how does food shelf life work?

[fodder]

i have a storage chest. in it there are 2 veg soup, shelf life around 50%. the cook brewed up 2 more and added to the chest... shelf life of the same stack goes up a few percentage. it should be mentioned that the 2 at around 50% were also freshly cooked, but was added to a stack that was almost rotting away.

it says veg soup should have a shelf life of 4 days when under roof, but previously i kept seeing notification of stacks of 5 soup rotting away and it couldn't have been 4 days already..

[Flin Fredstone]

Temperature matters as well. Also when the raw ingredients already were decaying then the final product tends to be less than 100%.
If food is at low quality you get a rotting away notification. Select the notification and it brings you to the food. Right click the food so that it's marked for throwing away.
Survivors may also get a penalty from consuming low quality food.

When you don't have a fridge, freezer or cold room, don't make to many meals at once. Survivors don't all eat at the same time so if you have lets say 5 people you wont need to have 5 meals at the ready all the time. Set cooking to Until 3 perhaps or less even if you have several kinds of meals.

[kubluu]

IIRC there is a checkbox to show individual items versus stacks. Try using it to learn more...

[gussmed]

I’ve had a stack of 8 vegetable soup rot away as a group even though 2 of them were just cooked.

[Zep Tepi]

You get food with low starting durability when the chef has a partial fail while cooking.

It rots extra fast in Saltu, and keeps longer in cold temperatures. Dried meat, pickled vegetables and syrup last a long time and don't need extra cooking. (They don't give mood buffs, but don't give debuffs either.) I don't cook much at all in Saltu until I get a freezer. Only cook what will get eaten in a day or two until then.

[fodder]

Originally posted by kubluu:

IIRC there is a checkbox to show individual items versus stacks. Try using it to learn more...

where? i toggling the top one (normally off) doesn't split the stack. toggling the bottom one (normally on.. and it switches itself back to on when you flip to the permission page and back) doesn't either.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3327431396

[Felis_Exploria]

Originally posted by gussmed:

I’ve had a stack of 8 vegetable soup rot away as a group even though 2 of them were just cooked.

@zep tepi might have identified your problem. Those are good points. Additionally, when food stacks, the entire stack becomes the average amount of rot. So 6 at 90% rot + 2 at 0% rot becomes 67% rot, which is still pretty close to making survivors sick.

[Stimpacker]

Food rots twice as fast in Saltu. In fact, it's so bad that for each cooked item (min 3 types for food variety), I only set the stove "until 1 in stock". Get a freezer ASAP. Until then, even with that minimal cooked food (they can eat fruit, syrup or rations when the cook is busy), 1 or 2 items will still rot, unless you micro-manage and make them eat the stuff with lowest durability first.
Other dry goods that can stay on a shelf for the entire game (till around Year 4-5) will rot in Saltu. For these and only for Saltu, I have to put them in a fridge. These are antibiotics, healing balm, beverages, mushrooms, dandelion, syrup.

[kubluu]

Originally posted by fodder:

Originally posted by kubluu:

IIRC there is a checkbox to show individual items versus stacks. Try using it to learn more...

where? i toggling the top one (normally off) doesn't split the stack. toggling the bottom one (normally on.. and it switches itself back to on when you flip to the permission page and back) doesn't either.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3327431396

"Group items by type" is the one.
It should be able to show individual item condition.

[fodder]

eh... no. it just shows the same thing minus the words free in the last slot.

[Stimpacker]

As far as I know, you CANNOT show individual item condition. The group items by type separates items down to a stack per slot. In the case of cooked food, it's a max of 10 per slot. So if you have 8, it'll show all 8. If you have 13, then you can see a stack of 10 and a stack of 3.

[gussmed]

I’ve spent some more time with it. The game doesn’t track individual items, only stacks. If you add new items to an existing stack, the status of the stack doesn’t change at all.

This applies to raw food, cooked food, and items in the meat / hide drawing rack. For drying hides and meat, this is an advantage, since the newly added hides can get big jump forward in drying.

Turning off “group items” only changes things if you have more than 1 stack. For example, if you have 500 Insect Meat, you’ll see 5 stacks of 100, each with its own status.

Carry-over rot from existing stacks is still a problem with a refrigerator if you make larger stacks of food and your population is small. I’ve changed all my cooking to “until 1” so I don’t cook food unless there is no existing stack.

[mikeydsc]

BTW - in your screen shot, the temp in your chest is 30C which is 86F - very warm so food spoils faster.

tempc x 1.8+32 = tempf

[fodder]

that might well be true, but the fact is still it doesn't track decay of each food item, but kills the whole stack instead. which can be both good and bad.

[gussmed]

The game doesn't care about "very warm." Either it's refrigerated or it's not. Shelf life is exactly the same if it's 60 or it's 80, either way it's simply not refrigerated.

To be more precise, there are 4 states: out in the open, under a roof but not refrigerated, refrigerated, and frozen. Regardless, temperature only matters because it affects the "frozen / refrigerated / not refrigerated" state.