How to store food?

[Rada]

Hey

I shot a deer and I got so much food but I don't know what to do now. I grilled some but there are still a few left. Where can I put these and do they rot? Is there a different between raw and cooked?

Thx!

[Thelek]

one deer may last 2 days depending on what difficulty level you are playing. you should never eat raw meat, it may make you sick. store allfoods in any container to slow the process of rotting. file cabnets hold the most at 88 pounds (40 kilos), just enough to store the meat from 1 bear. lockers and desks hold 66 pounds (30 kilos) each. store your meat raw until it reaches 49% or less condition then cook it and store it again. i dont recommend eating ANY food that reaches a condition of less than 25%.

[Rada]

Thank you very much!

When the meat reaches 49% and than I cook it, will it last longer?

[Thelek]

yes, cooking it increases condition, but i forget by how much.

[TWM]

When the meat reaches 49% and than I cook it, will it last longer?

Yes, cooking the meat will bring the condition back up to a 100% and then it will begin to degrade again.

So waiting a day or two before cooking it actually prolongs it's usability.

However if it gets below a certain quality percentage while raw, cooking won't restore it to a full 100%. I think I've cooked meat at 15% and gotten a 68% in return. Which is still edible, but if it gets lower than 60% cooked, it will start getting a chance of inducing food poisoning.

[thinair]

Always put meat in the locker, that way decays the slowest. To make it last even longer, as mentioned before, once the raw meat hits 49-50% cook it, and it will add 50%, so will have 99-100% condition meat.

Whole deer for me usually last 10-15 days when i'm active, and have not played hibernation style game in a while, were you let your condition drop to 5-10% due starvation, then eat 1 venison, sleep 12 hours and recover to 100%, and continue this cycle, then deer last 20+ days.

Smart thing to do is, when its like 3-4 hours of daylight left, start starving, finish the day starving, go to sleep starving, wake up at around 80-90% condition once it says 2-3 hours of darkness left, then eat half of the venison, sleep for 5-6 hours, it will recover condition to 100%, and can start exploring or whatever you wanna do. If its a day of wood gathering, and i know i wont have problems with wolves, even during my activities i starve a bit, i let condition drop to 70% or so. I eat allright only when i travel, then i usually have 500 or so calories in the system and of course 100% condition. This way dear last longer. People who eat whole deer in 2-3 days, IN MY OPINION, not playing the game right-survival-way... its not a all-inclusive vacation with full stomach. You suppose to starve.

[Rada]

Thank you for your tips! and you are right, starving is a big part of the game and the whole survival thing

[Eachna]

one deer may last 2 days depending on what difficulty level you are playing. you should never eat raw meat, it may make you sick. store allfoods in any container to slow the process of rotting. file cabnets hold the most at 88 pounds (40 kilos), just enough to store the meat from 1 bear. lockers and desks hold 66 pounds (30 kilos) each. store your meat raw until it reaches 49% or less condition then cook it and store it again. i dont recommend eating ANY food that reaches a condition of less than 25%.

I think refrigerators store more than file cabinets?

Yes Rada, definitely cook your meat, and store it somewhere other than open air or your pack. I disagree that you ought to let your meat sit in storage until reaching 49% condition and then cook it.

Instead, you should make that decision based on how much food you already have.

Do you have several days of stored food. Just shove the uncooked venison into storage and cook it when the other food runs out.

Do you have *no* food in storage? Cook it all at once (conserve matches) and then eat it as you need it. If you find another deer (or bear, or a large fish catch) while still working on the first deer, just store the new food raw until you need to eat it (and so on).

Basically, eat your oldest food at any time, cooking it first if it's meat.

[SteveP]

I think you should try to cook all your raw meat and fish in a large batch, if possible. I would not delay cooking it unless you are pressed for time to do some other important activity. I have stored raw meat overnight in an outside locker with minor degradation however don't try to do it more than one day, two at max. This extra day of meat doesn't add much to the useful life of meat since it is typically consumed prior to running into low condition meat. Bear meat is an exception since you can have so much, it's difficult to eat it all up and it seems to carry a higher risk of food poisoning than other meats at a given low condition. I don't know if that is a thing or not. Sleeping helps reduce your calorie consumption, making food last longer, which is an alternative strategy. Keep you clothing in top condition and use high quality beds and wolf skin coat etc whenever possible to also preserve calories. This is a calorie game. I think we might expect to see a few changes around food preservation, raw meat decay and so forth to improve balance. The difference between Stalker and Voyageur should be greater. Make Stalker mode much more difficult!

[Thelek]

i usually end up with way more meat than i can readily eat in a timely manner, so i find storing it raw and cooking it in batches works best. i prefer to store meat in file cabinets because they make keeping track of age much easier. each drawer is a batch @ 22 pounds (10 kilos) per batch makes for about 3 days worth of food. i always try to choose a base with plenty of file cabinets for this reason. the gas station has 3 and i think the farmhouse has 4. the dam has the most, but they are pretty well scattered making it a little difficult to keep track of stock.

i really do not understand why everyone is so worried about conserving matches. on my current play through, i am on day 123. i have explored all of ML, most of CH, and a small portion of DP and i have over 200 cardboard and about 90 wood matches in my posession. and thats not counting all those in plain sight i passed over so thier degradation clock wouldnt start. i also have 3 mag lenses and 4 strikers. by my estimation, i should still be able to light fires well past day 1200 with just what is in my posession. and i still have the better part of 3 maps yet to explore. maybe it has something to do with the way i light my fires. i NEVER use a match to light a fire if at all possible. if i have sunlight, i use a lens, otherwise, i first light a torch then use that to light the fire. especially as long as my fire building skill is below 100%. once it gets to 100, i may rarely use a match, but i really prefer to use a lens or torch because even though it may tell you that you have 100% chance to light that fire, i have still had fail a time or 2.

