Survival
Cold, Wind and Rain
The weather does not slow you down or take the controls away. It makes you hungry faster — and that is how the island kills you. What each kind of bad day costs, and the four places you can stand.
All of this is built and running. The one part missing is clothes — there is no wool in the world yet, so the four slots for them stay empty. See also Weather for where the weather comes from, and Food, Health and Berries for the bars it spends.
The whole idea, in one sentence
Bad weather never slows you down. It makes you hungry faster.
That is the entire mechanic, and it was chosen on purpose. This is a game about building things, so the weather is not allowed to freeze you in place, blur your screen, or take the controls off you. It does exactly one thing: the food bar falls faster.
And because running out of food is the only way to die here, that is enough. Every death in this game is a hunger death, and the weather is what brings it on early.
🎯 haugur put it better than the design did: "if you have to stay out in a storm and cold conditions, you can survive but you better have food in your inventory to keep that health up. You work at the same speed but no food you die. That's true survival and every Icelander knows it."
The third gauge
Beside your health and food bars there is a third instrument — a needle rather than a bar. That is the weather, and how much it is costing you.
It reads from comfortable down to as bad as it gets, and it moves in steps rather than smoothly, so you can tell one position from another at a glance. When something is biting, the screen also names it in words.
The warm end of the gauge is drawn and you will never reach it. Nothing in Iceland makes you too hot.
Three things can bite you
| When | What it costs | |
|---|---|---|
| 🥶 Cold | Only below freezing. Not a chilly day — actual frost | The most |
| 💨 Wind | Above about 10 m/s — a properly windy day, not an ordinary one | The same as cold |
| 🌧️ Wet | Whenever it is raining on you and there is no roof over your head | Half of what wind costs |
They add up. Nothing cancels anything: a freezing, windy, wet day charges you for all three at once.
Why cold only starts at freezing
Iceland averages about 5 °C. If cold began at 5 °C you would be cold for half the year — and with no wool, no clothes and nowhere warm, there would be nothing you could do about it. A punishment you cannot answer is not a mechanic, it is just weather that hurts.
So it starts at frost. When there is wool to wear and a fire to sit by, that line can move up.
Why rain costs the same in July as in January
Because that is what makes an ordinary wet Icelandic afternoon dangerous.
Cold does not start until it freezes, so before rain had a price, +4 °C and pouring cost you nothing at all — which is not the country anyone here lives in. Now it costs something all year round.
What a bad day actually costs
Food normally empties in about an hour.
| Where you are, in the worst weather | A full food bar lasts |
|---|---|
| Out in the open, freezing, blowing and raining | about 22 minutes |
| In the lee of a wall, same weather | about 29 minutes |
| Indoors, no fire | about 51 minutes |
| Indoors with a lit hearth | the full hour — nothing bites at all |
That is the ladder, and it is worth learning, because it is the difference between a January trip that works and one that does not.
The four places you can stand
① Open ground — you pay for everything
Nothing over you and nothing beside you. Cold, wind and rain all charge you.
② The lee of a wall — the wind stops
Stand on the sheltered side of a wall, a rock face or a bank and the wind stops costing you. It is a real and useful difference, and it is often all you need.
⚠️ It does nothing about the cold, and nothing about the rain. A wall keeps the wind off you; it does not keep the sky off you. That is exactly what standing behind a wall in Iceland is like.
③ Indoors — the wind and the rain stop, and the cold mostly does
Get under a roof, with walls around you, and the wind and rain both stop. The cold is cut right down but not to nothing — a turf house with no fire in it is still a cold house.
The game decides you are indoors by looking for open sky: if you cannot find your way out to it within about eight metres of where you stand, you are inside.
④ Indoors with a fire — nothing bites
Light a hearth in a room and the weather stops costing you anything at all. This is the top of the ladder and the only place the gauge reads comfortable in a storm.
⚠️ It has to be a room, and it has to be YOUR room. A fire under open sky is a campfire in a gale and changes nothing. A fire on the other side of a wall is not in the room you are standing in, and changes nothing either.
🏠 This is what the turf houses are for. A býtibúr, a skemma or a smiðja with a lit hearth inside it is the warmest place in the game — and the hearth you light is also where you wake up if you die. See Making Things.
What is not built yet
⬜ Clothes. The four slots under your hands — cap, jumper, trousers, shoes — are real and empty. There is no wool.
When wool arrives, clothing will reduce what the weather costs and it will never cancel it. That was decided deliberately and against how Minecraft does it, where a single piece of leather armour switches freezing off outright.
"Wool buys you an hour" is the honest version of Iceland. "Wool solves winter" is not.
⬜ Snow lying on the ground. The records know how deep it was and the game does not show it yet.
Two honest notes
These numbers are guesses that got tested, not laws. How hard a bad day should be was chosen as a feeling — how fast should the worst hour become? — and every one of them can move. If a December out on the lava turns out to be miserable rather than tense, the numbers are wrong and they will change.
Blíða will not exempt you. When the fair-weather mode arrives it will not switch this off; it pins the weather to a good day, and a good day costs nothing anyway. There is one set of rules and everybody is inside it.
