Yeah, I think it might be as much as a day of aging, which is really noticeable if you're carrying 30 berries in and then out. Shit went from like >50% left to rotted on a short excursion (2 days of travel + 2 trips in the wormhole). I'm kinda rethinking food management in general, though. I thought winter was gonna be 20 days, but it's 16 days, and the first several and last several are mild. Honestly, I've just been overly focused on food (I think the 10 traps near 3 ponds + fishing of renton's post got me thinking that you need to stockpile like fucking crazy), whereas it looks like probably just having like 5 meatballs + 10 small jerky + 10 jerky + a little bit of rabbit murder with some found food to make some extra sustenance is probably fine. Or am I crazy?

After that, I think it's mostly warmth, self defense, healing salves, etc that should be the focus. At least for the first winter.

I'm also kinda completely retooling the way I handle food aging. I think it's worth having two stacks of each for berries and carrots (one at camp, one on hand) so that I can use the older one for crock pot fillers and have the fresher ones for backup. Keeping one stack of each just makes it so that I either have to let a ton of shit rot, or I have to frantically pick to freshen the stack (but make it so I have more to get rid of) and frantically cook, which only displaces the problem to a prematurely aging meatball stack. Again, all of this frantic shit takes time away from harvesting silk and healing salves and shit.

Also, so long as you burn down a big forest, drying racks are ass cheap, and I could probably make 5+ of them and focus on drying all my rabbit/beefalo meat and only use the crock pot for monster meat.

Basically, I got too carried away with all the "optimality" of having a lot of food on hand without having it go bad, but shit changes too much to really do that. I especially didn't account for how much monster meat you end up with for crock potting.