Keeping warm: cold waves, rooms, heaters and tiers

Open the forecast list All 100 days with the light and cold grade each one brings; the cold days are the ones with a grade above zero.

The four parts of the system

Warmth is one number with a name the game shows you, Apparent Temperature, and it is fed from elsewhere. The weather brings a cold grade. The room you are standing in has a fixed offset. A device in that room adds its heat. Where the number lands picks a tier, and the tier is what actually charges you.

Every row above is the same scale, which is what makes them worth comparing. A room is worth as much as 4 steps between the best and the worst of them, and the whole distance from the Slight Chill cut-off to the Comfortable cut-off is 3. So the room you choose to spend a cold day in moves you further than the gap between the mildest tier and the best one.

What the site cannot do is add those inputs up for you. The game does that in code, and the tables carry the parts rather than the sum. Everything below states a part.

When the cold comes

Cold arrives in 4 spells across the run, and the longest is day 44 to day 46, which is 3 days back to back. Nothing before day 23 carries any cold, so a heat source finished on day 1 sits idle for 22 days and one finished on day 22 is on time. Added up, the schedule spends 168 hours under a cold weather, out of 2400.

The weather table names 9 kinds that carry cold, on a grade from 1 to 3. The campaign schedule only ever puts 2 of them in force: Severe Cold at 3 and Moderate Cold at 2. The other 7 exist in the data and never appear on these 100 days, so a page that plans for the mild ones is planning for weather this run does not have.

What each room adds

Basement is the warmest place in the house at +2 and a device works there, which makes it the room to spend a cold day in on both counts. Cold Storage is the other end at -2, and no device changes it, which is exactly why it holds food at 0.2× decay. Which room to use works through the food side of the same table.

Of the 5 areas, 2 are shut out of the device column entirely: Terrace and Cold Storage. Buying a heater does nothing for either, so the choice there is the room itself.

What each device adds

Each row has more behind it than fits here. Air Conditioning, Electric Heater and Heating Stove each open in the equipment list with their draw, their slot and everything else the game records about them.

Only 1 of the 3 is on a shelf. This is the part that catches people out, because the other two look like ordinary purchases and are not.

The Air Conditioning is the one you can plan on: a shop stocks it, and its recipe is open at Workbench level 0 once the Keep Your Cool talent is taken. The Electric Heater and Heating Stove both wait on an event instead, which means you cannot decide to have one. The Heating Stove has exactly 1 way in, Before the Cold Hits, and the Electric Heater has 4. You can only be ready to build one when its recipe arrives, and readiness here is 4 × Scrap Metal, 1 × Wire sitting in a box.

One run talent moves the device column. Heating Always On, 15 run points: "Each running Air Conditioning or Electric Heater provides +1 temperature boost". Read the names in that line, because they are not all of them. It covers Air Conditioning and Electric Heater and leaves out Heating Stove. With it the Air Conditioning contributes 3 rather than 2, which is the same figure as the Comfortable cut-off, though what that reaches once the weather and the room are added in is the game’s arithmetic and not the site’s.

What each tier costs

Freezing is the only tier with numbers in it, and they are per hour: 4 Satiety, 1 Morale, 1 Life.

Its own text says it runs until the cold wave ends, so it is not something you wait out.

The game applies it two ways, by the cold tier itself and by the event "Cold Wave Strikes".

Slight Chill and Comfortable carry no figures at all, only a direction. Warm is worth reading twice, because it is a good effect that still costs you: "You're staying warm and are protected from the cold. Morale still declines slightly during Cold Waves."

Open the status effects list Every status effect the game can apply, including the cold ones, with what puts it on you and what takes it off.

The full record for each of them, including everything else that can apply it and everything that takes it off, opens from Freezing and Slight Chill in that list.

One cold effect is not a tier. Wind Chill is tagged as a cold debuff and flagged as an illness like the tier effects are, but it is not one of the 4 rungs. It is the only cold effect that carries a duration, 24 hours, and it charges on a 2 hour clock rather than an hourly one: "Sick from cold. Lose 4 Satiety and 4 Life every 2 hours." Run that out over its full 24 hours and it is 12 charges, or 48 Satiety and 48 Life. What decides that a cold tier turns into it is in code the site does not read, so there is no chance and no trigger on this page.

Lifting your own reading

Where you sit can be raised without touching the weather, the room or a device, by 3 things.

The Hand-Knitted Scarf Hand-Knitted Scarf Household 300 g 2×2 cells Keeps indefinitely Scarf Warmth , Keeps you warm, increasing Thermal Comfort by one level. Wearing it increases Thermal Comfort by one level. The effect lasts for the rest of the run. costs nothing and cannot be bought. The item’s own sources list carries a reward set and nothing else, so it arrives when the run gives it to you. Put it on the day it does.

