Best way to preserve berries long-term ?

[Petike]

What's the best method of preserving berries for a long time, e.g. the autumn and winter until spring, other than just chucking them inside a cellar ? Can berries start to spoil or rot in a cellar ?

Thank you kindly for any and all advice.

[ModernNorseman]

What's the best method of preserving berries for a long time, e.g. the autumn and winter until spring, other than just chucking them inside a cellar ? Can berries start to spoil or rot in a cellar ?

Thank you kindly for any and all advice.

Hi!

They will spoil in a cellar as well, yes, however, it will be at a slower pace. However, they will rot fairly quick and won't last you through a winter. You can however look through the mods forum, for various food mods. Some will give you the ability to dry berries, which have a longer spoilage period.

[Petike]

Hi!

They will spoil in a cellar as well, yes, however, it will be at a slower pace. However, they will rot fairly quick and won't last you through a winter. You can however look through the mods forum, for various food mods. Some will give you the ability to dry berries, which have a longer spoilage period.

I see. It's a real pity the base game doesn't already have more food preservation methods. I thought drying could potentially work, but I've never seen anyone mention that method outside of meaty food sources. One of those things that feels like an oversight in the game. Drying at least some of the fruit and plants for the inhospitable season, as backup supplies, should be an option.

[Privateer]

from News.txt

And item modding is done the same way with cookery recipes.
        Here's a recipe for dried berries:

        .Dried berries.     *COOKERY*   /25/ \10d\  %50%    :151: 
        {Berries}   #1#     [remove] [roast] [name:Pile of dried %s]
        [SPOILAGE_DAYS:0]
        [WATER:0]
        [COOK_WEIGHT_DIV:10]

[Saukko]

To expand on Privateer's post, you can get a slightly hackish way of drying berries by copypasting that snippet to the cookery_glossary.txt file, for example into the vegetable recipies section, before the [SUBMENU_END:vegetable] tag. I say "slightly hackish" because as far as I can tell, the salting/smoking/drying methods are hardcoded and you can't expand on them - so it has to be made into a recipe, which is a bit counterintuitive and doesn't really work like drying berries or mushrooms would in real life (the cooking recipe methods need you to have a fire, but in reality you can dry berries or mushrooms the same way you can dry meat or fish in the game - it just wouldn't take as long). It would be nice if the salting/smoking/drying methods could work with wider selection of foodstuffs, but I doubt the devs would consider it a high priority since the recipe mod can be used to create almost the same effect.

EDIT: Never mind, I wasn't thinking properly... Anyway, I noticed that the devs are planning to add berries and mushrooms to the foodstuffs that can be dried - so maybe next version will have that?

[Brygun]

For my own mod I added cooking berry turnovers

.Berry Turnover. (6)  *COOKERY* /30/ \60\ |-1| 
{Stone} [ground] '+baking platform'
{Flour}     #1#   [remove] [roast]
{Berries}    #1#     [remove] [roast] [naming: last word] [name:%s turnover]
{Rock} [ground] '+crush the berries'
{Water}    #.5#  [remove]
{Seasoning} #.15#  [remove] [roast] [optional]
[COOK_WEIGHT_DIV:1.0]
[WATER:0]
[TILEGFX:vl-bbrooch]
//From Brygun
//Sample cooking on stone video
// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkU1SJ4dNV0



Also I've put berries in containers and they seem to be coming through the winter okay. They were in a cellar at times. Some then taken out into a container (clay pot or clay amphora) and I havent seen a rotten entry yet. Possibly those in the container take the last day of all the stack as the container code can only hold a single item with rotten and useable being 2 types.

[Bedlam]

Here's the dried berries from my NjerpCookery mod:

Code: [Select]

.Dried berries.  (4)   *COOKERY* /10/ \6d\  %30% :151: 
{Berries}   #8#     [remove] [roast] [name:dried %s] [optional]
{Board} '+to lay out the berries in the sun'
[COOK_WEIGHT_DIV:5]
[WATER:0]
[SPOILAGE_DAYS:180]

You can paste into your cookery_glossary.txt to try it out. The berries in the first entry are marked [optional] which I feel makes it a lot more versatile in gameplay because it's not often that you have the full 8lbs of berries the recipe calls for, but making smaller batches was annoying me when I did have larger amounts of berries amasssed, because of how many keypresses it was. This way seems to be a nice compromise that no longer feels annoying, to me.

Note that you can make dried berries outta literally nothing with this recipe because of how [optional] works, it will take any amount including 0 berries. But if you do that, you quickly find out the joke will be on you, since dried berries made of thin air will have 0 nutrition value 

[Brygun]

Its even more outta nothing if you replace "board", which you have to work lumber to have, with "stone" as a place to dry the berries.

[Acolyte]

Here's the dried berries from my NjerpCookery mod:

Code: [Select]

.Dried berries.  (4)   *COOKERY* /10/ \6d\  %30% :151: 
{Berries}   #8#     [remove] [roast] [name:dried %s] [optional]
{Board} '+to lay out the berries in the sun'
[COOK_WEIGHT_DIV:5]
[WATER:0]
[SPOILAGE_DAYS:180]

You can paste into your cookery_glossary.txt to try it out. The berries in the first entry are marked [optional] which I feel makes it a lot more versatile in gameplay because it's not often that you have the full 8lbs of berries the recipe calls for, but making smaller batches was annoying me when I did have larger amounts of berries amasssed, because of how many keypresses it was. This way seems to be a nice compromise that no longer feels annoying, to me.

Note that you can make dried berries outta literally nothing with this recipe because of how [optional] works, it will take any amount including 0 berries. But if you do that, you quickly find out the joke will be on you, since dried berries made of thin air will have 0 nutrition value 

Here's an errant thought - does the Patchwise tag apply to cooking recipes? If so, you could make batches in ..... well.... batches. 

   - Shane

[Bedlam]

Yep there's a patchwise tag but it was bugged for cookery at the time. Not sure if fixed now or not.

[Acolyte]

Hmmmm works with preserving meat, but that's not in the cookery recipes - it's hard-coded and so is roasting.

Guess it's time for some experiments. 

   - Shane