Food Preservation

Perishable food rots over time. Preservation converts it to a form with a much longer shelf life.

Spoilage

Perishable foods (raw meat, fish, and other items in the perishable list) carry a freshness budget that drains over time — but how fast it drains depends on temperature, because before refrigeration, where and when you keep food is the whole game.

• A fresh perishable has enough budget for ~1 in-game day at comfortable temperature. When it runs out, the item turns into rotten flesh.
• Heat drains it faster, cold drains it slower: the rate roughly doubles for every +25° and halves for every −25°. A warm summer hut rots meat fast; a cold biome, winter, or a cool cellar stretches the same piece for much longer (see Cold storage).
• Preserved food (salted or dried) carries a much bigger budget — ~30 in-game days — long, but not infinite; even jerky eventually goes rancid and turns to rotten flesh.

Food keeps rotting while you're away. The budget drains by the in-game time that actually elapses — measured against the world clock, not real seconds — so leaving your base does not pause it. Leave meat in a warm hut and go exploring, and you come home to spoilage; leave it in a cold cellar and it barely ticks. (Behind the scenes a stack is only re-checked when it's near you again — carried, or in a loaded container nearby — but the drain then covers the whole stretch of world-time since it was last seen, so nothing is forgiven by walking away.)

How to tell how fresh it is

Hover any perishable and its tooltip shows the state:

• Freshness: Fresh / Beginning to turn / Going off — eat it soon, coloured green → yellow → red as the budget drains.
• Preserved food also shows a "Dried jerky" or "Salted — keeps for weeks" line.

Preservation is stored as hidden data on the food itself (a freshness budget plus preserved/dried flags) — a dried piece is the same item, just marked, so it stacks and cooks like any other. There is no separate "jerky" item; the tooltip is how you read its state.

Non-perishable items (bread, golden apples, and similar keepers) are not on the list and do not spoil. See Food & Eating for the risks of eating spoiled or raw food.

Cold storage: the root cellar

Because spoilage is temperature-driven, a cold place is itself a preservation method — no salt, no fire, just the cool of the earth.

Dig a storage space that is covered (no open sky above it) and below sea level, and it reads as an earth-cooled root cellar: the food in any chest or barrel down there spoils at a deep-cold rate — roughly −20° just under the surface, down to about −50° in a deep cellar — which stretches a fresh perishable's ~1-day shelf life into weeks. The deeper you dig, the colder it gets.

The catch is that you have to build the cellar honestly. Loose soil caves when you undercut it (see Soil has no cohesion), so a real cellar means shoring the roof with timber or stone — or digging into solid rock. The full loop is: dig down, shore or line the space so it doesn't collapse, and store your harvest in the cool dark. An earned root cellar, not a free hole in the ground.

Chests and barrels within the loaded chunks around you are swept for spoilage at their own local temperature — so the same barrel keeps food far longer sitting in a deep cellar than it would in a sunlit surface hut.

The ice house

When you can't dig a cellar — or you're in a warm climate where the ground isn't cold — you can make your own cold with ice, exactly as people did before refrigeration.

Harvest ice. Breaking plain ice normally just leaves a puddle of meltwater. Cut it with a pickaxe or axe instead and you lift out a whole block of ice to carry. Ice only forms in the cold (frozen lakes and rivers, cold biomes, winter), so this is a seasonal harvest — and blocks of ice are heavy to haul.

Pack it around your store. Ice or snow placed around a chest or barrel chills it like a cellar: one block against it is about −12°, and packing it in on every side approaches −40° — enough to keep food for weeks, above ground and even in a hot biome.

Keep it dark and enclosed. Plain ice melts near light (torches, lava), so a working ice house must be shuttered and dark, its ice packed and out of the sun — just like the real thing. In a warm biome no ice forms locally, so you must haul it in from the cold and race to get it walled up before it melts. That hauling and insulating is the ice house.

And it doesn't last forever. Even shuttered in the dark, ice packed into a warm or temperate biome slowly melts from the heat leaking in — so a lowland ice house is a maintenance store you restock each winter with fresh-cut blocks, not a one-time build. The colder the climate, the longer it keeps: in a below-freezing biome (a boreal or arctic store) the ice doesn't melt at all and the cold is effectively free. So where you dig your ice house matters as much as how you build it.

Salting

Salting marks a food as preserved (the ~30-day shelf life):

1. Hold the perishable food in your main hand.
2. Hold salt in your off hand.
3. Sneak + right-click.

This consumes one salt and cancels the food's running spoil timer.

