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How are you supposed to build up a stockpile for Winter?


RedKrypton

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Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh.

 

I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale.

 

Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

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Larger supplies of canning materials can be found at the mall in West Point and smaller amounts in the few grocery stores on the map, otherwise they only have a rare chance to spawn in counters. Exhuasting most areas of the map, you should come up with about 30. If you're careful to collect nonperishbles, and plan your harvest as close to the first cold snap as possible, you can make it through the winter.

The winters in Kentucky are quite mild and, with compressed timeframes for farming, farming remains possible, due to an issue with the way sunny/well watered plants act that'll probably be fixed at some point. You could also try farming indoors, as it should get a temperature boost.

 

As to why you can't throw items into a sack .etc: becuase it's not in yet. There is no concept of a root celler or alternative method of storage in PZ right now, but I'm sure it'll be added in the future.

 

From the game's code, it seems that you should only need a lighter or match to light the barbacue, once the charcoal has been added as fuel (right click -> add fuel). Maybe you need a literature object as kindling?

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PROBLEM: no food in winter

SOLUTIONS: multiple

DIFFICULTY: from easy to hard

 

SOLUTION 1: Dig for worms with a trowel, stockpile them for winter. Difficulty: easy.

 

SOLUTION 2: Use foraging to find non-perishables. Difficulty: medium

 

SOLUTION 3: Go loot the town ffs. There's enough food there to survive winter, unless you're surviving your third year. Difficulty: easy

SOLUTION 4: Find a generator, some gas and connect it to your house. Start farming, stockpile your food in a fridge. Difficulty: hard

 

SOLUTION 5: Use the game's food canning system. You need a lid, a jar, vinegar, salt and sugar. This method actually doesn't work, since those items hardly spawn LOL. Difficulty: close to impossible

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SOLUTION 5: Use the game's food canning system. You need a lid, a jar, vinegar, salt and sugar. This method actually doesn't work, since those items hardly spawn LOL. Difficulty: close to impossible

Yes, canning ingredients need to be increased quite a bit, even ignoring that it's meant to be something that encourages players to visit the mall. Wouldn't hurt the game balance at all. :|

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From the mall alone I exhausted it of enough canning stuff to make 20-30 jars, all be it I was kind of disappointed because there was nowhere else I knew to look for them.

 

The crafting store in the mall is a great place to find them, though. Don't miss it if you need jarring stuff. I actually didn't explore so I'm not sure if they spawn in any other stores in there, but I'm sure there is gift shops that might.

 

If you know where to look, stockpiling is definitely not impossible. But if you want it to be reasonable, you should find ways to make food outside of farming.

 

I find that running a "cold storage" works, hooking up a generator and stockpiling fuel before the power dies, and preserving as much food as possible in fridges and only running the genny certain times in the day.

 

Of course, fishing, foraging and trapping all also work, all be it not as effective in the winter. Winter in Kentucky isn't unbearably long, so keeping a supply of canned food and non-perishables is also important. Given that canned food isn't exactly super rare you should still be able to survive.

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Larger supplies of canning materials can be found at the mall in West Point and smaller amounts in the few grocery stores on the map, otherwise they only have a rare chance to spawn in counters. Exhuasting most areas of the map, you should come up with about 30. If you're careful to collect nonperishbles, and plan your harvest as close to the first cold snap as possible, you can make it through the winter.

 

What 30 jars? That's pathetic. Don't Americans store jam, pickles and all other kinds of preserved food in jars too? You can find pickles, which never go off, but they aren't in a jar, at least for the game they aren't. You should be able to find hundreds of jars of all kind on the whole map, not 30. I currently don't have any food shortage and would probably survive the first winter without problems.

 

 

The winters in Kentucky are quite mild and, with compressed timeframes for farming, farming remains possible, due to an issue with the way sunny/well watered plants act that'll probably be fixed at some point. You could also try farming indoors, as it should get a temperature boost.

