gayonne

Love the VCR and CD devices idea. The horror movie tape demo was very funny, seeing how it affects stress and panic levels! I'm using @Nebula's Immersive CD Players mod to manage unhappiness and boredom, which is really neat because I get to hear real music in-game, but I'm just as happy with a text version. I just hope this feature would also manage unhappiness (and stress) in the same way that TV shows and radio programs currently do. 

So after some testing this afternoon, I've come to understand a few things. And with the lack of answers on other threads and other sources found via online searches, I figured I'd post some of this here in hopes that it may be of use to someone.
 
 
 
Let's get down to what I've found"
-Pillars DO NOT matter. no ifs ands or buts about it. they hold no relevance to how an interior may be recognized. It seems that this is an old wive's tale in the realm of PZ discussions online. I won't go into all of the ways in which I tried things out to come to this conclusion, but the smoking gun is that interiors can be detected with the complete lack of pillars on any corner even in complex-shaped homes.
 
-Concave vs. convex shapes seem to hold no relevance in recognition so long as that shape is on the same horizontal level
 
-Sheet ropes are going to f*** your s***. Ok look yes it's probably the greatest of all zombie killers. A Z-level and some fabric and you're totally safe. So I've come to find that adding, and especially removing, sheet rope is going to wreak havoc in the code to determine if something is inside or not. This may also have to do with the coding around floors/ceilings as removal of these items is necessary while creating those types of entry way. There's really a lot to go into with this one as I did some of the testing with creative mode features. From what I can tell, having an empty floor tile with a sheet rope going through it to the z-level below adds a flag of sorts to that tile and possibly to the ones adjacent to them. I think it is tiles adjacent as adding walls perpendicular to sheet rope exit setups will not allow you to add sheet rope after the walls have been constructed. There's a lot of investigation into the effects and ramifications of these features and I believe that a lot of the code work involved has to do with something that pertains to this.
 
-Walls do not need to be fully constructed in order to make something an interior. This is huge actually and I never see it talked about. You can fully isolate yourself from the outside and it's harsh climate by using only framing. In the pictures provided next, you'll see that the first and second floor now register as an interior even though they are only framed walls. I think I might have a before and after. Either way, framing works as complete walls. Whether or not it increases temperature resistance after being fully built is another topic altogether. This fact seems to be one of those other old wive's tales you hear about online sometimes. Well now you know!
 
-Placed floors vs constructed floors. Ok so this one's kinda big. Essentially there is no significant difference. You will have the same result either way you build your floors. Still highly recommend constructing a floor with planks as a baseline and then adding placed floors additionally. I think that's the requirement anyways. But reason being is... well we'll get to that at the end because I fixed my interior problem and I'll tell you how to too!
 
-You do not need adjacent floors on the inside and outside of your home for it to register interior. It is not reflected in the pics attached that I've uploaded to my Steam, but I've removed the exterior border floor tiles you see on the second floor. I re-added them as I quite like a safety blanket in case I manage to drunkenly jump out a window. But I did some testing with those exterior border tiles and it actually led me to the full solution for fixing interior detection... and that is priority.
 
Lower floor fully registering as interior with only framed walls
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2551279526
No rain here which is a huge massive update from my first post. This is where I sleep for god's sake!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2551279588
 
So here we go. Here's the fix!
 
Rebuild. And rebuild CLEAN I'm not even kidding. Take your original idea and gut it. Remove your furniture after moving all your stored items somewhere. Remove the walls. Remove the ceiling if you have to, but if you've already made it just keep it unless you're still running into issues.
I'll go into a little detail after this but the guaranteed solution is just to start from scratch and do a "clean build". So I highlight that term because the coding around construction is shaky at best. You're going to have to really baby the game into giving you the interior that you wish to define. So gut your interior, destroy the walls, and start from the outside-in. After about 2-3 hours of testing, deleting chunk files, reloading, and hammering away at just about anything I could to jog the game into realizing I had an interior built - it came down to just a clean build, exterior first. I'd left all my floor and ceiling tiles for ease and to be a sort of guide (although I had a very good idea of the dimensions of my building anyways). I only redid the walls after gutting all my floor transitions like sheet ropes. Guarantee you'll come out clean. If not PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE respond to this post and link me a zip of your world file. I'll jump in and take a look at your constructions and see if I can get it to recognize an interior. And that's really it. Now onto the explanation
 
There seems to be a pre-programmed glitch in the construction process that gives a 1-2-3 priority setting to each tile. This can be observed by building a number of items on a single tile and attempting to destroy them. The game has it's own idea in which item will be the first in line to be destroyed and the results are inconsistent. Sometimes the floor will be chosen first before a corner pillar or a wall. Sometimes the wall first, etc. Beyond this, a floor transition like a flight of stairs or sheet ropes will add a flag to nearby tiles. This inconsistent categorizing of constructions into appropriate layers and flagging them appropriately in the code (somehow) is a definite issue in getting the game to do what you want it to do. Among other factors, I think that I can actually fix just about any interior registering issue in the game now. Feel free to share your issues and let's see if we can fix them together.
I want to note that I was willing to take this one to the bitter end as this is one of the more challenging runs, settings wise, of PZ I've done and by far the longest I've survived. A lot of time went into gathering the materials for just this modest extension into the lake so far. I was not willing to give up on it all because the winter freeze would cause my base to be all but inhabitable. Thanks for your time reading! I hope that I've cleared some stuff up for all of you.

OK, problem solved. It was the update to Raven Creek that had caused my old saves to not work properly. The mod's author has since released the old files for us to download and once installed, everything went back to normal again. Thanks for your attention and sorry for any inconveniences caused.

Pandorea YOU ROCK!! 
 
So, I went back to the lake for some fishing during around 17:30 till around 21:00 and I managed to catch 3 decent-sized fish and a pair of socks!! Yes I used up all my crickets but I had enough worms to get by. See the attached “screenshot” I took with my cellphone for the fishing results. Now I can have something fresh to last me another few days! 
 
Now I just need to figure out if foraging is still feasible at all in winter and if so during what times of the day. I just saw the first snow in-game, which was beautiful, so I need to try and survive this...
 
So, it looks like the problem is solved for now. Thanks a lot for your help and patience!

Agree with these sentiments although idk about the animal/fox one.  Ohhhhh why not?

1. This is a big one... I don't get why the devs are so much against silencers if it's balanced properly. Weapon mods are already rare, silencers would be rare too, and simply make a weapon with silencers break much faster than one without. That means a weapon with silencers can only be used sparingly...And finally, silencers don't actually silence the sound, they suppress it, meaning it's still pretty loud and would attract nearby Zeds, just not the entire town.
 
2. I think this is being worked on.
 
3. Perhaps through metalworking, I approve of this.
 
4. Agreed. Also pets you can keep in your home would be nice too, I especially want a Fox!