store meat in bathrooms

[InsaneWithAnger]

In order to preserve meat, the game currently rewards leaving scraps outside shelters to experience lower temperatures. I like this feature, but I think it could be expanded into more variables for the player to juggle. Here is a sketch of my idea for The Long Dark:

-Players may store their meat outside, but at the risk of predators feasting on it while the player is absent.

-Meat may be stored in outdoor metal or wood containers (rare to find), with the benefit of preventing wolves from accessing the meat, while bears would still be able to steal from the food stash. Game calculates chances of a bear finding the food at night or while the player is away. Corpses are barred from being used as storage, for gameplay realism.

-Meat may be stored indoors to keep scavengers from stealing, but players pay a high price in food degradation because of the higher temperatures.

My concept is this: A player may expend time and effort moving snow into the bathroom showers/bathtubs. The shower or tub would serve as a place to pack meat for preservation. Snow would slowly melt over time, requiring the player to spend more effort to move snow and keep meat frozen. Melted snow would drain out through the shower/tub drain hole. Packing snow anywhere in the house would not be an option, since snow would melt and cause water damage.

This option for storage would be favorable in many circumstances, but it would require the player to find a shelter with a bathroom (excludes many living locations). It would encourage the player to make creative decisions about where to live, hunt, and store meat. Some locations, like trapping or fishing huts, may be easy for capturing food, but would not have bathrooms for storage. Others may have storage, but no nearby places to easily acquire meat. More choices to juggle!

PS: The Long Dark would also incorporate a feature involving freezing and thawing meat. Frozen meat would take longer to cook, so your frozen storage of meat would incur that penalty. That is, unless you plan -with foresight- to let your meat thaw out for a couple hours while you are away from your hut doing other activities.

[Wastelander]

Definitely +1 for temperature-based condition loss.

Welcome to the forums InsaneWithAnger!

[vancopower]

Just now, InsaneWithAnger said:

In order to preserve meat, the game currently rewards leaving scraps outside shelters to experience lower temperatures. I like this feature, but I think it could be expanded into more variables for the player to juggle. Here is a sketch of my idea for The Long Dark:

-Players may store their meat outside, but at the risk of predators feasting on it while the player is absent.

-Meat may be stored in outdoor metal or wood containers (rare to find), with the benefit of preventing wolves from accessing the meat, while bears would still be able to steal from the food stash. Game calculates chances of a bear finding the food at night or while the player is away. Corpses are barred from being used as storage, for gameplay realism.

-Meat may be stored indoors to keep scavengers from stealing, but players pay a high price in food degradation because of the higher temperatures.

My concept is this: A player may expend time and effort moving snow into the bathroom showers/bathtubs. The shower or tub would serve as a place to pack meat for preservation. Snow would slowly melt over time, requiring the player to spend more effort to move snow and keep meat frozen. Melted snow would drain out through the shower/tub drain hole. Packing snow anywhere in the house would not be an option, since snow would melt and cause water damage.

This option for storage would be favorable in many circumstances, but it would require the player to find a shelter with a bathroom (excludes many living locations). It would encourage the player to make creative decisions about where to live, hunt, and store meat. Some locations, like trapping or fishing huts, may be easy for capturing food, but would not have bathrooms for storage. Others may have storage, but no nearby places to easily acquire meat. More choices to juggle!

PS: The Long Dark would also incorporate a feature involving freezing and thawing meat. Frozen meat would take longer to cook, so your frozen storage of meat would incur that penalty. That is, unless you plan -with foresight- to let your meat thaw out for a couple hours while you are away from your hut doing other activities.

Maybe we could build wood container in later updates and put snow in them why do we limit ourselves to bathtubs. In fact any container can be turned effectively in to fridge at those temperatures, as long as you don't start fire near them. But yes bathtubs would be preferable + 1 from me to bathtub/fridge idea

[Boston123]

Or, you know..... you could just pack the fridge and freezer with ice......

It is already insulated, so a couple of buckets of ice would last a while.

Why people want to make things unrealistically difficult, I don't know. Why we would pack a bathtub full of snow when we have a perfectly usable fridge is ...... completely backwards, to me. Sorry.

