On Refrigeration and Bags of Holding

[Civis Mundi]

I've been putting way too much thought into something in the effort to optimize a master chef, and I wanted to know what the playground thinks.

I've been trying my best to figure out how to create a refrigerator in D&D by RAW, without resorting to something like Matt Mercer's Bag of Colding. And I think I've got it figured out, but it relies on some grey areas.

The text of a Bag of Holding reads: "Breathing creatures inside the bag can survive up to a number of minutes equal to 10 divided by the number of creatures (minimum 1 minute), after which time they begin to suffocate."

While the bag's interior is implied to be a closed vacuum isolated from outside forces, it does specifically contain this pocket of air. However, we also know that air is finite.

So my plan is this:


Put a bunch of ice in the bag of holding.
Put whatever food you want to store inside it too.
Put an animal into the bag and close it behind them. We could use a familiar to avoid anything but metaphysical animal cruelty, but that gets expensive. I wish I could just drop a torch in there, but the rules specify that while magical items are resistant to damage, only artifacts tend to be immune. Thus, it could easily be interpreted that a lit torch would burn the bag before it would de-oxygenate.
The animal/familiar suffocates inside the bag, using up all the air and turning the interior into a chilled, de-oxygenated space.
So long as the bag remains closed, anything inside will be effectively refrigerated, if not freeze-dried.
Unfortunately, each time we want to put more food into the bag of holding to preserve it, we let more air in, requiring the sacrifice of another poor creature to de-oxygenate the bag. The best way to do this is probably to simply drop in an animal you later plan to butcher and cook.


Does this check out? If not, how would you create a magical refrigerator?

[Spriteless]

Wouldn't the creature just appear 5 feet away from the bag as soon as it wanted out, or is that just portable holes? If not, then you could just tie a string to the critter and pull it out once it runs out of air.

In Eberron 3.5, there is a barrel of preservation. It is sold to restaurants, by a dummy company set up by a religion that includes vampires, umm...

I would just ask to home rule that item in.

Or I would get Purify Food and Drink into the healer's ritual book, and have them cast it every 3 days or so.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I mean sacrificing small animals for the sake of refrigeration is surely gonna shove your master chef into the lower section of the alignment pool.

[MaxWilson]

The animal/familiar suffocates inside the bag, using up all the air and turning the interior into a chilled, de-oxygenated space.


No, this doesn't work. Respiration doesn't turn oxygen into chilly carbon dioxide--if anything it turns into _warmer_ carbon dioxide than the oxygen originally was.

Skip the animal and just fill your bag of holding with ice. Vacuum is a perfect insulator, so presumably extradimensional space should be too--there's nothing that can add heat, so your stuff should stay as cold on average as it always was, except for whatever heat comes through the opening of the bag. Keep the bag itself in a cooler (and maybe Prestidigitation it to be cool every hour, and/or make more ice via Shape Water if your DM rules that ice it creates is cold) and you're effectively keeping the whole freezer in an cooler. With enough ice that could keep an lot of stuff cool for a long time.

[C-Dude]

You could cool it like an actual refrigerator or air conditioner would.

Consider a portable gnomish window AC unit. You stick it halfway into the bag and activate the compressor. The refrigerant sucks any heat out of the bag as its low-pressure gas condenses, and then emits that heat out of the bag when reverting to gas.

Of course, when this device is first made its creator would need to summon a Chlorine, a Fluoride, and a Carbon elemental to get the gas, but once in the device it should be self-sustaining as long as it has fuel to run the compressor.

[ftafp]

Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a chest of preserving, but I know that defeats the point of the exercise. What you need is a system that can spam Gentle Repose repeatedly on the the contents, but that would take some digging to figure out how to implement. In the mean time it would be better to use it as a gentle repose icebox instead of a gentle repose refrigerator

As a side note, drawing a vacuum won't preserve your food, there are plenty of anaerobic germs that can thrive in an airless environment, the worst being Botulism. In addition, drawing a vacuum can have differing effects on the contents depending on how strong a vacuum you draw and whether or not there's a rigid frame in place to prevent the bag from collapsing. In the former case, many kinds of fruit, particularly melons experience massive textural changes when compressed, taking on a consistency similar to raw tuna. If however, you have a rigid frame, foam-like foods such as marshmallows will balloon in size. liquids such as soup, broth, milk or wine will boil down to a sludge if not contained, and if they are contained said container will likely rupture with similar results.

[Tanarii]

I mean sacrificing small animals for the sake of refrigeration is surely gonna shove your master chef into the lower section of the alignment pool.
Use a chicken. Even angels approve of chicken nuggets.

[ftafp]

Use a chicken. Even angels approve of chicken nuggets.

Tanarii, we are finally living in a world where chicken nuggets can be 3d-printed from cell cultures. Please stop trying to set humanity back.

[Tanarii]

Tanarii, we are finally living in a world where chicken nuggets can be 3d-printed from cell cultures. Please stop trying to set humanity back.
Speaking of things that land people in the lower planes.
(I kid, totes will eat not-chicken ink-nuggets)

[Civis Mundi]

Skip the animal and just fill your bag of holding with ice. Vacuum is a perfect insulator, so presumably extradimensional space should be too--there's nothing that can add heat, so your stuff should stay as cold on average as it always was, except for whatever heat comes through the opening of the bag. Keep the bag itself in a cooler (and maybe Prestidigitation it to be cool every hour, and/or make more ice via Shape Water if your DM rules that ice it creates is cold) and you're effectively keeping the whole freezer in an cooler. With enough ice that could keep an lot of stuff cool for a long time.

I'm much happier just tossing ice in there and calling it a day, and I'm glad that should work. Using shape water to keep the cooler in a cooler is a nice touch as well, thank you. I'm glad the bag of colding doesn't require horrible animal murder. I didn't need my master chef to be good (there's many a real-world chef on that side of the alignment scale!), but it's nice that being a monster isn't a literal requirement.