 

I don't like that farming is compressed and so easy to do. It makes all other methods of finding food largely obsolete, if it weren't for winter they would be pointless. I started my game with the park ranger profession and I wanted to play as a hunter gatherer. But after a while, while I searched for tarp and other necessities I became increasingly awae that foraging and trapping isn't worth it.You have to seriously level up both of these skills to be worth it with trapping being worth more as you can use your worms in your bird traps for some diversified nourishment.

 

But what is foraging good for? I looked at the wiki page for it and I was very disappointed. Until level 4 you can't even find mushrooms and half the stuff I got from were tree branches, which I didn't really need. The time it took me from leveling up once was insane even after I read a skill book. Foraging takes way too long and yields too little of a result and it makes you instantly tired. I don't know how it is programmed in the game, but foraging makes you tired. If I wake up at 8 o'clock and instantly go foraging, by 12 o'clock I am exhausted for no reason.

 

I know there is fishing in the game, but I am in Muldraugh and I have no interest of going to that imbalanced overrun town of West Point. And for the Mall, I generally don't liek to go there.

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What 30 jars? That's pathetic. Don't Americans store jam, pickles and all other kinds of preserved food in jars too? You can find pickles, which never go off, but they aren't in a jar, at least for the game they aren't. You should be able to find hundreds of jars of all kind on the whole map, not 30. I currently don't have any food shortage and would probably survive the first winter without problems.

Canning was never intended to be a sustainable way to get through the winter. It was meant to only augment what you can scavange in the world. If you found hundreds of jars, there'd be no issues with surviving many winters.

In reality, jarred food in the US is almost exclusively one-use. Once opened, they are no longer air tight and can not be resealed. This is, of course, OK for refrigeration-based jams and pickling.

 

Consider that others may have had the same idea as you and taken the canning supplies, or that the zombie apocolypse happened out of season.

 

 

The winters in Kentucky are quite mild and, with compressed timeframes for farming, farming remains possible, due to an issue with the way sunny/well watered plants act that'll probably be fixed at some point. You could also try farming indoors, as it should get a temperature boost.

 

I don't like that farming is compressed and so easy to do. It makes all other methods of finding food largely obsolete, if it weren't for winter they would be pointless.

You can change the time compression in sandbox options, if you'd like, but I doubt many people would like  to wait four + months for a harvest.

But that pointlessness extends to our own reality: farming provides a constant, consistent, volumous food supply. Hunting and gathering doesn't, but it's great for when you can't farm.

 

But what is foraging good for? I looked at the wiki page for it and I was very disappointed. Until level 4 you can't even find mushrooms and half the stuff I got from were tree branches, which I didn't really need. The time it took me from leveling up once was insane even after I read a skill book. Foraging takes way too long and yields too little of a result and it makes you instantly tired. I don't know how it is programmed in the game, but foraging makes you tired. If I wake up at 8 o'clock and instantly go foraging, by 12 o'clock I am exhausted for no reason.

Insects, plants, fungi, berries.

 

I know there is fishing in the game, but I am in Muldraugh and I have no interest of going to that imbalanced overrun town of West Point. And for the Mall, I generally don't liek to go there.

Then you don't get to fish and are very unlikely to be able to can food.

 

It's your choice to make.

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Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh.

 

I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale.

 

Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

 

Also, remember, that with the inclusion of NPCs it will likely be much easier to find valuable tools, or at least people that own them. If it gets too easy to live on your own, I imagine it will be way too easy if you manage to get a functional group together once nonzombie NPCs are implemented in the game. This is , of course, speculation.

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Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

 

I had this same problem for a while. You need a magazine or newspaper to start the bbq. It does not work with ripped sheets or twigs.

 

Add fuel to the BBQ, then light it with matches/lighter and a magazine or newspaper.

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Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh.

 

I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale.

 

Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

 

Also, remember, that with the inclusion of NPCs it will likely be much easier to find valuable tools, or at least people that own them. If it gets too easy to live on your own, I imagine it will be way too easy if you manage to get a functional group together once nonzombie NPCs are implemented in the game. This is , of course, speculation.

 

Its going to be the other way around.

 

Right now is easy to scavenge the shit out of the area you are in worth of canned food, get a very small farm going and start stockpiling gas for the generator.

