Currently, the player can’t die from cold. Sustained cold can lower your stats and speed a lot and also cause pain, but not do any hit-point damage or kill you. This seems undesirable, because it means you can sit around wearing shorts and a T-shirt in a blizzard with impunity so long as you’re safe from monsters. An easy fix would be making DI_COLD start doing HP damage at intensity 3. Alternatively, it would be reasonable to make it so that letting your strength hit 0 is instant death, or at least makes you pass out and eventually die if you don’t warm up. (In Pathfinder, characters with Str 0 go unconscious.)
A related issue, which would become more of an issue if cold became lethal, is that ice labs can get ludicrously cold. In the winter, deep levels can easily reach -200 °F. For comparison, Wikipedia tells me that this is about the average temperature on Saturn, whereas the coldest officially recorded natural temperature on Earth is -128.6 °F, and the record low temperature in New England is -50 °F. Without much knowledge of physics or medicine, I suspect that really strange things should happen to the environment of a lab at temperatures under -200 °F, let alone a person. (It’s already bad enough that liquids don’t freeze.) How about letting ice labs get no colder than, say, -100 °F? That’s cold enough to betray the supernatural influence of the subprime, but not quite outside human experience. If ice labs are allowed to remain crazy-cold but cold is made more dangerous, perhaps mutations, bionics, or gear should be added to help.
Finally, most professions are poorly equipped for the default starting time of the first day of spring. If lore permits, I’d suggest changing the default to the first day of summer, which would also make things a bit easier for newbies by making most fruit immediately available. Otherwise, just adding a winter coat and a pair of gloves to most professions would help a lot.
