Vintage Story: Food Preservation & Cellars
Checked on 13 October 2026 against the Vintage Story 1.22.7 game files and its in-game handbook.
In Vintage Story, food spoilage is a constant threat. The most reliable strategies are cellars for temperature control and crocks for sealed meals. Every container shows how well it works: look at it and its tooltip reads Stored food perish speed: 0.26x or similar, where 1x is the normal speed.
Cellar Requirements (Updated)
- Max size: Interior up to 7x7x7, or up to 9 blocks along one side as long as the room holds no more than 150 blocks of air. The handbook's smallest example is a 1x2x1 hole with a container in it, covered over.
- Enclosure: The room must be fully closed, with no openings. A door is fine.
- Walls that cool: faces of stone, soil, ore or fired clay (bricks, ceramic) cool the room. Wood, glass, metal and other materials do not: with as many non-cooling faces as cooling ones the cellar effect is halved.
- Sky light: a room lit by the sky loses up to 40% of the effect, and sunlight brighter than level 11 on the container warms the food further. It weakens the cellar rather than switching it off.
- Check with the HUD: look at the container and read Stored food perish speed.
A perfect cellar holds stored food at 5 °C whenever it is warmer outside (a colder outside stays colder). Food perishes faster the warmer it is:
| Temperature the food sits at | Perish speed |
|---|---|
| -10 °C and colder | 0.1x (the floor) |
| 0 °C | 0.17x |
| 5 °C (a perfect cellar) | 0.26x |
| 10 °C | 0.38x |
| 15 °C | 0.54x |
| 20 °C | 0.75x |
| 25 °C | 1.04x |
| 30 °C | 1.42x |
| 35 °C | 1.92x |
| 40 °C and hotter | 2.4x (the ceiling) |
Tip: Cellars can be above ground if fully enclosed, but the cooling comes from stone, soil, ore or fired clay faces, so a wooden shed with a door makes a poor cellar. Dig into a hillside, or line the room with stone or bricks.
Preservation Methods
| Method | Best For | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cellar (room bonus) | All stored food | Down to 0.26x in a perfect cellar on a warm day; see the table above |
| Storage Vessels | Vegetables, grain | Vegetables perish at 0.75x and grain at 0.5x inside; other food is unchanged. This stacks with the cellar |
| Crocks (unsealed) | Prepared meals | Perish rate multiplier is 0.85 |
| Sealed Crocks | Long-term meals | Perish rate multiplier is 0.1 for a cooked meal, and 0.25 for raw ingredients sealed in a crock |
| Pickled in a Barrel | Vegetables | Not a multiplier: 1 litre of brine and 1 vegetable sealed in a barrel for 14 days becomes a pickled vegetable that stays fresh for about 75 days (pickled soybeans about 180). Works for carrot, onion, parsnip, pumpkin, turnip, cabbage, bell pepper, olive and fennel |
Sealing Crocks (Fat or Beeswax)
- Fill a crock: serve a cooked meal into it from the cooking pot, or put ingredients in it.
- Seal it with Fat or Beeswax: hold one and right click the placed crock (the hint reads Seal crock), or in your inventory drop one fat or beeswax onto the crock. Each seal uses one.
- Store sealed crocks in a cellar for maximum effect: a sealed meal at 0.1x in a 0.26x cellar spoils at about 0.03x, roughly 30 times slower than an open meal at 20 °C.
An empty crock, or one already sealed, refuses with This crock is empty or already sealed. Taking a serving out breaks the seal, so seal it again with more fat or beeswax.
Cleaning Rot
Rot can build up inside containers. To clean a crock, cooking pot or bowl whose contents have rotted, drop it into water and wait a few seconds: the rot spills out as items, the container comes back empty (and unsealed), and you pick it back up. Storage vessels do not empty this way; take the rot out by hand.
Winter Storage Strategy
- Prioritize sealed crocks for meat-heavy meals.
- Use pickling for vegetables that you cannot cook into meals yet.
- Reserve storage vessels for vegetables and grain in your cellar.
- On a server, the
foodSpoilSpeedworld setting scales all spoilage from 25% to 400%; see the worldconfig reference.
Protect your harvest through every season. Set up a Vintage Story server with Supercraft and keep multi-year food vaults safe with fast world saves.