[Ruruwawa]

On the other hand storing meat outside is perfectly realistic.  I've done it myself.  The barrier to animals is not a wooden or even sheet metal box (bears would laugh themselves silly at these), unless you can get it several meters up from the ground like a cache,  The easy alternative is eliminating the odor.  On my arctic backpacking trips we double bagged our food in heavy plastic bags and buried it 10-15 cm down by the permafrost under moss and lichens (as good as a refrigerator).  I watched wolves check out our camp from my tent and they never gave our barely buried food a sniff. 

Some loss to predators, sure, I'm fine with that.  Snow in an existing fridge or tub -- still fine.  But construction projects seem a lot more like The Sims: Hunter's Camp than hardcore survival to me.  (Except a survival shelter, of course, which really is about survival.)

But whatever Hinterlands decides is also fine with me.  If they want to take the game in the direction of construction projects to build a better base  (vs exploring the world to find a better base), it's their call.

[InsaneWithAnger]

9 hours ago, Boston123 said:

Or, you know..... you could just pack the fridge and freezer with ice......

It is already insulated, so a couple of buckets of ice would last a while.

I've never tried packing snow in an unpowered freezer. But I always imagined it would be like filling a basic cooler with ice: would last maybe a day or two, melting into a huge puddle of water on the floor. Too much water on the floor might cause mold or rot.

[Boston123]

1 hour ago, InsaneWithAnger said:

I've never tried packing snow in an unpowered freezer. But I always imagined it would be like filling a basic cooler with ice: would last maybe a day or two, melting into a huge puddle of water on the floor. Too much water on the floor might cause mold or rot.

The fridge/freezer is insulated, so as long as you refrain from opening the door too often, the ice and snow will remain frozen for a decent amount of time. Granted, so are coolers, but to a much lesser degree. Even still, I have packed a cooler full of ice and stuffed it with food, and there was still ice left in the cooler a couple of days later, in the middle of a New England summer.

It all depends on how often you open the door and expose the interior to warmer temperatures.

If you get a power outage, you are supposed to leave food in your refrigerator, and try to not open it. Depending on the temperature, the freezer will remain at safe temps for generally a couple of days.

Besides, most fridge/freezers have watertight gaskets around the edges of the doors (also to help insulate the interior)

[InsaneWithAnger]

I see. I wonder if that would be ok long term. At the low temperatures (even indoors), I would expect snow to not melt for a while. But over 100 days, floor damage and mold inside the freezer might accumulate. In any case, I like the idea of expending effort and time to store meat indoors. I thought the player might get a jolt of surprise after realizing a shower or bathtub would be a perfect place to store snow and meat in the long dark world. Low indoor temps and a drain in the shower would accommodate ice packing very well (in addition to allowing nearly unlimited storage space).

[Wastelander]

Quote

If you get a power outage, you are supposed to leave food in your refrigerator, and try to not open it. Depending on the temperature, the freezer will remain at safe temps for generally a couple of days.

Waaaaait a minute. Does that mean that my former landlord is an ***hole? I mean, we regularly had outages for half a day, maybe a whole two because the whole building was falling apart. Did I throw my bacon away for nothing? It was slightly below room temperature when I did.

[hauteecolerider]

1 hour ago, Boston123 said:

The fridge/freezer is insulated, so as long as you refrain from opening the door too often, the ice and snow will remain frozen for a decent amount of time. Granted, so are coolers, but to a much lesser degree. Even still, I have packed a cooler full of ice and stuffed it with food, and there was still ice left in the cooler a couple of days later, in the middle of a New England summer.

In the old days, iceboxes were common. Big blocks of ice was stored in the topmost compartment, and food kept below. The chill moved downward through the icebox to keep things nicely cold through the summer months. Of course, in the winter, food was kept out on the back porch.

[Scyzara]

13 hours ago, Wastelander said:

Did I throw my bacon away for nothing? It was slightly below room temperature when I did

Why did you throw it away if it wasn't spoiled anyway? 

Potentially harmful bacteria (and mold fungi) need quite some time to multiply to an amount that overextends the capacities of the immune system of a healthy person. And it takes even a little longer until their toxins (=metabolic byproducts) accumulate to a harmfull degree.

We're actually eating small quantities of germs and their toxins every day (it's almost impossible to avoid them as they're everywhere - in the air, on surfaces, on vegetables or meat we buy, on our own skin, etc). But we're perfectly fine as long as we're not eating billions of germs or large amounts of their toxins at once.