[thinair]

@ steve, all lockers, cabinets are the same, no matter if its outside or inside... the decay % is the same. It actually used to be wayyy back in a day, in early versions of the game that outside containers were the best, but devs changed it so all containers have same decay %.

@thelek. with all due respect, but 123 days is basically nothing, wait until day 300-400 and your matches that you have in your possession will be gone due to decay. It basically matter to people who do long runs, 1000-3000days.

[joki]

- Fresh meat decays faster than cooked meat

- Cooking meat will increase its state by 50%

So as rada has mentioned, if you are really going for highest survival time, keep all the meat until it reaches 50%, then cook it. So you get the both of both worlds: If you cook it earlier, you "waste" some of the 50% condition you would have gained, otherwise. If you cook it later, it will be longer in the state were it decays faster (raw), while not going back up to 100% after cooking it. Of course if you don't have anything else to eat, cook it earlier.

[ThresholdSeven]

i really do not understand why everyone is so worried about conserving matches. on my current play through, i am on day 123. i have explored all of ML, most of CH, and a small portion of DP and i have over 200 cardboard and about 90 wood matches in my posession. and thats not counting all those in plain sight i passed over so thier degradation clock wouldnt start. i also have 3 mag lenses and 4 strikers. by my estimation, i should still be able to light fires well past day 1200 with just what is in my posession.

Matches decay in just a couple months in game. If you have more than one pack of matches on you, there's a good chance that all the other matches on you will rot before you even finish using the first pack.

That is why players sometimes stop looting containers until they need matches again (unless finding other items trumps wasting matches in their situation) and why they leave matches that are discovered out in the open untouched (so you don't trigger their decay timer). Matches can be moved with the right click placement mechanic without triggering the decay timer though.

On the other hand, there are so many matches in the world as well as fire strikers that it's barely a concern. I'm on a run that is nearing three thousand days and still have about a dozen fire strikers, over a dozen matchbooks left untouched that I can retrieve whenever I need them, and at least a few more packs of matches in the airplane lockers. (If you quit looting a locker by hitting esc, the rest of the stuff in the locker will not start to decay)

Matches are actually the least of my concern. I don't know what I'll run out of first. I have more than enough of everything that my first item to go extinct probably wouldn't be until 5k+ days or more. It might be arrows, because I like to shoot at every bunny I see while laughing maniacally, but I could definitely conserve them.

Packaged food will most likely be the first thing to go (I think I might have drank the last Stacy's Grape in the world the other day). The more I play the more careless I am with all supplies because the more I realize that all the supplies in the world are super abundant.

I hope that a new mode (if Stalker isn't made more difficult) will be implemented that has way less supplies.

It would be fun to do a "no match" challenge. Although it might never end.

[Hatchet]

When the meat reaches 49% and than I cook it, will it last longer?

Yes, cooking the meat will bring the condition back up to a 100% and then it will begin to degrade again.

So waiting a day or two before cooking it actually prolongs it's usability.

However if it gets below a certain quality percentage while raw, cooking won't restore it to a full 100%. I think I've cooked meat at 15% and gotten a 68% in return. Which is still edible, but if it gets lower than 60% cooked, it will start getting a chance of inducing food poisoning.

I have had food poisoning of a 67% fish and food poisoning from a 88?87?% wolf steak on stalker difficulty.

Both poisons were within 24 hours of eachother.

I wonder if storing food in fridges and freezers prolongs the spoiling process even further? I usually store my fish and wolf meat in there but it's giving me food poisoning more often then when placing them in containers.

I also noticed the poisoned fish i dropped (was 5.3 kg so didn't ate it all at once) had green/purple spots, i only have one of that kind of fish so i can't check if other fish of that kind also have that, or if you can visibly see if food is spoiled or not (which would make a great addition, getting poisoned on pure luck is camel dung as stated above, 80+% food should not poison me, atleast not in a video-game, atleast not right after one another almost killing me while i was powerless to do anything about it because it wasn't from my mistakes i would have died.

[SteveP]

I also noticed the poisoned fish i dropped (was 5.3 kg so didn't ate it all at once) had green/purple spots, i only have one of that kind of fish so i can't check if other fish of that kind also have that, or if you can visibly see if food is spoiled or not (which would make a great addition, getting poisoned on pure luck is camel dung as stated above, 80+% food should not poison me, atleast not in a video-game, atleast not right after one another almost killing me while i was powerless to do anything about it because it wasn't from my mistakes i would have died.

Like this?

Or this?

I wasn't able to easily find an image of cooked fish from the game so can't compare images. I'd be very surprised if they added spoilage indication to the image since each item just seems to have a single 3 dimensional image.

I've tried eating the some fish raw in the game however even then it's pretty risky for food poisoning even if the condition is 99%. All cooked fish should look very similar

IIRC, Bethany said all the containers in the game behave the same way regarding food condition loss. It just makes the game less complicated and simplifies implementation.