Yeah, there should maybe be time limits on imperishables so they don’t outlive your atomic lamp. There’s also a lot of scope for making small critters steal from your food stores, necessitating taming cats and so on.
I don’t agree with your assertion that you can’t survive without scavenging, however. I’ve played essentially 100% wilderness games for several years (started in the wilderness, bounced between rare mansions farms and labs when possible searching for so much as a road - stupid 8 city spacing), and food has never been an issue, even though my characters typically gravitate towards a vegetarian shrub-forager lifestyle.
Foodwise, if you’re travelling cross country and examining bushes faithfully it’s honestly very, very easy to get enough wild vegetable to make more aspic than you can eat, and eggs for vitamins. Not to mention if you come across an ant hill you’ll have more meat and eggs than you could ever, ever need (one ant egg alone is essentially a day of nutrition, which is problematic in itself), while bee hives give perishable but awesome Royal Beef to cure your B12 deficiency.
The biggest problem for me is water, 90 day season or not. Realistically speaking, cities are deserts where water should be a serious problem, and most water supplies that are available would be tainted by pollution that would be hard to remove without serious filtration and treatment of the water.
But a swimming pool in Cata is a permanent, never emptied, healthy water supply and most houses carry days worth of water in their bathrooms that can be rendered perfectly safe by a burning candy wrapper. Meanwhile fields and forests are barren, desiccated wastelands that stretch on for mile after mile without so much as a trace of morning dew. The only way the player can feasibly survive the limitless jerky is to live river-adjacent, have a CBM, or use a trolley with a funnel attached to help simulate the “small streams” and “puddles of rainwater” that are notoriously absent from the Cataclysmic wilderness.
