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4 posts in this topic

Have you read, understood, and followed all of the rules listed in large text at the top of the suggestions forum?(Yes/No): Yes
Answering "no" to the above question will result in your post being deleted.

 

I'm surprised that I couldn't find any suggestions for an ice house anywhere, but perhaps this idea has been suggested before and dismissed.  I know this would not be an easy structure to code, especially given the need for special "area of effect" temperature variations from the surrounding environment.  Still, I thought I would suggest it as I believe it would add some more realism to the game.

 

Ice houses are large structures which were used prior to the invention of modern refrigeration to store large quantities of ice primarily for the purpose of food preservation but also the luxury of having an iced drinks and ice creams during the hot summer months.  Typically, these structures were man-made built underground and heavily insulated.  Ice from frozen lakes or rivers and snow would be placed in the ice house and often covered with sawdust, sand, or hay to help insulate it. 

 

For purposes of the game, this would need to be a relatively large structure, at least 8 x 8 blocks I would think and 3 or 4 blocks high. I don't know that a special block would be needed for the walls, but it should certainly be made of rock or brick at least, perhaps the outer walls would need to be covered at least two high on the perimeter inside with blocks of ice or snow that has been covered (right-clicked with material in hand) with hay, sand, or sawdust.  These "perimeter" ice blocks would slowly melt during the non-winter seasons.  Again, not knowing the details of the coding I'm sure this would be no easy task to include these temperature variations that change based on seasonal changes.  I don't think there needs to be any animations showing the blocks melting, but they could simply disappear by the end of autumn and need to be replenished each winter.  Any storage vessels placed in the ice house would benefit from the lower temperatures for food storage purposes obviously much like storing them at higher elevations.  A new tool might be required to cut ice from frozen lakes and rivers during the winter months.  An ice saw would need to be a metal tool, that would only be used to cut ice blocks.

 

Thank you for considering the possibility!

 

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It's a fun idea, one I'd considered suggesting, but I thought I saw a similar idea get shot down somewhere, though I can't find it now, even under "ice box".  Dynamic temperature, I've seen discussions before that indicated this is kind of a non-starter due to the complexity, but who knows, maybe TFC2 is different?  Also, the Cellars Addon basically does this already, but using snow rather than ice.
 
I think the issue you might run into is that most places, people like to build their 'sky freezers' at the top of the world where it's perpetually cold, if you're far enough from the equator.  If you're anywhere that ice forms for more than a few days, I think you're probably ahead to go the sky freezer route, as they don't need maintenance, although they can be tedious to climb up to.  I could see an ice house being useful in tropical areas where even the top of the world is too warm for a sky freezer.  But then you have to trek a long ways to get the ice.  To make ice houses/boxes truly useful, I think you'd have to somehow make sky freezers non-workable, and I don't know how you'd do that unless you have some kind of 'freezer burn' or something for if your food gets *too* cold, maybe in combo with too high up.
 
That said I think it'd be a fun mechanic, in line with the other detailed constructs of TFC, such as charcoal pits and blast furnaces.  I don't see why you wouldn't just use a regular saw for you ice saw.  It'd give the saw a left-click use.
 
The way I envisioned the ice box mechanic:

was not as a room, but as a special storage block, 1 or 2(max) blocks tall, made of metal sheets.  This block would need to be surrounded by seven columns of ice blocks - one in each diagonal direction, and 3 in the cardinal directions.  The remaining side must be a door.  The several columns must be 1 block taller than the top freezer block, and there also must be an ice block on top of the top freezer block itself.  So basically your freezer block(s) must be encased in a cube of ice, including diagonals, except for the door and the ground.  If these conditions are met, the ice box blocks are at or near freezing, preserving the food inside indefinitely or nearly so.


The ice blocks melt over time, but only the top-most block in a column.  Maybe there would need to be ice layers created, like charcoal?  One layer melts every so often, based on ambient temperature (maybe around 6 hrs at middle latitudes in summer?).    So if you use the bare minimum blocks, they'll only completely freeze the top ice box block for presumably something like a couple days at mid-lats.  The solution is you stockpile more ice blocks, either in the manner of old (i.e. pile them in a huge pile and hope they last the summer) or actually create an 'ice silo' around your fridge, meaning you stack the ice blocks up in really high columns.  The top layers keep the bottom layers from melting.  The ice lasts longer if you further surround the ice columns with columns of thatch (but just cardinally adjacent, not diagonally. 
In plan, what you'd end up with is a freezer block in the middle, 7 columns of ice around it plus a door, and a further 11 columns of thatch around the ice columns, and presumably a blank spot to access the door.  Since the ice box must be surrounded on all but one side by ice, you can't place two adjacent to each other, but you could space them one apart, so they share three of the ice columns.
 
Personally I think I'd make the ice block itself back-carryable only, but that's probably too grindy for some.  But when you see old ice house pictures, it was a huge production using horses and tracks to slide the blocks.  It might bring an interesting use to minecarts, which would probably be reasonable since your base is likely by a body of water, so you'd not need hundreds and hundreds of track.  It'd also be fun to see people set up track on ice, and have to remember to remove it before thaw.
 
Unfortunately this plan would probably have some sort of ramification with regard to ticking blocks or something due to the ice melting, I don't know.  And it would be nice to have a new solid thatch block to prevent people falling to their death through the thatch while trying to replenish the ice silo.  But to me it seemed the best way to get a pretty faithful representation of the old ice houses.


 
Both our ideas though, are a lot more complicated than simply having a special ice box container, with a special slot for putting ice blocks, and it sucks up an ice block each day or something.

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It'd give the saw a left-click use.

 

Tools already have left-click uses. It's called block breaking. There's really no way to override that. The only special use you can give to tools is the right-click action.

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Interesting. I must say the sky-fridge would probably be an easier solution. That said, if in fact building changes slightly and building so high isn't so effective perhaps. Or there are other functional uses for cooling like more advanced tech. No I don't mean modern tech I mean things like some sort of wierd metal working.

 

It is an interesting suggestion though. Are there any non-food uses you were thinking of?

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