Getting salt — boil down seawater

Salt comes from the sea, the old way. Fill a fire-safe pot (clay or iron) from the ocean — it fills as salt water — then stand it in a lit campfire (right-click the fire with the pot). Fresh water boils clean, but seawater boils down to dryness and leaves a crust of salt: right-click the fire empty-handed to take the pot back and you get about 2–3 salt (roughly half the pot's capacity), the water gone as steam and the pot empty again.

That's evaporation, not distillation — you get the salt, not drinkable water back (reclaiming the fresh water with a condenser is a separate, later thing). But it makes salting a working preservation method: a trip to the coast, a pot, and a fire is all it takes to lay in salt for the winter.

The drying rack

The drying rack preserves meat without salt. It is crafted from 5 sticks:

S S S
S . S

→

Place it, then right-click it with a perishable food to hang one piece — the piece is shown hanging on the rack so you can see what's curing. Right-click the occupied rack to check it: while it's still curing this just reports progress ("Drying… 60%") on the action bar, and once it's done the same click takes the finished jerky. It only comes off before it's done if you sneak + right-click to force it — and pulling a half-cured piece restarts it from scratch, so leave it be until it's ready. Breaking the rack also drops whatever is hung on it. The rack keeps drying while you are away — progress tracks elapsed world time even while the area is unloaded.

Finished food becomes jerky: it is marked preserved (~30-day shelf life) and dried, which also makes it lighter to carry (the water is gone).

The same rack tans hides

A drying rack isn't just for meat — a lashed frame of poles is exactly what you stretch a hide on to tan it into leather, so the drying rack does that job too. Right-click it with a raw hide (while carrying a lump of animal brains) and it brain-tans into leather over a longer cure — roughly three in-game days. One rack, both jobs; see From raw hide to leather.

You dry meat raw — you don't cook it first. Jerky is dried raw meat, and cold-smoking over the campfire is the same: the drying (and the smoke) are what make it keep, and what make it safe to eat. So hang raw beef straight on the rack, and eating the finished jerky carries no raw-meat sickness — the drying dealt with that. (Old jerky can still turn once it's deep into its 30-day shelf life; that's the freshness gamble, not a raw-meat one.)

Drying speed depends on conditions

Air-drying a piece takes about 1.5 in-game days in normal temperate, dry conditions. Temperature, weather, and biome change that rate, and warm wet conditions spoil the meat instead of drying it:

Condition	Result
Smoked (lit campfire two blocks below, with an air gap)	Fastest — about 0.4 in-game days, and weather cannot stop it
Warm, dry air (hot biome, not raining)	About 0.75 in-game days
Temperate, dry	About 1.5 in-game days
Cold, dry (winter, or a cold biome)	Slow but safe — about 3.75 in-game days (freeze-drying)
Cold rain or snow	Paused (frozen); no progress and no spoiling
Warm and wet (rain, or a warm humid jungle/swamp)	Does not dry; the meat rots after about half an in-game day of exposure, becoming rotten flesh

Smoking

Smoking requires a lit campfire two blocks directly below the rack, with an air gap between them so cool smoke rises to the meat. A fire, lava, or lit campfire placed directly beneath the rack instead sets the wooden rack alight — the rack and the food on it are destroyed.

Fresh meat draws predators

Preserving food isn't only about shelf life — raw meat you carry reeks, and the wilderness has a nose for it.

• Carrying loose, unpreserved perishable food (raw or cooked meat, fish) draws a nearby wolf or polar bear toward you — from about 14 blocks, and further the more you carry (up to ~30).
• If one reaches you, it snatches a piece of raw meat and bolts with it — a hungry raid that costs you food, not health. It takes no more than one piece every ~8 seconds, so a pack can't strip you all at once, but standing in the open with a full load of venison is a losing game.
• Salted or dried food doesn't reek — preservation seals the smell, so a pack of jerky travels clean where a pack of raw meat would trail predators (and a raider can't take what it can't smell).
• Food stashed in a chest or backpack — rather than loose on your body — isn't on you to smell, so caching your meat is the other way to travel unnoticed.
• Foxes stay skittish and keep their distance; only bold predators track you. Wolves and polar bears no longer flee you, either — they hold their ground.
• The same nose finds carrion: fresh meat dropped on the ground — a kill left behind, or the pile where you died — draws predators that eat it where it lies (a piece at a time). Don't dawdle recovering a meat-laden death pile, and don't expect dropped raw meat to wait for you.

So the trade is real: haul raw meat and attract danger, or preserve/cache it and travel clean.

(Dedicated sealed barrels, hung caches, and smokehouses — purpose-built stores that beat the scent better than a plain chest — are still planned.)