Temperature

Temperature is a core mechanic in Vintage Story. It can influence the player's body temperature, as well as plant growth and animal weight. Different regions will have different temperature bands, which significantly affect the placement of flora and fauna and therefore, the resulting type of biome.

Players can check the ambient temperature in the Character screen with C.

World generation

Depending on the chosen world generation settings, the game creates different temperature regions in the world. Under "realistic" settings, the game creates a gradient of temperature stretching from a cold "north pole" to a warm "southern equator". These points loop - if a player goes further north than the north pole, the temperature will start increasing again until hitting another "equator", and moving north beyond that will lead to another "pole".

Under "patchwork" settings, temperature regions are arbitrarily generated and distributed, meaning that it is possible to see very cold regions bordering hot deserts.

Temperature, alongside rock strata and rainfall , strongly affects the types of blocks that will generate. Therefore biomes are an emergent property of interactions between temperature, rainfall, and landform shape. High-temperature, high-moisture climates will result in a rainforest-style environment, while high-temperature, low-moisture climates create deserts.

Regional temperatures also vary over the course of the different seasons . Summer is the warmest season, and Winter is the coldest.

Body temperature

A seraph's body temperature needs to be kept at 37°C or more, otherwise they will suffer from cold and might even end up freezing to death. As of version 1.18.0, there is no penalty for overheating.

With harsh winters enabled, the player will start taking damage if they are at least 4 degrees too cold for more than 3 ingame hours straight. The damage will tick every 10 seconds.

Body temperature can be maintained using various means, or can be disabled completely when creating a world, or with the following world config command:

/worldconfig bodyTemperatureResistance -40

Players may employ several tactics to ensure they stay warm in cold conditions. The first is by wearing warm clothes . Woollen or fur lined clothes tend to grant more temperature protection, and clothes lose temperature protection as their condition degrades.

Different blocks and mechanics can also help heat up the player's surroundings. A torch held in the offhand or the active slot will raise the temperature slightly ^{by how much?}. Standing beside a lit firepit , forge or bloomery will warm the player up and raise their body temperature for a time even after stepping away from the heat source. Burning wood or coal piles will have the same effect.

Note that only the firepit will be able to "heat up a room", as the firepit's warming range will be larger while in an enclosed room - other heat sources, or an open air firepit, will only heat up the area in very close proximity to them.

Enclosed rooms

Staying in enclosed rooms will benefit the player, as their body temperature will be raised by 1°C as long as they stay inside. Room calculation is quite generous in version 1.18.0, and enclosed rooms can be far larger than a cellar or greenhouse . The warming range of firepits will be larger indoors then outside (since version v1.14.8-rc.1) - enabling the player to efficiently warm up a room if there is a burning firepit in it.

A room is considered completely enclosed if there are no openings. An enclosed room must fulfill the following criteria:

• The room cannot have any entrances aside from a door or trapdoor (rough doors do not count)
• The room needs to be completely closed off by solid block faces. All the walls need to be complete, without any holes created by slabs or stairs - however, if the full faces of slabs or stairs are located to the inside of the room, they will count
  • Chiseled blocks count as valid blocks for rooms, with the following limitations: The inward facing side must be almost solid (less than 20 voxels missing), and at least 50% of the blocks volume must be retained
  • Slanted roof blocks count towards enclosing a room
• The room can be a maximum size of 14x14x14. Specifically, any point of the room cannot be more than 14 blocks (counting inclusively) away from the room's walls. Diagonals for this calculation count as 2 blocks long.

Players can use the console command /debug rooms hi and /debug rooms unhi to highlight valid rooms. This is useful when trying to figure out whether or not a given space is considered a valid room.

Effect on plants

Wild crops are not killed by cold, but will not grow. Mushrooms will loose their harvestable tops when it is too cold, remaining only as stumps. Similarly, berry bushes will only flower and bear fruit when it is warm enough.

Cultivated crops have different tolerated temperature ranges. Crops suffer hot or cold damage very quickly once the ambient temperature is outside of their tolerated temperature range. If a crop suffers from cold, they will only yield half of their possible harvest, even if the temperatures go up again. They will however always drop one seed. Similarly, if a crop gets too hot while not yet ripe, they could suffer from heat damage, which will also halve the harvest. An already ripe crop will not be affected by this.

All crops will stop growing at 0°C, however some hardy crops can endure even lower temperatures without getting cold damage.

Protip: Keep in mind that cabbages only ever drop one per crop to begin with, however in their case frostbite or heatstroke means there is only a 25% chance for a plant to drop a cabbage - which comes down to 1 out of 4 crops will yield a harvest - the remaining crops will only drop their seeds when broken.

Effect on animals

Wild animals and unfed domesticated animals will lose weight over the colder months, resulting in less meat and less or no fat dropped on kill.

Bees will hibernate at freezing temperatures. See Beekeeping for specifics.

Video Tutorials

Detailed look at body temperature

History

• Prior to 1.19, slanted roof blocks did not count towards enclosing a room; a player needed to add full blocks or slabs below them to create a ceiling between the room and the attic.