As a rule of thumb, you should always have a close look and smell at food in case of doubt. If it looks or smells bad (= germs are present in larger quantities and have likely already produced a lot of toxins), throw it away - especially if it's raw meat. If the food looks and smells fine (= larger quantities of toxins are not to be expected), cooking or frying it properly is usually sufficient to kill enough germs to avoid any problems.

It's certainly not necessary to throw everything away in general just because it was unchilled for a few hours.

13 hours ago, Boston123 said:

The fridge/freezer is insulated, so as long as you refrain from opening the door too often, the ice and snow will remain frozen for a decent amount of time.

Well, as the average indoor temperature in a TLD house is -3°C (at least in Stalker, not sure if it applies to all modes), even opening the door wouldn't do any harm in this particular case. ^^

[Wastelander]

Quote

Why did you throw it away if it wasn't spoiled anyway? 

Was the first few weeks of me living completely on my own and being really really bad at existing

[SteveP]

On 2016-05-28 at 2:52 AM, Wastelander said:

Was the first few weeks of me living completely on my own and being really really bad at existing

Bacon is already preserved using smoke and potassium nitrate so doesn't go bad as rapidly as other meat or fish. Hot dogs, sausage and other preserved meat can last through a power outage easily.

[vancopower]

On 27.5.2016 at 9:20 AM, Boston123 said:

Or, you know..... you could just pack the fridge and freezer with ice......

It is already insulated, so a couple of buckets of ice would last a while.

Why people want to make things unrealistically difficult, I don't know. Why we would pack a bathtub full of snow when we have a perfectly usable fridge is ...... completely backwards, to me. Sorry.

I guess you never had the opportunity to see powered down fridge, all the ice turns to water as quickly as 3-4 hours depending on the temperature. the only part that is insulated is the deep freezer and even this will not last long. However assuming that inside temp. will stay 0-3 degrees Celsius it should be fine but that means no fire in the house. Anyway it is a complex mechanic and the decay rate of items is already dropped to 1000+ so how more should be dropped to 10.000+  there is no need to complicate things further.  If anything I am more for smoked meat or salted this would make more sense and the mechanic will be easier to implement.   

[Boston123]

20 hours ago, vancopower said:

I guess you never had the opportunity to see powered down fridge, all the ice turns to water as quickly as 3-4 hours depending on the temperature. the only part that is insulated is the deep freezer and even this will not last long. However assuming that inside temp. will stay 0-3 degrees Celsius it should be fine but that means no fire in the house. Anyway it is a complex mechanic and the decay rate of items is already dropped to 1000+ so how more should be dropped to 10.000+  there is no need to complicate things further.  If anything I am more for smoked meat or salted this would make more sense and the mechanic will be easier to implement.   

Yep, I've done it. In the middle of a New England summer (so, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, with 70+% humidity), we lost power when some drunkard smashed their car into a powerline pole. It was out for a couple of days.

We packed the freezer full of frozen food and ice, and left it closed until we absolutely needed to get in there. The food remained frozen until the power came back on a couple days later. Sure, the stuff near the door started to thaw out, but nothing every became unsafe to eat.

And, again, "nothing needs to be more complicated", is strictly your opinion.

[SPiRiT]

well i like the idea it sounds kind of interesting for me and if it works it may solve a lot of storing problems and as well new things to worry about like you said. so it would be a balance i think and a nice feature too.

[SPiRiT]

On ۱۳۹۵/۳/۷ ه‍.ش. at 7:59 AM, vancopower said:

Maybe we could build wood container in later updates and put snow in them why do we limit ourselves to bathtubs. In fact any container can be turned effectively in to fridge at those temperatures, as long as you don't start fire near them. But yes bathtubs would be preferable + 1 from me to bathtub/fridge idea

and I like your idea too

in later updates with the possibility of shelter building it could be possible to build some kind of containers outdoors by your home site and store your meat and other kinds of food there , if there would be any new types of course rather than packed food , but then the animals risk would remain but it could be better than bathrooms if you place your container smartly and some where safer than the other but still some risk and worry would make it more fun and maybe more realistic i think.

 

[Pillock]

On 5/30/2016 at 8:42 PM, SteveP said:

Hot dogs, sausage and other preserved meat can last through a power outage

Hotdog sausages are not edible in the first place, so it's impossible for them to spoil.