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Body Temperature

Your body runs at a temperature you have to manage — too cold and you freeze, too hot and you cook — and it quietly drives your thirst, hunger, and stamina alongside its own dangers.

Reading the temperature square​

To the right of the corner meters is a temperature square with a small trend arrow:

  • Blue — you're cold; darker blue means dangerously cold.
  • Green — comfortable, right where you want to be.
  • Red — you're hot; darker red means dangerously hot.
  • The arrow shows the direction you're heading: warming up or cooling down. It shows the trend before the color itself changes.

What drives your temperature​

Your body temperature is pushed around by your surroundings:

  • Biome — snowy taigas and tundras chill you; deserts and badlands bake you.
  • Weather — rain and storms chill you fast.
  • Season — winter shifts everything colder, summer warmer.
  • Time of day — the open night sky is cold.
  • Wetness — being wet or submerged makes cold far worse (see below).

The danger bands​

Cold → hypothermia​

Linger in the cold and you first slow down, then start taking freezing damage. Cold also has knock-on costs before it's outright deadly: below a hard chill your stamina recovers at half rate (you're stiff and shivering) and your body burns extra food to hold its heat.

Cold and wet gives you a chill. The real danger isn't dry cold — it's the wet-cold combination (soaked clothing insulates nothing). Stay cold and wet for a few minutes — caught in freezing rain, or after falling through the ice — and a chill sets in: a lingering sickness that stays with you even after you've warmed up. Dry off or get to a fire before it takes hold; an herbal remedy will treat it once it has.

Heat → heatstroke​

Overheat and you take burning damage as if you were on fire. Standing in lava or a desert at noon in heavy clothing will push you there fast.

What warms and cools you​

  • Wetness multiplies cold — and ruins your clothing's warmth. Soaked hide and wool hold almost no heat (they keep only about a quarter of their insulation until they dry), so being wet in the cold is dangerous even fully dressed. This is why wet-cold, not dry-cold, is the real killer — and why drying off by a fire is worth more than another layer.
  • A towel dries you at once. You normally dry over ~30 seconds (faster by a fire), but a towel (woven from wool) lets you right-click to rub yourself dry instantly — the fast way to kill the wet-cold after you climb out of a river or duck out of a downpour. Using it soaks the towel, so it goes damp and needs about a minute to dry before it'll work again; and while you're still in the rain or water it just re-wets, so it's what you reach for the moment you get out of the wet.
  • A fire dries you about five times faster than air alone, and warms you at the same time.
  • Heat sources warm you: stand near a lit campfire, open fire, torches Torch, or lava and the square climbs back toward green. Lava is strong enough to overheat you.
  • Shelter insulates — and walls matter. Being under cover (no open sky above you) shields you from rain and the cold night sky. A bare roof (an open lean-to) pulls the temperature about 40% toward comfortable, but the more walled in you are the better it holds heat: a fully enclosed shelter (a solid wall within about 4 blocks on all four sides) reaches roughly 78%. So building real walls, not just a roof, is what makes a cabin beat winter.
  • Thatch is the day-one roof — and it's real work. Any solid block overhead counts as a roof, but you rarely have planks or spare dirt on night one. Thatch is the primitive answer: lay it over a dug-out niche or a low wall of logs and the space beneath is roofed and, with the sky blocked, rain-free, so you stay dry (the thing that keeps wet-cold from killing you). But it isn't a free craft — it's the labour that keeps a first shelter small: you thatch it from leaf litter (torn from the canopy by hand — slow, tugging work) bundled onto stick battens and lashed with a little cordage, and the weaving is a timed job at the bench (about a quarter-hour of compressed work per couple of panels). The other catch: thatch is bone-dry tinder — it catches readily and fire runs across a thatch roof, so keep it well clear of your campfire.
  • The tarp is the roof you can put over a fire. A tarp — a sewn, oiled hide sheet (leather + cordage, so it's real gear you make once you're hunting and tanning, or bring from the start) — roofs and dries you just like thatch, but it's the premium, packable version: it doesn't burn, so unlike thatch you can pitch it straight over a campfire and have flame and a dry roof together, and you pick it back up and carry it on. Hard to make, but the shelter that travels with you.
  • Blizzards are deadly in the open. A winter storm (a thunderstorm while it's winter) is a blizzard — driving snow and wind that freezes the exposed fast. Caught out under open sky it piles a hard extra chill on top of the season's cold and slows you to a trudge through the whiteout, with a warning to get to cover. Any roof breaks the worst of it (you're out of the driving snow), and a fire under that roof does the rest — so a blizzard is a race to shelter, exactly as it should be.
  • Caves are cold, not a refuge. Underground air is stagnant and damp, and the deeper you go the colder it locks — near the surface (the top ~15m) a cave just moderates the weather above, but below that it settles into a constant, clammy chill (and colder still toward bedrock, a genuine hypothermia zone). It's survivable while you're dry and moving and dressed for it, but being wet or standing still turns a deep cave dangerous fast. So a long mining trip is a cold-exposure problem: wear your hides, keep dry, and bring fire (a torch or campfire warms the space) — exactly the way real cavers dread the cold more than the dark.
  • Hot meals warm you. Eating a cooked meal or stew bumps your body temperature toward comfort (it won't overheat you), then drifts back over about 40 seconds.
  • A cool drink eases the heat. Drinking water while you're overheated lowers your temperature back toward comfort (it can't chill you below it). So water is doubly precious in the heat — it quenches thirst and cools you — which is why a desert run lives or dies on it. (Salt water still only dehydrates.)

Clothing​

What you wear shifts the temperature loop:

  • Leather and hide (armor pieces and turtle shell) insulate well. In the cold they blunt the chill back toward comfort. In the heat they trap warmth and make you overheat faster.
  • Metal plate barely insulates, and under an open sky in the heat it bakes you — the sun turns your armor into an oven. Shade cuts the bake: a roof stops it entirely, and tree cover dapples it — standing under ~3 leaf layers roughly halves the sun-heat, falling off with a denser canopy.
  • Wet clothing insulates nothing — soaked layers do nothing until they dry.

How temperature feeds your other meters​

Temperature isn't isolated — it drives the rest of your body:

  • Heat → sweat → thirst. The hotter your body runs — from desert sun, standing by a fire, heavy clothing, or hard exertion — the faster your thirst drains.
  • Cold → extra hunger + slow recovery. A cold body burns extra food to keep its heat (the colder, the more), and once you're badly chilled your stamina recovers at half rate.

See Survival Meters & HUD for the meters this feeds into.