Keeping warm in winter

Winter isn't something you have to get through alone or all at once, but a little getting ready goes a long way. The main things are a coat, a roof, a fire you don't have to keep feeding by hand, and something hot to drink.

Firewood#

Any stump makes a chopping block. With an axe and a log in your pack, tap the stump and choose Split firewood, and the log comes apart into 4 sticks of stovewood. Each one burns 2 min, against 5 min for a whole log, so splitting is worth the trouble. It's Woodcutting work and it trains Woodcutting a little.

The woodpile#

A woodpile is a yard piece: two posts and a strip of bark over the top, with room for 160 firewood. You can split logs right at it and the wood goes straight onto the pile. Put one within 4.5 m of a cookstove and the stove feeds itself from it, a stick at a time, whenever it's lit and getting low. So in winter you light the stove once and keep the pile topped up.

A stove, or any fire under a roof, only burns while somebody's within 12 m of it. An empty house uses no wood, so you never come back from a few days away to find the pile burned down to nothing.

A warm house#

Once the cold comes on, a roof on its own doesn't keep it all out. A lit fire or stove in a closed room warms the whole room, not just the few paces round it. A room is closed if you can't walk out of it without passing a wall, a window or a door.

How tight the house is also decides how hard the stove works. In a bare shell of walls a stove burns up to 60% more wood in the cold months, and in a finished house (round logs, chinked, with trim and shutters) it burns no extra at all. A cookstove holds 2 h of fuel at most.

Hot drinks#

Pick spruce tips off a spruce or a pine (no tools needed), then at a lit fire steep 2 of them in a drink of water. That makes 2 cups of spruce tea. For 5 min after you drink one the cold gets at you 40% less. It stacks with a hearty meal and with warm clothes.

Snowshoes#

Deep snow slows you down off the paths, to about 70% of your pace once it's lying thick. Paving, a bridge, packed trails and anywhere under a roof are clear. A pair of snowshoes in your pack keeps you up on top of it at 97%. You bend them at a fire from 6 sticks and 1 hide, and you need Crafting 2.

Split a few logs onto a woodpile beside your stove before the snow comes. It's the one bit of getting ready that makes the biggest difference.