measure the temperature of the room
What a generous clue! Must be refrigerators. 
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So, it has come to my attention that yesterday was Thursday and that today is Friday. I’ve probably lost myself somewhere along the week because I was sure today would be Thursday… So I propose we all pretend that today is Thursday and get to our next Preview Thursday!
DECAY & SPOILING
Currently ACE simply features a continuation of the system present in the base game: food, usually unprepared, will spoil/rot away if left untouched for too long. The only things ACE really does about it is that it added this to some of its own products like drinks.
However, while exploring the game files, we found an unused reference to prepared food rotting… We don’t really know if it was never implemented/finished in time OR if it was intentionally not implemented, but we figured that this could be one of the answers for a late game balancing issue we’ve been recently looking into: food overflow.
It is quite easy, after some time, to pile up enormous amounts of food that will inflate your net worth and make acquiring new hearthlings trivial. The survival aspect of food production becomes almost non-existing with a cook and a farmer, and that simply turns it into a chore.
So this overhaul enters the scene…
Rotten stuff added in ACE
Starting next update, almost all foodstuffs will spoil over time - including prepared food–
Ok! Stop.
I can guess that many of you are already thinking something like “What?!” and grabbing your pitchforks - but fear not, this is not necessary because this is not really something that will make the game more difficult. Not only because of the time they will take to rot - which is really long for prepared food, which means that if that food was really needed for the survival of your town it would’ve been eaten already - but also because if you really want to stockpile food, you’ll have the means to do so!
“But Dani! My food…” Well, this is mostly a long-term, middle-end game balance change and not a difficulty change. To understand what I mean, let’s try to summarize the difference between challenge and difficulty. You can think of it like this:
Challenge refers to where you need to get to in terms of the effort needed. When something is challenging, it means it requires more effort, basically - but not necessarily something that you can’t do without a certain skill set or ability. For example, walking all the way to another town might be challenging, requires a lot of time and effort, you’ll be tired, etc… But it’s not something you can’t do. It’s just, well, challenging.
Difficulty refers to how hard something is to achieve, and how well prepared you need to be to be able to do that something. Are there certain skills or abilities you need? For example, driving requires you to know how to drive - it’s not challenging but it is hard/difficult if you have no idea how to do it. When things require abilities, resources or just rely a lot on good planning and player skill, they are difficult. Of course, the more you improve yourself, the less difficult things will be and so on - it’s a relative concept.
With that said, this change is a challenge change - it won’t make surviving any harder because, as said before, your food will be eaten much before it rots, if your production is just enough to sustain your town. What will change, however, is that it will be more challenging to keep a huge food surplus or to grow your food supplies beyond a certain point, thus increasing the challenge (but not the difficulty) of acquiring hearthlings in the long run and, perhaps - adds a bit of an extra difficulty for long winters and such.
Now, what that picture from the “Surprise Sunday” has to do with all that, then?
Turns out @Pawel_Malecki and @dunnar guessed correctly! These are cold storage containers!
Like I said, the goal of this change is not to make the game harder - it doesn’t make the game harder at all - but instead increases the challenge of keeping a huge surplus of food. It doesn’t take this capacity away from the game, however - it only adds a new layer of requirements to it rather than just ordering your Cook to pump out endless amounts of food!
For towns that produce just about the right amount of food they need to survive, this change will not be noticed. Only those players that pile up hundreds of stews, roasts and cakes will notice the dreadful effects of time! And then these new pieces of furniture will come as a solution for them.
As a matter of fact, all kinds of storage will have some effect on food spoiling time, which also serves to encourage organized, clean towns. From fastest to slowest, here’s the different ways you can influence the rotting speed of food:
- Left on the ground (Fastest)
- Stockpile
- Any container (i.e.: a chest)
- cold storage
- freezing storage (Slowest)
Better than the regular cold storage created by either the Mason or the Potter, Engineers are the only ones that can create freezing storage - the very best one for preserving things that can spoil.
The last special thing about cold and freezing storage containers is that they have their own special filters that allow you to customize their contents as you please - and only display things that CAN spoil, which means you won’t be spending precious space with things that shouldn’t be in there.
Beyond all that, there’s also one last change related to this change that will probably be very welcome to everyone:
Seeds - like tree seeds - will now last much, much longer if you bring them to storage. The reason seeds spoil in the base game (we assumed) is because they’d slowly clutter your storage with an unavoidable side-product of cutting trees and plants that you might not want (if you don’t replant them). However, this has often led to frustration when some seeds your herbalist made were forgotten somewhere - or when you forget to replant some bushes - and it all disappears. No more!
Now whenever seeds are placed on a stockpile or in storage containers, they’ll become protected from spoiling, which means that if you DO want them, you just need to reserve some space for them! 