 

When Helicopters start rolling in you either wait it out in your house so the zombies dont come to fuck shit up or you are already in other place scavenging.

 

With NPCs however, everything will become a competition, the first days are going to become essential to find even the most basic tools because the NPCs are going to try and gather those tools too, canned food is probably going to be one of the first items that NPCs will loot, alongside Can Openers and then we have a probability that those same NPCs who looted important stuff die at the hands of other NPCs or Zombies, making them almost impossible to recover those items.

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Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh.

I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale.

Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

Also, remember, that with the inclusion of NPCs it will likely be much easier to find valuable tools, or at least people that own them. If it gets too easy to live on your own, I imagine it will be way too easy if you manage to get a functional group together once nonzombie NPCs are implemented in the game. This is , of course, speculation.

NPCs won't make the game easier for you, but harder. Currently it's easy to have a safehouse or mulitple safehouses, because the only danger is zombies, but when there are others you have to rethink your defense and also food supply. You most likly have to team up to manage some kind of safety to be able to keep all the stuff you gather. Also why would I be able to find more stuff and tools? If I only was able to find one jar lid during two months, guess how many I will find if NPCs care about them.

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I am a traveller. I have searched this land far and wide for the rare prize. I have seen many people on my quest, but none with minds like my own. I got into more fights than I can remember, and smashed more faces than anybody could. After at long last arduously uncovering seven several dozen of the artefacts, I felt the time had come to settle down with a nice house on a farm. I had become Joseph, lord of the jars, and to this day I guard my hoard.

PreservedFood1.jpg

Edited by Gaffa Tape Warrior
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Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh.

I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale.

Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

Also, remember, that with the inclusion of NPCs it will likely be much easier to find valuable tools, or at least people that own them. If it gets too easy to live on your own, I imagine it will be way too easy if you manage to get a functional group together once nonzombie NPCs are implemented in the game. This is , of course, speculation.

NPCs won't make the game easier for you, but harder. Currently it's easy to have a safehouse or mulitple safehouses, because the only danger is zombies, but when there are others you have to rethink your defense and also food supply. You most likly have to team up to manage some kind of safety to be able to keep all the stuff you gather. Also why would I be able to find more stuff and tools? If I only was able to find one jar lid during two months, guess how many I will find if NPCs care about them.

 

I think in terms of finding good items the game will actually become easier because, as I was trying to imply, human NPCs will be looking for tools as well. So, a good way of finding tools, would probably be to steal from other NPCs and thus easier than having to scour the entire city on your own looking for them.

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I agree with many points, but I believe this has yet to be balanced, this is afterall, an early access game. One point that wasn't mentioned though is 'partial' harvesting. For example when I harvest my tomato plant, I don't need to harvest it fully (can leave some for later on, still fresh) and even when if I do harvest it completely, there's no need to pluck the plant out the dirt. I can wait and harvest it again later on. (yes, my farming speed is very low in all my games)

 

Also, as a central European, I want sauerkraut in my game! A barrel, cabbage and some salt, that's it ! And some weights !

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Honestly, farming kinda seems like a waste of time atm, if you can build your safehouse near water (which nothing should really prevent you from doing that).

 

Fishing is year-round, and doesn't have the depression side effect of worms. Worms are a horribly broken food source though that really needs addressing at some point. If you lack the patience for fishing, then you can farm during the warmer months, but at some point its strongly advisable to try it.

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What 30 jars? That's pathetic. Don't Americans store jam, pickles and all other kinds of preserved food in jars too? You can find pickles, which never go off, but they aren't in a jar, at least for the game they aren't. You should be able to find hundreds of jars of all kind on the whole map, not 30. I currently don't have any food shortage and would probably survive the first winter without problems.

Canning was never intended to be a sustainable way to get through the winter. It was meant to only augment what you can scavange in the world. If you found hundreds of jars, there'd be no issues with surviving many winters.

In reality, jarred food in the US is almost exclusively one-use. Once opened, they are no longer air tight and can not be resealed. This is, of course, OK for refrigeration-based jams and pickling.

 

Consider that others may have had the same idea as you and taken the canning supplies, or that the zombie apocolypse happened out of season.

