Guide:Prepare for Winter

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Not only can your character starve to death, but you can die of hypothermia. Assuming you used the default settings for starting in a temperate region, you can expect around 5 months of weather too cold for farming and other things. "Make hay while the sun shines."

Save for wintertime

Don't do these during fair weather, when your time could be better spent preparing for winter:

• build a large, fancy base
• chisel lots of detail
• mine chests full of ore
• cook stews/porridge (unless you have beeswax)

While you can repair translocators and peek at what's on the other side, if it takes you to warmer areas then save significant exploration for when your main base is snowbound.

Food

Get a farm started as soon as you have access to seeds and medium fertility soil near water. Flax is especially useful, but it's a poor food source for people. Because a balanced diet increases your character's maximum health points, I focus on 1 other grain as a food source, and 1 vegetable. If you have access to honey, cook jam and seal it in crocks so you can have fruit out of season. If you have access to quartz and fire clay, consider making a greenhouse to extend the growing season.

Vegetables and grains last quite a long time in a properly-constructed cellar, especially in a storage vessel. A cellar is easiest to make underground.

Warmth

A Fur Coat is easy to make with pelts. All you need besides raw hide is a lump of fat. 1 lump can treat up to 4 small hides, 2 medium hides, or 1 large hide. A huge hide requires 2 lumps of fat. Then let the hides sit somewhere to cure for awhile (on the ground is fine). Make Fur Gloves and Fur-lined Boots the same way.

If you look in the Handbook at the recipe for a fur coat, you'll see that any hide size can be used. In terms of fat, it's cheapest to use a huge hide for the coat, large hide for the boots, and medium hide for the gloves.

You might be able to find a Clothing trader selling items as good for warmth as furs, but probably not better.

Fur clothing as well as regular clothing can be repaired. Above 50% durability, an item gives its full warmth value. If it drops below 50%, I like to repair it with squares of linen. Pick up the linen with left click, open your character panel with C, and leftclick on the item you want to repair. 1 flax twine restores 10% durability to an item, 1 linen square (4 flax twine) restores 50%, and a sewing kit (4 flax twine and a stick) restores 75%. However, I usually don't have any linen or twine to spare my first year (prioritizing farming and windmill).

If you're wearing nothing that gives a warmth bonus, your body temperature will start dropping when you're outside in below-zero temperatures. If you're wearing clothing that gives you a total of 10 warmth points, your body temperature will stay at 37.8 until temperatures get below 10 degrees.

Tip: remove fur coat etc in the spring, to save for next winter, rather than wear down its durability meanwhile.

Explore

Not only do you take damage from getting too cold, but snow makes several things harder to find, or more time-consuming to obtain. During summer/autumn, explore widely (thousands of blocks away from your base) and mark your map with things that might be useful later:

• clay deposits, especially fire clay
• fruit trees
• resin
• peat
• prospecting pick's density mode
  • save the data for later analysis and action

Chores

Some processes pause in cold weather. Stockpile on these while you can!

• replant cattail roots close to your base, and harvest the tops every time they appear
• replace most Harvestable skeps with empty skeps
• chop trees and replant
  • oak near your base is useful for leather and sticks
  • pine near your base is useful for charcoal (because pinecones have such a high drop rate and pines tend to grow tall)

See also

Guide:Productivity_in_winter