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Hey folks,

So pulling from various sources in the Players Manual:

Page 131: Food and Drink
Domestic Food: ...needs to be consumed within a week, or it will spoil.

Wild Food: ...Spoils after one week.

(the difference between them is that Domestic Food is "processed"/cooked and weighs half as much. But the takeaway here is that they both spoil in a week.)

Page 134: Cropland
For each <success> rolled (on your Stamina skill - Ed.) when you harvest in the fall, the field yields d6x100 units of wild food.

Root Cellar
Makes your domestic food stored here last for a month instead of just a week...

Page 148: Cooking
...your rations of meat, fish or wild food are turned into domestic food rations

So let's assume you have Cropland in your base, and you get two <success> on your Stamina check to harvest. Cool, you get 2d6x100 wild food - assume average so you now have 700 wild food. Awesome!

You spend the next while converting it to domestic food, to store in your Root Cellar (aside: how much wild food can you convert in a single shift? The book says "at a campfire" you can only do 12 at a time, but in a kitchen... it doesn't say. It must be more than twelve, but I don't think it'd be 700 /aside)

So now you have 700 domestic rations....that will spoil in a month. What are you supposed to do the other 10.5 months of the year? You're only allowed to harvest once and only in the fall, and (by the book) there's no other way to store food for longer.

Am I missing something?

To be clear: I'm looking for an official, RAW answer, if there is one. I'm aware I can wing it, but that's not the point of this post.

Yeah, seems to either be an oversight or just missing from the rules. You seem to have listed everything to do with all that.

For my own game I'll probably offer a way to turn wild/domestic food into "rations" by picling/canning/jarring/smoking/salting etc. But yeah for RAW any real long term solution for storing food seems to be missing.

A root cellar works like a refrigerator and technically the rules in the game works as intended, well, sort of. Food put in a refrigerator won't last forever. What is missing though is rules for how to preserve food. Some foods can last longer than a month if stored correctly, most don't and will need to be preserved.

Even though FL loves to put extra rules, items and such in their expansion modules, I don't think they will add a Food Preserving facility in any of the upcoming expansions. Perhaps someone who knows something about preserving food could do a workshop article about this.

edit: in the meantime you could instead of a month, just assume that any domestic food put in the root cellar will last for 2-3 months instead of just one or halve the number of rations for each month that passes beyond the first unless eaten (so 100 rations will be 50 at the end of the second month and that will be 25 after the third month).

Been thinking about this a bit more and you can stretch it out a little bit further by having multiple fields and harvesting one per month

So each month, for 3 or 4 months, harvest a field, convert to domestic food, store in the Root Cellar, eat it.

And for the other 7-8 months of the year..... the only RAW way to get food in any grand quantity is to start killing off your pigs and cows, if you have those facilities in your base. Also amusingly there are no rules for animal husbandry so (RAW, and I'll admit a little too literally) you will never be able to get more animals short of buying/stealing them off other people.

This applies to everyone, everywhere, which I'd imagine would lead to cannibalism sooner rather than later....

I think there should be some sort of salting/brining/preserving rule somewhere in the book, otherwise everyone everywhere will be dead within two years

Ask was mentioned in a different thread Poland has a long history of salt mining, and that salt was primarily used as a method of preserving food like meat. Given the backstory it is likely that many people living in rural Poland would know how to preserve foods due to them living off their own farms to a large degree before WW3 started.

So you have salting, smoking, drying and pickling as methods of creating long-lasting foodstuffs. Hard cheeses also have a long shelve life without refridgeration. These preserved foodstuffs are vital for surviving through the winter so they'll be expensive to trade for as PCs.

So salt along with coal - another resource Poland has a lot of - would be primary trade goods moved between communities.

As I said in the OP, I can wing it just fine - I was looking for rules that allowed salting/drying/pickling/preserving/any mechanic which preserves food for more than a month.

Looks like there aren't any, in the book, which is a very odd decision given it's supposed to be a post-apocalyptic survival game.

This just gives a new meaning to keeping up with the jones.....you just eat your people next door....

Hi!

I think the rules for unprocessed food are way off at least when it comes to grain and root beets, potatoes, carrots etc. Grain can be stored for several years, potatoes and beet for half a year if stored correctly. If a root celler is counted as "correctly stored" in the rules i would just house rule this. Flour must be stored for two months before using it in cooking due to some process and after that it can be stored for several months.

I would just house rule a list which is easy to google and go by that.
I would also add that if stored longer just half the amount or roll for sickness etc if they eat it.

Same goes for meat, just google how long salted, smoked or frozen meat can be stored. It is pretty easy to make a freezer/cooler with ice and sawdust and a root celler.

As my (WIP) extended encounters supplement already had quite a few encounters and new pieces of equipment/food to fill in the gaps described here, I decided to expand on all this in a different supplement to cover food processing and preservation. Gives me something to do as certain real world events really turned me away from continuing with the extended encounters supplement at this time.

As I said in the OP, I can wing it just fine - I was looking for rules that allowed salting/drying/pickling/preserving/any mechanic which preserves food for more than a month.

Looks like there aren't any, in the book, which is a very odd decision given it's supposed to be a post-apocalyptic survival game.

I suspect nobody actually thought about it that hard and the food preservation rules were never playtested (in the sense of seeing whether a group of PCs could use them to survive the way presumably every civilian has for the past couple of years).