Why is spring so damn cold?

[Bio]

I’m from canada and even our springs don’t get cold enough to freeze solid food. I know that climate change is a thing in the game but shouldn’t that make things warmer? Is this some sort of other alien shenanigans or what?
fruits should not go below the “cold” level when they’ve been sitting indoors during spring

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I don’t know if there is a lore reason, but I’d point out that global warming causes weather at both extremes, hot and cold.

As for fruit being inside – If you turned off all the heat in your house, and no one was there to warm it with their body/other ambient heat sources, the temperature would decrease to eventually match the outdoor temp. I’m not a fan of how this is instant at the start of a new character in Cataclysm, but I mostly don’t hate it, either.

I don’t know what spring is like in Canada, but I live in an American state with pretty average winters and the early days of spring can often still be cold enough to freeze things left at outdoor temperatures.

[Stone]

I’m from canada, and the start of our spring is still winter temperatures, -10 to -30 excluding wind chill. Albeit I’m in labrador.

[Bio]

well I’m from one of the more hospitable areas (at least enviroment wise, the place is going to hell social wise through the mix of complacency, naivety, and corporate/government harshness) and the winters last 4 months and can evaporate hot liquid instantly, but it still doesn’t get that cold. the insulation should could keep heat from escaping during winter and cold from escaping during summer

[mlangsdorf]

We found some experimental data recently the indicated that yes, even unoccupied but minimally sealed houses shouldn’t drop below 3-6 C, almost regardless of ambient air temperature, because the ground acts as a heat source if the inside air temperature gets below that range.

I don’t think the guys who do temperature stuff have had a chance to revise the game’s models to reflect that yet. It’s a bug.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

even unoccupied but minimally sealed houses shouldn’t drop below 3-6 C

That’s actually very interesting. I had just assumed it would reduce to outdoor temp.

[Zhilkin]

House walls are insulators, so indoor temperature would be changed to temperature of a heat source (ground).

[mlangsdorf]

Yeah, that had been my analysis, too. Pretty much by definition, all the bodies in a system with no other heat source will reach ambient air temperature given enough time. The experimental data from the Canadian study made me realize that there are two ambient temperatures for an abandoned house: the air temperature and the ground temperature, and the ground temperature will act as a heat source if its warmer than the air temperature.

It really is something we need to revisit, but I don’t code the temperature math so I’m not likely to fix the bug.

Also, interior air temperature is only going to stabilize near ground temperature if the house’s insulation is intact. As soon as a window gets broken and you get convective cooling of the interior air, it’s going to dominate the heat transfer over the conductive heating from the ground.

[nameless_survivor]

Well, there WAS an apocalypse before game start. Besides all the extradimensional garbage ejected into the atmosphere by the Cataclysm which could alter climate and weather patterns, various countries deployed substantial numbers of nuclear weapons during the chaos. Earth would experience a Nuclear Winter caused by the fucktons of dust and ash thrown into the upper atmosphere by nuclear detonations and subsequent firestorms, followed by Nuclear Summer a year or two later.