs for the roofing, that their face is flush to the inside of the space you intend to insulate and not the outside. If the slab is flush to the outside I don't believe it will work. If you chiseled parts of the walls you'll also need to make sure that you didn't chisel away too much material, since that can also mess up the room calculations. https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Room

Possibly causing the game, or newer versions of the game at least, to not run properly on older hardware either. However, there's nothing unusual about that at all; many games that are long-lived go through the process at least once in their lives. Pretty much. Minecraft's performance has been suffering for a while now, and with the introduction of Caves & Cliffs it got especially bad. If I recall correctly, Mojang has been trying to improve the performance in recent updates, so while mods like Sodium and Optifine are still useful they perhaps aren't as critical to play as they used to be.

The problem I see here is that several players already don't like temporal mechanics. While temporal mechanics could certainly use a little work, I don't think it's a good idea to add more features to them that are most likely going to be annoying and prompt yet more players to turn said mechanics off.

Boosting durability and getting a mix between power and durability is a thing in my mod. I reworked the tempering mechanic so that it boosts the item's durability by 40% exclusively. Covering the item in fire clay before quenching will boost both power and durability, but neither stat will be quite as strong as picking a finishing method exclusively for one or the other. Just wanted to make sure it was clear. Thanks! I still need to work out a config, so that folks can tailor the buffs and shatter risks to their specific liking. I'll get around to it...eventually...

That seems a little high to me, so I'd say you've just gotten unlucky this time around. If you want to simplify the process though, I made a mod for that! https://mods.vintagestory.at/improvedquenching It still retains some shatter risk for certain benefits, but overall it changes the system to a "one and done" process.

As a story location, sure, but it's not something I'd want to be doing on the regular, essentially.

Welcome to the forums! Birds are still on the roadmap, and there's likely still other animals yet to be added to further flesh out the world. There are other livestock fowls that could be considered flightless for gameplay purposes, as well as wild birds like the cassowary that are entirely flightless. However, it's important to consider that while domesticated geese and ducks might not fly very well, their wild counterparts do, in addition to migrating, so it would be just a little bit disappointing to have wild waterfowl that acts the same as domesticated. Additionally, some of the flightless bird options, like the cassowary, are found in more specific environments like the tropics or warmer regions of the world, so they're not likely to be much of an option on a standard playthrough. It also takes quite a bit of time to model, animate, texture, and code new entities, so while new creatures are always nice to have it's also resources that aren't being used to develop other aspects of the game, such as new mechanics or story content. Right, but keep in mind it's also a videogame. Arrows are meant to be fairly easy for the player to create, which means that the crafting materials also need to be fairly easy to find as well. Maybe when more bird variety is introduced, the rules on which birds drop usable feathers for fletching(or other purposes) might change(ie, you're not going to kill a songbird and get anything useful), but overall I would expect the rules to remain rather simple. It's easier to code and saves on file size to just make all decently sized birds drop a generic feather item for crafting, than it is to make several different feather variants for each bird type and then further restrict which variants can be used for which recipes.

Yeah pretty much. Generally when I make suggestions I try to work within the framework of what's already in the game and what the overall direction seems to be, rather than make sweeping changes that would drastically alter what the game is. In regards to tower defense...I'm really not a fan of them, especially if the game is intended to offer the player a lot of aesthetic building choices. There's not much point in putting in the effort to make everything look nice when it's just going to get constantly destroyed, and in Vintage Story it can take a LOT of time just to collect all the materials needed for a project and then a LOT more time on top of that if chiseling is going to be involved.

You can't char vegetables in the vanilla game. You can cook them into a meal via the cookpot, or bake them into a pie, but cooking the vegetables by themselves isn't an option unless you're playing with a mod like Expanded Foods. Do also note that cooking will usually take the freshness of the ingredients into account, so cooking with ingredients that are spoiling will result in a meal that isn't too tasty. I think the only exception is juice and alcohol, since there's currently no real penalty for pressing fruit that has started to spoil. Dehydrated fruit is another modded mechanic(Expanded Foods). For fruit preservation in vanilla, you will need to either cook it into a meal, cook it into jam, bake it into a pie, or turn it into alcohol. Honey never spoils and counts as fruit saturation, so if you have a lot of bees honey is also an option. Apples and pears do last a long time by themselves, but as mentioned above, dehydration is currently a modded mechanic and not a vanilla one.