Food temperature needs a buff

[grem6]

I doubt many people know what food temperature is, since it's a rather obscure mechanic with almost no applications that, afaik, is mentioned only in cookbook and not even in scrapbook, so, in short, eating specific foods may cool you down or heat you up.

However, the durations on most foods are very short, ranging from 5 to 15 seconds of heating/cooling on everything except warly's dragon salad and asparagazpacho.

Heating foods also lose their heat with time, at a rate of (0.25 / heating duration) every 10 seconds, meaning that if a food heats for 5 seconds after eating by default, it will lose this effect entirely 200 seconds/3.33 minutes after you cook it, or 4 times as fast (50 seconds) if you put it into a fridge.

The foods also can't bring you below 12 degrees if cooling or 62 degrees if heating, even though you can go to 1 degree or 69 degrees safely without hitting freezing or overheating threshold (0 and 70 respectively).

 

 

At the moment almost no one utilizes this mechanic, if they are even aware of it in the first place.

I have a few suggestions for fixing that.

First one is to increase the duration of food temperature. 5 seconds of cooling means only losing 5 degrees, which means that if you're overheating, you would need to eat 12 fruit medleys, 5 seconds between eats (eating them all rapidly will only give 5 seconds from the last one, as food temperature doesn't stack), to go from 70 degrees to 12. So I think that the durations should at the very least be doubled, or maybe even tripled.

Second one is to remove hot food losing it's heat with time. At the moment this limits the applications of hot food for any remotely long trip quite a lot. With beefalo hat it takes around 11.5 minutes to start freezing from 70 degrees in winter. By that time even the hottest foods, the ones with 15 seconds of heating, will have lost their effect entirely and won't help you anymore. This makes them useless unless the player's using very poor insulation clothes, but even if they are, the effect of the foods would still be greatly reduced if not fully removed by the time they'll start freezing.

Third one is to make cookbook mention for how long the food keeps cooling or heating you. At the moment it only says "Cools/Warms the body". I think that it should just display exact duration, e.g. "Keeps the body cool/warm for X seconds", or just add some temperature icon for it, like how there already are icons for hp, hunger and sanity in cookbook.

Fourth one is to make food temperature stack, so that you can eat multiple heating/cooling foods in a row and benefit from that, instead of only getting the effect from the last one unless you wait X seconds between eats.

Fifth one is to display if a food can cool or heat you in scrapbook. At the moment only cookbook shows that, even though there also are some non-crockpot foods that have food temperature, such as ice, which are in scrapbook instead of cookbook, with scrapbook having no indication of them having food temperature.

Edited August 5, 2025 by grem6

[grem6]

After further testing i've realised that food temperature can't even bring you to the limit (12 and 62 degrees) most of the time when used in the season relevant for the food. Hot food in the middle of winter couldn't bring me above 20 degrees, and cold food couldn't bring me below 59 degrees in the middle of summer. This seems to be caused by the fact that the foods can only offset your temperature by 40 from world temperature, so world temperature -20 in winter = hot food only brings you to 20 at most, 100 in summer = cold food only brings you to 60. I feel like the offset needs to be increased significantly.

Edited August 6, 2025 by grem6