What is the easiest way to store food long term. Meat/fish, the kind that spoils fast and you can hunt in bulk.
I am thinking of building a bank of minifridges in a pseudovehicle, but that might be too much work, or it may get buggy, not sure. Canning in 3L jars would be my favorite roleplay wise, but it seems to take too much in-game time to actually work well. Dehydrating it also seems like a large chunk of time, though I haven’t tried it in bulk yet.
Any thoughts?
Solution Edit: After some time away from game and coming back, I decided to mark the Smoking Rack as the best option. As stated, the ability to activate it then and walk away, clearly makes it the fastest way to store food long term.
However, for anyone searching this topic later on, I have a few points to add.
The “Charcoal Smoker” talked about here is listed as “Smoking Rack” in the construction menu (*)
It can only hold 20L of food at one time. Remember this if you have 150L of Moose chunks sitting around rotting. You can, of course, build more then one.
It makes A LOT of heavy smoke. Which makes sense, but it didn’t occur to me and I had to move it after first use
It uses 25 Units of charcoal PER LITER of food. So 20L of food = 500 Units. BUT you want to use it twice to dehydrate it completely. So 1000 units of Charcoal per 20L of Dehydrated food.
You will obliviously need a way to make charcoal. I built the “Metal Charcoal Kiln” using 4 hot water heaters (40L tanks) and 4 pipes
The Metal Charcoal Kiln can hold up to 125L of wood. Activating it with the max amount nets you 3000 Units of Charcoal
The Kiln excepts all kinds of movable wood, from splinters up to logs.
But keep in mind, in order to stay ahead of rotting, you will need those thousands of charcoal units already made before hand.
This means that you will need access to a large amount of wood, which is easy enough, considering how many forests are around. But again, you need the wood=charcoal BEFORE you have the meat/fish. Get wood cutting!
Charcoal smoker, you can turn meat and fish into smoked meat and fish and than dehydrated ones. Just put charcoal and food into smoker light it and it will smoke it for you over 6 hours while you go about your bussiness, than put in more charcoal and light it a second time any you have dehydrated meat and fish.
Yeah without access to refrigeration charcoal smokers are best. Especially the furniture version that smokes by itself while letting you go about your business.
If you have access to a swamp I also find going down there and making a ton of jerky from the salt water is fine
I use mostly a food dehydrator to dehydrate meat, wild vegetables, fruit and occasionally mushrooms (also to make powdered eggs). Pine needle tea is also easy to make. I also prepare fat by making tallow. This gives me a good selection for healthy food. With a bit of flour you can vary your dishes even more.
When I kill some big prey it takes some time to prepare all of it: a moose will take me about a full day to prepare. I dehydrate meat first, since raw fat won’t spoil for a week or so. I don’t even care about entrails.
In 0.D I made tons of pemmican, now it would become boring pretty fast.
I recently went through the effort of building enough infrastructure to have vehicle area coolers in the basement of my shelter. It gets a bit finicky with the reality bubble, but it works well enough so long as you throw the stuff into a smoking rack before putting it in there.
that is correct, also note: if you lack access to electrical means of refrigeration, you can also make Root Cellars, which will generally reduce the temperature(and thus spoilage rate) of food placed within(I believe it reduces it to what it would be 1 z-level lower?)
I should have asked my question more specifically. I was mostly worried about the efficiency of making preserved food vis-à-vis in-game time. I agree that canned food would be the best for long term storage, but was that the best use of time?
Although I have not made one yet, the charcoal smoker, which you can walk away from and do other tasks, would seem the best. Obviously just sticking it in the freezer would be the quickest method, but as you pointed out, it can fail.
For now, I used a food processor to turn a moose into dehydrated chunks, which are then cooked into sausages. Although it takes an hour to cook 6 sausage, they can be smoked as well. So its good enough for the time being.
the best way is to find a farm/silo and eat the wheat raw, easy to storage easy to eat, and if you want the morale bonus, well you can process to make other things like bread and stuff
There’s a vast array of options for what you can do with food. The down and dirty fast way of keeping food around is to simply dry as much as you can and chuck it in a root cellar. Root cellars are typically the best solution wherever possible, simply because it offers maximum space and a fair temperature regulation. If it lasts 2+ seasons, it can go in a root cellar for ages. I have 3 of these right now, mostly for sorting purposes.
Fridges/Freezers major drawback isn’t just the infrastructure needed to power them around the clock, but their limited space. This is actually the MOST amount of time you can blow over food preservation, because of all the mechanics work that needs to go into power grids and the storage array. For all that, you get a LOT less capacity than a root cellar, but you can freeze things year round if you can keep the power up. Freezers are great on RV vehicles because you can pack in meals for the road, and at base, I have two that I use exclusively for storing unprocessed meats, fats, and lard. I have 3 fridges that I use for day-to-day meal stocking and keeping opened containers (such as jam and imitation peanutbutter) and fresh fruits & veggies that I wasn’t planning on preserving right away.
vac-sealing/canning/jars offers the most space overall, since you can just chuck the supply in a back corner somewhere and forget about them 'till winter. I throw the MRE’s and other ‘prevents spoiling’ stuff back there for that purpose. you want to jar/can fast-spoiling ingredients like Red Sauce to keep them as long as possible, so you can make pasta or pizzas whenever, which can offer better nutritional spreads and ‘cheaper’ calories from flour products. If it keeps for less than a season, I huck it in the fridge, and if it looks like it’s taking up a lot of space or not being used, I figure out how I’m going to preserve it (usually via a smoking rack)
Im almost always too lazy to set up a fridge stack or try to get enough glassware or cans to can stuff. I pretty much always stay low tech and dont even make a root cellar. Its really not all that hard to find food even in winter.
What i usually do in the weeks before winter is gather up a ton of meat, fruit and veggies and use the smoking rack to dehydrate all of it. I make as much tallow or lard as i can. Ill take all my grain and convert straight to flour and make some salt and just gather up all the unshelled nuts, tea, coffee pods and such i can and pile it all up by my smoker where i can just make food as needed. Usually just make pemmican when i finally get cooking high enough cuz it lasts a long time, is nutrient dense and is perfect for carrying around cuz it meets all your vitamin needs.
Even if you manage to run out you can still always get pine boughs, pine nuts, cattail rhizomes and meat/fish in winter so youll hardly starve. Anything that i cant just dehydrate i just cook right away and eat since they added body condition and the ability to store stuff in fat. I just live on fruit and nuts all autumn so i dont need to touch my stash till winter
Flour has a pretty long rot date. Typically longer than it takes to use, except maybe in summer.
Though I’m of the same mindset as you. I just eat the wheat and cattail rhizomes raw. It takes too long to process to be worth it, and it’s not like processing it nets extra calories.
Hell, I even debugged it once and with the taste inhibitors CBM and metabolic interchange it was literally more efficient calorie-wise to not cook food. Since the time to cook the food took up more calories than I spent running the taste inhibitor CBM.
My long term food storage solution is always a live cow. It takes up only a single vehicle tile in a livestock carrier and provides far more food than you will need.
I convert to flour because its lighter and if you have other food sources like meat and fish it stretches really well. Unless they changed something, flour has an indefinite shelf life. Mostly just do that for grain because cooking down rhizomes takes too much time.
I rarely build a vehicle. I actually like playing a character with wayfarer. I usually have my loot stashed in an out of the way secure location like a bunker or lmoe shelter. Carrying a little flour, water, fat and salt lets me stretch any food i find in the field. Its also kind of a roleplay thing for me.
I dont play this to meta game it and find the most efficient way to do something xD
Either way, theres lots of valid ways to preserve lots of food