Ice Cellar

Store ice. Keep food fresh.

A vanilla cellar bottoms out at 5°C no matter how deep you dig. Stack blocks of ice in one and it gets genuinely cold — down to -3°C with ten blocks, which roughly doubles how long your food keeps. Cellar ice finally behaves like ice in a cellar rather than ice in the summer sun: it melts slowly, and it never floods the room.

No new blocks, no new items, no new recipes. Just ice and a good cellar.

How it works

• Any ice counts — lake ice you harvested yourself, glacier ice, packed glacier ice.
• Where you put it doesn't matter — ice lining the walls, floor or ceiling counts the same as ice stacked in the middle of the room, so you can build the cellar you actually want.
• 4 blocks to start chilling, 10 blocks for the full effect.
• Your cellar still has to be a cellar. The chill scales with the room's own cellar rating, so skylights and non-cooling walls cost you exactly the way they already do in vanilla. Ice now counts as a cooling wall material, so lining a room with it no longer works against you.
• Look at any food container to see where you stand. The block info panel reports how many ice blocks it can see and how much of the chill you've earned, right above the perish-speed line the game already shows you.
• Winter is free. Ambient cold already passes through, so a cellar that's colder than the ice target is simply left alone.

Ice that lasts (and doesn't flood your cellar)

Vanilla rolls ice melting purely off the outdoor climate and replaces every melted block with a full water source — which quietly floods any cellar you stock. Here:

• Melt chance is rolled against the chilled room temperature instead, so a well-stocked cellar preserves its own ice.
• Ice still wastes away eventually — roughly one block per ~17 hours of real play time in a fully chilled cellar. Restocking is part of the deal.
• Ice melting inside an enclosed room vanishes instead of flooding it.
• Ice buried inside a wall is insulated and doesn't melt at all.
• Below 2°C outdoors the game never rolls at all, so winter preserves cellar ice completely.

Configuration

Everything is tunable in ModConfig/icecellar.json, created on first run. A restart is needed for changes to take effect.

• Enabled (default true) — master switch. Off is fully vanilla, including ice that melts back into water sources.
• MinBlocks (4) — ice blocks needed before any chill applies.
• FullBlocks (10) — ice blocks for the full effect.
• Temp (-3) — effective cellar temperature at full effect.
• MinMeltChance (0.01) — floor on the melt roll. Set it to 0 if you want fully chilled cellar ice to last forever.

Compatibility

Safe to add to an existing world and safe to remove again — there is nothing of this mod's saved in your world, so uninstalling simply returns your cellars to vanilla behaviour. Works in singleplayer and on servers; on a server the server's config is the one that counts.

This mechanic also ships inside The Seraph's Ledger, my bundle of small tweaks. Running both is safe — Seraph's Ledger 1.15.1 and newer detects this mod and hands the feature over, so nothing is applied twice. If you run an older Seraph's Ledger alongside this, just switch its ice-cooled cellars feature off.

 

** This mod should be compatible with the mod: Ice is Cellar.