Storing food outside

[RIchAsissts]

I'm getting a really long decay time on the fresh meats that I am storing outside. My questions are should I be storing all food items outside like coffee, tea, crackers and what about medication? Will they have a longer decay time outside? Also does meat and other food items decay at the same rate placed on the ground outside as storing in a dead corpse outside? At the minute I'm storing all meat in 3 body's around my home base and its lasting for along time. What do you guys do?

this is on stalker mode

thanks for any advice and input 

[Scyzara]

Hi @RIchAsissts,

As a rule of thumb most kinds of food items deteriorate slower if stored outdoors. One exception from this rule is (or at least was in V.328) soda which had a way faster deterioration rate outside than inside. But for all kinds of meat and fish (both raw and cooked) as well as for almost all other premade food, outdoor storage is very advisable indeed. It doesn't matter whether you store items on the floor or in a container outdoors (yes, corpses do count as containers for the game^^), the outdoor decay rates are always the same. 

I for one live in the Mountaineer's hut and use both the hatch inside the hut (which counts as an outdoor container) and the drawers in the nearby fishing hut to store most of my meat and fish. Canned food (including tins of coffee/packages of tea) and medicine I just place on the shelves inside the hut. But I'm mainly doing this for reasons of decoration to be honest. The most "efficient" way to store your food items is certainly to have a look at their current condition as well as the item type's decay rates (@Drifter Man did a great job to evaluate these rates in his 1000 days in the dam thread) and distribute everything accordingly (or eat it up if necessary).

I wouldn't advise you to leave behind greater amounts of canned food for more than 2 months, though. Quite a lot of my food (and all of my soda cans) spoiled inside my base while I was discovering other maps which was a bit of a pitty. I guess it's better to rather try to eat up most canned food (exceptions are e.g. MREs and crackers) fairly fast if you're planning world exploration trips or favor a nomadic playstyle.