 

 

The winters in Kentucky are quite mild and, with compressed timeframes for farming, farming remains possible, due to an issue with the way sunny/well watered plants act that'll probably be fixed at some point. You could also try farming indoors, as it should get a temperature boost.

 

I don't like that farming is compressed and so easy to do. It makes all other methods of finding food largely obsolete, if it weren't for winter they would be pointless.

You can change the time compression in sandbox options, if you'd like, but I doubt many people would like  to wait four + months for a harvest.

But that pointlessness extends to our own reality: farming provides a constant, consistent, volumous food supply. Hunting and gathering doesn't, but it's great for when you can't farm.

 

But what is foraging good for? I looked at the wiki page for it and I was very disappointed. Until level 4 you can't even find mushrooms and half the stuff I got from were tree branches, which I didn't really need. The time it took me from leveling up once was insane even after I read a skill book. Foraging takes way too long and yields too little of a result and it makes you instantly tired. I don't know how it is programmed in the game, but foraging makes you tired. If I wake up at 8 o'clock and instantly go foraging, by 12 o'clock I am exhausted for no reason.

Insects, plants, fungi, berries.

 

I know there is fishing in the game, but I am in Muldraugh and I have no interest of going to that imbalanced overrun town of West Point. And for the Mall, I generally don't liek to go there.

Then you don't get to fish and are very unlikely to be able to can food.

 

It's your choice to make.

 

 

GOODNESS GRACIOUS. It's official, Twiggy's by the gun store in WP is officially the best base in the game. Why?

 

- It's near the heart of West Point; the loot jackpot.

- It has 2 floors and a spacious interior.

- You can hoof it to the mall for jars and back and survive.

- It's next to the gun store, darn it!

- plenty of yard space for farming and base expansion.

 

This gives me an idea for a new topic. Brb.

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Okay, just addressing this one point, farming being condensed does not make the other methods obsolete.

 

Farming, depending on your day length (and whether you are in multiplayer or not) takes forever. If you want food tomorrow, you should have started growing cabbages a week or two ago. There are also diseases, and the fact that you need to either be a farmer or know the recipes if you want to make cures for those diseases. It is a lot more than other games do for farming.

 

Fishing, on the other hand, is less effective in the winter, but you can still fish. There are multiple ways to go at fishing, one with looted stuff (fishing equipment isn't that rare), one with the wire nets, and one with fishing but with scrounged materials that can be found with foraging.

 

If you get good with it, you can find food for the next several days just from one fishing trip. If you can preserve that fish in a running fridge, that's even better.

 

Trapping on the other hand has more in common with farming because you wait a certain amount of time for your prize. Except this one can't be calculated as much as farming can be. You can rely entirely off trapping if you know what you are doing.

 

Foraging, well, your comment about foraging disappointed me. Do expect cooked meals to just emerge from the ground when you right click on the ground (and have to do relatively nothing else?). From the base level, you can find berries. Which can be found in batches, meaning that if you find some, you are finding some, not a single berry. You don't have to forage for hours to get 20 edible berries. They aren't that rare.

 

If you don't want to go where there is water, then that is your choice. There are plenty of other water sources that aren't in the city of west point (You also said it was unbalanced, which I should also mention are by your own standards). If you want to stay in muldraugh, you need to invest into finding other ways to sustain food.

 

If you aren't content with that the game requires you to find another way to get food than what you are used to, then that's the consequences on choosing where you live and consequences of only relying on farming. Farming is all great and dandy until you can't do it anymore. I repeat, save your non-perishables.

 

You don't have to do just one, either. You can farm, then check your traps, and then go on a fishing trip while you wait for the crops to grow. Or, you know, save every last non-perishable you find.

 

I hope that helps. There are plenty of ways to stockpile through the winter. Canning is not a crutch. If you do one single visit to the mall I guarantee you will find enough cans to last several winters minimum. If not, canned food.

 

Edit: Oh, getting good at cooking can also help you make use of that near-spoiled food. I forget if extremely high levels of cooking can still salvage one or two points of hunger from the 'good parts' of spoiled food to use in recipes.

