I guess I"m pretty late to this thread, but i thought I might add to it since my experience is a bit different I think. Having settled at 7k on HC, I never had freezes, so I never did any food prep, nor did I have any kind of freezer. I never even found salt. So I was never doing food prep before. I always carried 4-5 vessels on me for food. two vessels were stocked with 8 sandwiches. The rest were for ingredients. I ALWAYS carried these on me. Never stored them anywhere. And I had absolutely 0 problems with decay. I'd trim the food when I got it out to make new sandwiches - it was never more than 1% decayed except fruit sometimes, and that was it. I could go on very long mining expeditions like this just fine. It would last many days, across multiple logins.
I thought there was a function that was for SMP play, that said something like 'if player logs in and has not logged in for 8+rl hours, do not apply decay to food in their inventory. So I always spaced my play times 8+ hours apart irl. I thought this was in part what was saving my food so long. This was true while i was moving my base to spawn, which was about 10 trips over many irl days, and some of those times I logged off at spawn. Not a problem. Still had the food when I logged back in.
But that no longer works. Now my food is always 100% gone when logging back in, even grains, which were basically immortal before. So something has definitely changed, and I'd say drastically. I went from having fractions of a percent of decay on my inventory vesseled unpreserved food when logging back in, to having everything gone, almost every time. I think one time I had two stacks of grain that had decayed about 50% but not disappeared yet. Has anyone looked into whether that function to not apply decay if logged of for X rl hours is still working? Or was it ever a thing, did I just imagine it?
I always thought the sky freezer thing was pretty cheesy. But, this is definitely rocking the boat a lot. We make it work where crops are immortal, but I wonder how it is in the areas where it freezes at ground level, but doesn't stay perpetually frozen in a sky freezer. I suspect a zone like that exists from maybe 8-10k or so.
Now I'm not having a problem currently, as long as I'm logged in. I do the same food strategy, and trim it every time I take it out to make new sandwiches. I think the fruit gets up to 3% or so. But even with immortal crops, it makes long mining trips where I'll probably have to log out problematic. I've been planning that if I did that I was going to take seeds and plants some crops nearby the mine, so they would be there when I logged back in. But on the new server, wandering around to find a new base is going to be rough, if it takes many irl days.