And if you don’t want them, you can leave them out there in the wild and they’ll disappear over time as they’ve always done!
That’s it! With these new tools, you can go back to stockpiling as much food as your heart (and your tummy!) desire! 
Hopefully this will be a positive change for the long-term challenge of the survival aspect of the game, and maybe even allow for some exciting winter stories!
Thanks for reading and we’ll be back sunday with the next tease
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Cool! time to prepare rotten versions of my foods 
(also good change, since im in favor of anti-clutter )
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Well, ACE utilizes a single “generic” rotten prepared food entity (the lowest one on the first picture) for most prepared foods, similarly to how the base game utilizes the generic “rotten food basket” for all the vegetables and fruits and stuffs that go into baskets. The only specific models we made are for the different drink containers (buckets, jugs, kegs…) and for the big meat pieces (fish and steak) because the base game also has specific models for its own rotten big meat pieces (pork, poyo, poultry, etc…)
We might, over time, add a couple more varieties, maybe… Like the stew pot. We’ll see
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will the game just assume “default rotten cooked food if none is supplied code wise” ?
Yes, as long as you add ACE’s “prepared food decay mixin” to the food, just like vanilla/base-game raw foods have the food decay mixin.
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I really like this change. Some added challange beyond goblins, and other invaders is nice to have. I think it will work out well:D
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Nice! And the engineer gets more recipes 
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Greetings once more, my fellow hearthlings!
Last week we had two correct guesses for the first Surprise Sunday, so let’s see how it goes today…
For this picture, there’s actually quite a bunch of new things that you can spot, but one of them is rather specific instead of generic… Can you guess what is this Surprise Sunday all about?
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I just hope these herb bundles to the left are not lavender…
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The potion on the shelf in the back, would be my guess 
I mean, yeah, lots of new herbs, but they are in the focus of this picture, so … potion it is!
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Never really payed attention to the cauldron when my herbalist used it, but its glowing blue, and we also saw that if you want to craft the highest level fridge, you need some kind of blue potion. So these two could be together?
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Magical Essence, crafted by the herbalist, required to make refrigerators?
And a potion to maybe buff fuels?
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Well, these are all pretty good guesses
Like I’ve said, there’s actually a bunch of “new” things to spot on this picture - which means that most of these guesses are correct in a way… but the real subject of the next Preview Thursday, well…
Sometimes the obvious thing in focus is the one that matters 
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Herbalist outfit or the workbench looking thing
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I see several supply bins and everything looks nicely sorted so I’m gonna guess something to do with material storage.
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I’ll break this down into multiple pieces starting with the herbalist herself. I see that she has a different hairstyle (I think) and she definitely wearing a different outfit, the hood gives it away. I’m not sure about the cauldron but maybe there’s a new animation or craftable tonic being made by the herbalist. There’s one finished storage shelf with a tonic, so maybe there are different sizes of tonics judging by the glass there and of course the new freezer is being displayed. There’s also a table where a sapling, hearthfrost, and what looks to be a piece of meat are placed on it, so maybe it’s a serving table for organic items. Finally to address the elephant in the room, there are woven baskets with a variety of herbs being grown. I think this was teased in the April Fool’s update that for the dwarves, there would be a revamped system for growing plants underground.
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With regard to the Herbalist’s table: that’s simply an NA variant of the herbalist’s standard workbench. ACE gives every kingdom unique workbenches, it’s a subtle but really cool touch! I believe the “piece of meat” is a pinecone or a seed from some other NA-appropriate tree.
Personally, I feel like this is a teaser of the “expanded and improved herbs/potions” idea that @DaniAngione mentioned a few months back – I’m a bit fuzzy on the details but off the top of my head it was based around having different types of herbs (medicinal, ones used in flavouring/cooking, tiers of herbs so that e.g. one herb might be useless on its own but combine with 2 other types to make a stronger healing potion with an advanced recipe…) so that it’s not simply “I have one lot of flowers and now I can make all the things!” but instead requires the player to explore the locally available resources. I notice what looks like poppies, lavender, small bundles of stemming herbs (comfrey? echinacea?) and that narrow vial on the shelf immediately makes me think of apothecary bottles.
I’m pretty sure that input bins can already filter by specific herbs, but it seems like the mixtures in some of these baskets might be hinting at new herb categories too – e.g. the lavender and frostsnaps being mixed together, the yellow tulip cactus bulbs and what looks like a fox lily (?)… it just feels to me like the herbs mixed together in baskets come from the same “tier” (i.e. fox lily and tulip cactus are both harder to obtain than frostsnaps and violets and their like); if the baskets were simply set to “all herbs” then they’d all be mixed together.
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Wouter’s image upscaling skills: +10
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