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I think most of us would agree that the amount of jars is super low, and has been since the implementation. I also think most of us would agree that the amount of food currently in the world, plus what you can get from foraging, farming, or fishing is also super high. So possibly two sides of the same problem: food balance (which is also affected by how "nutrition" is handled, as one can survive of chips for a year without a heart attack :))

 

I understand that the "balancing" phase will come later in the dev cycle. I understand the logic behind this, but I can't see why some tweaks couldn't be made to start fine tuning. All this months have been "lost" in this regard, when we could by now have some basic data on whether the numbers are too high, or too low to make a difference. I don't have the slightest idea on the amount of work that would need to be done on the code for this, but I'd dare to say this is a fairly easy change. 

 

My 2c!

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I think most of us would agree that the amount of jars is super low, and has been since the implementation. I also think most of us would agree that the amount of food currently in the world, plus what you can get from foraging, farming, or fishing is also super high. So possibly two sides of the same problem: food balance (which is also affected by how "nutrition" is handled, as one can survive of chips for a year without a heart attack :))

 

I understand that the "balancing" phase will come later in the dev cycle. I understand the logic behind this, but I can't see why some tweaks couldn't be made to start fine tuning. All this months have been "lost" in this regard, when we could by now have some basic data on whether the numbers are too high, or too low to make a difference. I don't have the slightest idea on the amount of work that would need to be done on the code for this, but I'd dare to say this is a fairly easy change. 

 

My 2c!

 

I'd like it personally if there was more containers where the jars/lids could be found (and jars in general).

 

One thing that could be beneficial is only having the lid seal be useless after canning, and you have to clean out the jar if you plan on using it again. That way you have to worry moreso about the amount of lids you find rather than the jars themselves.

 

(For balance sake, jar lids should be more common).

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I'm playing around in sandbox at the moment and have my loot set to abundant and with about 30 hours of gameplay in my current world my character has only seen a couple of lids and a single jar. I thought food preservation would be encouraged since implementation but I don't see the point in growing crops and collecting vinegar + sugar + salt if I only have one jar.

 

My character has a hearty appetite and has already burned through 90% of her current food supply since outbreak (stocked up then spent months building) and winter is coming...

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One thing that could be beneficial is only having the lid seal be useless after canning, and you have to clean out the jar if you plan on using it again. That way you have to worry moreso about the amount of lids you find rather than the jars themselves.

 

I am not sure how it is handled in the US, but in Austria you can reuse lids for like eternity.

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I'm playing around in sandbox at the moment and have my loot set to abundant and with about 30 hours of gameplay in my current world my character has only seen a couple of lids and a single jar. I thought food preservation would be encouraged since implementation but I don't see the point in growing crops and collecting vinegar + sugar + salt if I only have one jar.

 

My character has a hearty appetite and has already burned through 90% of her current food supply since outbreak (stocked up then spent months building) and winter is coming...

As said above, you'll only find canning supplies in very, very specific places on the map -- namely the mall or the grocery stores.

THere's enough food on the default map to live a few years, even on the default loot setting.

One thing that could be beneficial is only having the lid seal be useless after canning, and you have to clean out the jar if you plan on using it again. That way you have to worry moreso about the amount of lids you find rather than the jars themselves.

 

I am not sure how it is handled in the US, but in Austria you can reuse lids for like eternity.

Lids are one-use in the US. Plastic lids with rubber gaskets have only started to become popular recently. French-style resealable jars tend only to be used for dry storage due to USDA and health department recommendations. Typical US metal lids use a thin layer of plastic gasket material that melts in a heat bath, damaging it irreputabily.

Preppers in the US tend to try to horde these metal lids for this reason.

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I think the problem is that creators of game didnt have much knowledge about storaging vegetables like potatoes or carrots. They are very easy to storage and be good quality even after a few months. Another thing is that farming in game is way too easy for now.

I tried to do a mod (theindiestone.com/forums/index.php/topic/14248-realism-mod/to balance things out, you can check it out for info but i didn't updated it and i don't have time to make it better at the moment but i gave various reasons why my changes are better than actual farming etc in game.

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