Cellar/Draft

Cellars are a type of room that is used to preserve food or ripen cheese by setting the temperature of the room to 5°c and slowing down spoilage . This temperature is adjusted by penalties determined by if the blocks used to create the cellar is exposed to sunlight, and if they are the wrong type. Cellars should only be constructed with stone , soil , ceramic , or ore .

Construction

Cellars should be formed using the following block types:

• Stone
• Soil
• Ceramic
• Ore

The size of the cellar cannot exceed 7 blocks in length, 7 blocks in width, and 7 blocks in height (7x7x7). Configurations of 9x?x?, ?x9x?, or ?x?x9 is also possible if the volume doesn't exceed 150 blocks.

Effectiveness

The cellar works by setting the room's temperature to 5°c which then slows down spoilage. This temperature is adjusted by the cellar's effectiveness based on if the cellar is constructed underground where no room block is exposed to sunlight and if other types of blocks are used to create the cellar.

If the temperature outside the cellar falls below 5°c then the cellar temperature will use the outside temperature instead.

Technical

The following formulas are used to determine the effectiveness of cellar:

Cellar temperature = outside temperature + (5 − outside temperature ) * (Effectiveness)

This means that as penalties increase, the more the cellar temperature will shift towards the outside temperature and increase spoilage. For example, if the effectiveness is 50% then the temperature of the cellar will be the middle ground between 5°c and the outside temperature. If the temperature outside is 25°c then the cellar temperature is 15°c.

Construction penalties

If a cellar room has blocks of illegal types then the cellar's effectiveness is reduced to a maximum of 50% based on the amount of legal and illegal blocks. This means that as the number of illegal blocks increase, the less effective the cellar becomes.

This penalty is reduced by a percentage based on the number of legal and illegal blocks used to create the cellar using the following formula:

Construction penalty reduction (%) = Number of legal blocks / Number of illegal blocks

Exposure penalties

If any blocks are exposed to the air then the cellar's effectiveness is reduced to a maximum of 40% based on the amount of blocks. This means that cellars created underground is more effective than one created above the ground.

This penalty is reduced by a percentage based on the number of exposed and unexposed blocks to create the cellar using the following formula:

Exposure penalty reduction (%) = (Number of exposed blocks / (Number of exposed block + Number of unexposed blocks) * 100)

This means that as less blocks are exposed to sunlight the more the penalty is reduced and larger cellars are less affected by exposed blocks. Any cellar completely underground has this penalty negated.

Here is a table of examples showing how this penalty is adjusted based on exposure:

Example Penalty Rates

Type	Exposed Blocks (#)	Unexposed Blocks (#)	Penalty Reduction (%)	New Exposure Penalty (%)
Surface	Any number	0	0%	40%
Underground	0	Any number	100%	0%
Partially underground	20	6	23%	31%
Small cellar	10	20	67%	13%
Large cellar	10	50	83%	7%

Any blocks may be used to create a cellar, but some blocks are more effective in use for cellars. Blocks in the stone , soil , ceramic , or ore classes are the best insulators, and will each add 1 to the cooling block total. The one exception being farmland which gives 3 to the non-cooling block total, as do trapdoors. Airtight doors add 3 per block of space they occupy when open and 1 per block when closed to the non-cooling block total. The game creates the cooling score by dividing the non-cooling block total by the cooling block total and capping the number at 1, for 100%.

Protip: Because of the way the game searches for insulating walls, any blocks built inside the cellar that have a full face and that aren’t insulating will lower your score! So make sure that if you’re going to build walls, platforms, or shelving to hold things like barrels and vessels that you build them out of insulating materials, or you use the chisel to make them no longer count as solid walls! Open doors count against your score more than any other kind of block as well so make sure to use doors sparingly and to keep them closed whenever possible.

As a result, the most effective cellars are made of highly insulating blocks (stone, soil, ceramic or brick, ore) and are closed with airtight doors.

Food Preservation

Typical layout of a cellar filled with crocks on shelves, storage vessels, chests and 2 barrels of pickled food.

The main use of cellars is for food preservation, however cellars reduce the rate of spoilage for any good stored inside whether it is a food or not. This reduced rate of spoilage stacks with container types , so placing storage vessels and sealed crocks into a cellar can drastically extend the shelf-life of any food inside them.

When calculating how fast food will spoil in a cellar, the game first creates a cellar effectiveness score, which starts at 100%. Up to 40% can be deducted based on the skylight score (that is, the amount of sunlight the cellar receives), and up to 50% can be deducted based on the cellar's cooling score.

The air temperature inside the cellar will never be greater than the air temperature outside. When the effectiveness of the cellar is 100%, the air temperature will cap at 5°C. Otherwise the game will calculate air temperature inside the cellar based on the effectiveness score and skylight score, in addition to how much sunlight is in the container block being affected.

Protip: Because there is no minimum size for a cellar, burying a vessel in a cube of soil is an extremely effective way of preserving food early-game. Just dig out the top block or a side block to access it, then replace it to seal it again. Make sure the vessel is surrounded on every side by a cooling block and never build with anything transparent or you won’t get the full bonus!

Cheese Ripening

Cellars can also used to ripen cheese, by lowering its perish rate until it can ripen before it spoils. Cheese can only ripen when placed onto a shelf with a perish rate of 0.5x or lower. Cheddar does not have to be made in a cellar and can be made outside if it is cold enough, while blue cheese must be made in a special kind of open-air cellar with at least one open exit and the shelf must have a sunlight level below 2. This special open-air cellar will not count as an ordinary room, so it will not get the normal bonus for cooling. Blue cheese still needs to be ripened with a perish rate of 0.5x or lower, however, so blue cheese can only be ripened when it is cold enough outside to lower the perish rate to the necessary level.

Protip: Remember if you’re trying to build an open-air cellar for ripening blue cheese, /debug rooms hi will always show those as red, but you can fill in the hole before using the command to check and make sure that it counts as a room, and then dig out the hole to make it open-air again. Placing the shelf as far away from the hole as possible and including a long and/or twisty corridor to get in and out of the cellar can help keep sunlight low as well.