Hunger is a feature in Minecraft that requires the player to eat in order to survive. It does not affect the player in spectator or creative modes, or on Peaceful difficulty on any gamemode, and is represented by a bar next to the health bar. As this bar drains away, various unpleasant things happen:
There is also a hidden, secondary form of hunger called "saturation", which is always exhausted before hunger. Eating food will replenish various amounts of both hunger and saturation. The depletion of saturation and hunger is managed by way of another hidden variable called "exhaustion". This variable allows accumulating small fractional costs until either the saturation or hunger gauge can be reduced by a full point. Conserving energy[]Several techniques can reduce your need for food:
Effects of hunger[]There are three hunger variables you need to worry about: The visible hunger bar, and two hidden values which are called "saturation" and "exhaustion". Hunger and saturation range from 0 to 20 (hunger is shown as ), but saturation cannot exceed your hunger (for example, if you have 17 ( × 8.5) hunger, you can have at most 17 saturation). Exhaustion ranges from 0 to 4. As you move about, fight, mine, etc, exhaustion accumulates. In order, common activities that will exhaust you the most are: Healing damage (most of a food point per health point), a "sprint jump", sprinting any distance, attacking monsters or receiving damage (from any source), and jumping. More specific values can be found in the table.
When exhaustion reaches 4, it resets to 0, and saturation decreases by 1. When saturation reaches 0, the hunger bar will start to visibly ripple, and hunger starts to drain away in place of saturation. (As a result, a way to visualize saturation is to think of it as an "extra hunger bar" above your hunger bar, that gets deducted before hunger at the same speed.) When your hunger drops below 18 ( × 9), you stop healing automatically. When it is at 6 () or below, you will be unable to sprint. Also, when your hunger drops to 0 (), you start to take starvation damage. On Easy mode, starvation damage will not lower you below 10, while on Normal mode, it can reduce you to 1. On Hard mode, starvation can kill you. While eating is essential to keep your health up, it is not always needed. On Easy and Normal modes, the health bar will stop decreasing before death, so if the player takes care not to take any further damage, they can continue playing normally. Obviously, this is much riskier in multiplayer servers with PvP (player vs player), as well as adventuring. With the exception of golden apples, chorus fruits, honey bottles and suspicious stew, you cannot eat when your hunger is at max; when you do eat, each food item restores a specific amount of hunger and saturation. The following section will elaborate on the strategies on effective management of both hunger and saturation. Food[]Food are a specific type of items that can be eaten by pressing the "use" button, when your hunger bar is not at maximum. Food restores both the hunger bar and saturation, with different foods filling different amounts of each. You can obtain food through crafting, trading, searching naturally generated chests, farming, and killing mobs. Many foods can be cooked (smelted) for better effect. Burning mobs is an easier method to obtain meat without the need of cooking. Foods can be divided into five tiers, according to how much saturation they restore per hunger unit. They are known as nourishment values, and the saturation one gets from any food is defined as nourishment times hunger. Knowing this, there are roughly two ways to approach the issue of hunger and saturation. Players can either try to eat efficiently, meaning using as little food items as possible, or try to eat expediently, meaning to stave off hunger as fast as they can. The efficiency approach requires the player to avoid wasting hunger or saturation. Meaning, never eat any food that would "overfill" the hunger bar, avoiding to waste saturation points by going over the limit (the hunger value after consuming the food). By doing this, one will use every piece of food to its maximum potential. However, one needs to use more time to tend to their hunger bar, and remember the current saturation value. Therefore, this is ill-suited for healing in emergencies, and should probably be done when safe and/or low on foodstuff. The expediency approach, on the other hand, doesn't mind wasting a bit of the food here and there: Eat the most filling and nourishing food until full, and be done with it. If food supply is not an issue, if the player requires imminent healing, or if the player simply wants to save time, this is an appealing option. A few foods also have special effects, mostly bad. While the golden apple can heal you, other foods can poison you (losing hit points), or give you food poisoning (draining your hunger bar). For these, there is milk, obtained by using a bucket on a cow. While milk doesn't restore hunger or saturation, it does wipe away any status effects that the player currently has, so use it carefully. Another option are honey bottles, which only remove poison, and do have some food value. Supernatural[]Crafted with gold, these have a nourishment of 2.4. Enchanted golden apple Restores Advantages:
Cooked food[]These have a nourishment of 1.6 — the most nourishing of the ordinary foods. Steak and cooked porkchop Restores Advantages:
Normal[]These have a nourishment of 1.2 — the staple foods, cheap and fairly nourishing. Baked potato Restores Advantages:
Low[]These have a nourishment of 0.6, these are useful for achieving a full bar of both hunger and saturation when the current hunger bar is almost empty, if eaten with foods of higher tier of nourishment. Apple Restores Advantages: Disadvantages:
Poor[]With a nourishment value of 0.2, these foods will provide almost no saturation. They are basically snacks that will rarely ever overfill the saturation bar.
Emergency measures[]If your hunger meter is dropping and you have no food in hand, there are a few emergency measures you can take, depending on available resources. Milk If you have a bucket and a cow, mooshroom or goat milk them. The milk will let you fill up on rotten flesh, raw chicken, spider eyes, or poisonous potatoes, and then cure the illness. Fast crops If you have any potatoes or carrots, and some bone meal (craft 3 from one skeleton bone, or get from composter), you can make a hoe and till some dirt near any water source, then plant your vegetables and use the bone meal to make them mature more quickly. It can take several pieces of bone meal to get a mature plant. Cooking the potatoes will make them much more filling. If you have the bone meal but no carrots or potatoes, you can destroy some tall grass near a river or lake, make and use a hoe, then plant seeds and use the bone meal to rapidly grow your wheat. The same caveats as above apply to the use of bone meal. Doing nothing You won't lose hunger if you don't do anything (walking, mining, healing, etc.). In hardcore especially, this can be a necessary strategy while waiting for crops or baby animals to grow. Death A last-ditch measure: If you're close to your bed or spawn point, stuff your inventory and armor into a chest or two … then die. On hard mode, you can just wait to die of starvation, otherwise, good methods are drowning, jumping off cliffs, or dropping gravel or sand on yourself. You will respawn with full health and hunger bars, and can then reclaim your stuff. Naturally, this method doesn't apply in hardcore. Note that this isn't a totally free solution: you lose most of your experience.Video[]
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