I’ve spent several days working on the Outdoor Freezer mod and I’ve run into clear limitations that can’t be solved on the Lua side.

I think I can build a workaround to make the Outdoor Freezer more reliable, so you can leave food outside with greater peace of mind.

Until then, here are my recommendations when using the mod:

• Before you leave your food unattended, make sure it’s truly 100% frozen when it’s outside.
  
• Only return to that food while temperatures are below freezing.

I’m working on a solution that looks at the average temperatures over your last few in-game days and then applies spoilage adjustments retroactively.


What is the problem?
In vanilla, the food-aging system keeps running even when an item is fully frozen—unless it’s inside an appliance (freezer/fridge). If the item isn’t in a freezer, it continues to spoil. That’s the core issue.

For now, the mod detects when outdoor items are truly frozen. Once an item is fully frozen, we tag it; if you return while temperatures remain below freezing, its spoilage is paused. This is a temporary workaround—I’ll keep refining it for better realism.


Thanks for reading!

I really need your feedback. I can’t properly play-test the mod right now—I’m in a competition where I can’t use it myself, and I built this for you. So if you’re using it, please tell me everything.

Did you notice any FPS or performance issues?

Did you run into major logic errors or odd behavior?

In my “test” runs I couldn’t do full playthroughs due to time limits, but I invested a lot of time making it as realistic as possible within my constraints. That’s why I need you: play with it and share anything that can help me optimize and improve it!

Howdy! I have noticed some sort of incompatibility with Clean UI, I've only noticed an error pop up when I kill a zombie that has a backpack/container with food. I haven't done any specific testing, but I am 100% free to assist w/ troubleshooting. I will post the error next time I encounter it, cheers!

@Bleeks that is much appreciated! If you encounter any bugs, just post here your stack trace of your console.txt! or maybe on pastebin.com

Again thank you very much!

Here you are, pastebin link [pastebin.com] Let me know if you need anything else! Thank you for your mods and all your hard work!

Thank you very much, that helped a lot, if you encounter something like that again, please tell me more about it here!

first of all: thank you for your work, especially with the "cryogenic mod" or "Winter is comming"-Szenario this is a solid immersion. appreciate your work.

When it comes to bug reporting: i noticed, that not only food with the tag "fresh/stale/rotten" is frozen, but all - in an example seasoning salt was frozen. That wouldnt be much of a problem, but it seems, those do not want to unfreeze.

@EDELRAUSCHEN thanks a lot, that is a good bug report!
Yeah I'll look into that, how I can sepperate seasoning from food. Excluding it from spawning in frozen state! Thanks a lot!

I think I can exclude them with the tag, they already have "driedfood" shouldnt freeze at all.
again thanks a lot!

I spent the entire day removing items that shouldn’t freeze from the freezing list. I ran into serious limitations when trying to detect foods that are non-perishable but still allowed to freeze. If I simply add all non-perishables to the “do not freeze” list, that conflicts with vanilla behavior—cockroaches, for example, can be frozen. The same goes for chewing gum.

On the other hand, there are items like coffee that must not freeze, just like seeds—but the problem is that potatoes are also marked as seeds. You can see how this becomes a pretty involved process.

I’ve done my best to identify foods that shouldn’t ever be frozen. If you still find any that don’t thaw on their own (you can just throw those away), please let me know. Unfortunately, foods that can’t thaw will stay frozen forever because there’s no thawing process for them. So if you discover new items (ideally in fresh playthroughs), let me know and I might set aside another full day to look into it and try to fix it.

False frozen items should get back to normal now. (I hope)
I've spent the whole day on it.
Let me know if something makes trouble.

Dunno why but if i leave food inside a bag put outside, it will become always frozen even if temperature is not cold, this happens to me since game start, looking in trash bins i found just frozen food. I use many mods so maybe it is a conflict

I started a game with only this mod on, and food is not frozen so the issue is from another mod, i will find it

I did a lot of testing; I thought the problem was caused by using other mods that affect food aging, temperature, or refrigeration, but I tried them all, and there didn't seem to be any incompatibilities.
So I started a new game with my usual mod list but without entering my sandbox settings, and the bug disappeared.
So, to be sure, I started a new game with only this mod active, but putting on my sandbox settings, and bingo, the bug returned.
So, this mod could cause this problem if some sandbox setting is set, but I'm still not able to figure out which one.

i sent you a friend request, so i will be able to share you my sandbox settings if you need.
However i'm still looking for the problematic setting