Long Johns and Down Jacket together are 26 run points for two levels, and Down Jacket caps the stack in its own words: "Increases Thermal Comfort by another level (maximum Comfortable)." The talent tree writes the levels as Cold → Chilly → Warming → Comfortable where the status bar writes them as Cold, Slight Chill, Warm, Comfortable. They are the same 4 steps under two sets of words, and this page uses the status bar’s.

Another 3 talents change what a wave costs without moving the reading.

Cold-Resistant Constitution is the one that matters, because it is permanent and it works on the bill rather than the tier: 25%, 40%, 50% off across its 3 levels for 90 points. Its text names Vitality where the Freezing text names Life; the game’s own attribute table has those as one stat, so the talent does cover what Freezing takes.

Worked examples

Each of these stays on one side of the boundary: they multiply a rate the data states by a duration the data states. None of them adds a room to a weather to a device, because that sum is the one thing here the site cannot check.

What the longest spell costs if you sit in it

The longest run of cold days is day 44 to day 46, which is 3 days, and each of those days carries 24 hours of cold, so 72 hours. Freezing charges 4 Satiety, 1 Morale, 1 Life an hour. Sit in it for the whole spell and the bill is 288 Satiety, 72 Morale, 72 Life.

For scale, that 288 Satiety is what you would otherwise be feeding yourself with on top of ordinary hunger, across 3 days.

What the whole schedule costs

The run has 168 hours of cold in it across 7 days. Spent entirely in Freezing, that is 672 Satiety, 168 Morale, 168 Life.

Nobody spends all of it there. The figure is the ceiling, and the point of a heat source is how much of the ceiling you never pay.

What the permanent talent takes off

Cold-Resistant Constitution at its top level cuts the loss by 50%. Applied to the ceiling above, the same 168 hours come to 336 Satiety, 84 Morale, 84 Life instead. What it saves is 336 Satiety, 84 Morale, 84 Life, the same figures again, because a 50% cut is exactly half of what was there.

That is the honest way to price it: 90 permanent points against a saving that only shows up on the hours you fail to cover. A heat source that keeps you out of Freezing makes the talent worth less, not more.

What a room is worth against a cut-off

Basement and Cold Storage are 4 steps apart, and the cut-offs sit 0, 1 and 3, so the whole tier ladder above the bottom spans 3. Moving rooms is a bigger move than any single tier boundary. A device is smaller: the largest heat value in the game is 2, and 3 with Heating Always On behind it.

The comparison holds because all of it is the same scale. What it does not tell you is which tier any particular combination lands in, and no amount of comparing the parts will tell you that.

What to do

1. Read the forecast before day 22. The 7 cold days are fixed at 23, 24, 44, 45, 46, 58, 60 and they do not move between runs.
2. Order the Air Conditioning Air Conditioning Package Furniture Packages 2000 g 2×2 cells Keeps indefinitely for $50 if you want a heat source you can count on having. It is the only one a shop stocks, and its 2 is the highest heat value in the game.
3. Keep 4 × Scrap Metal, 1 × Wire aside for the Heating Stove and 3 × Scrap Metal, 2 × Electronic Components for the Electric Heater. Both recipes arrive through events rather than through money, so the materials are the only part of it you control.
4. Stand the device in Interior, Sunroom, Basement. Nowhere else is reached by one, and Basement at +2 is the best of them.
5. Put the Hand-Knitted Scarf Hand-Knitted Scarf Household 300 g 2×2 cells Keeps indefinitely Scarf Warmth , Keeps you warm, increasing Thermal Comfort by one level. Wearing it increases Thermal Comfort by one level. The effect lasts for the rest of the run. on the day the run hands it to you. It is free and it lasts the whole run.
6. Take Cold-Resistant Constitution only if cold has actually cost you a run. It is 90 permanent points, and it pays out on the hours a heater would have covered anyway.

Quick reference

• Cold days: 23, 24, 44, 45, 46, 58, 60, which is 7 of 100 and 168 hours.
• Longest spell: day 44 to day 46, 3 days.
• Grades in play: Severe Cold 3, Moderate Cold 2, out of 9 cold weathers in the table.
• Warmest area: Basement +2; coldest: Cold Storage -2. A heater reaches 3 of 5.
• Devices: Air Conditioning +2, Electric Heater +1, Heating Stove +1. Stocked: Air Conditioning.
• Cut-offs: Slight Chill at 0, Warm at 1, Comfortable at 3.
• Freezing costs 4 Satiety, 1 Morale, 1 Life an hour until the wave ends.
• Lifts your reading: Hand-Knitted Scarf, Long Johns, Down Jacket.
• Softens the bill: Cold-Resistant Constitution, up to 50%.