Hunger is a feature in Minecraft's survival mode, requiring the player to eat in order to survive. It does not affect the player in Spectator or Creative modes. On Peaceful difficulty, hunger drain is disabled. Hunger levels are represented by a meat bar (similar to a stamina bar) next to the health bar. As this bar drains away, various unpleasant things happen:
In Java Edition, if the player's hunger bar is completely filled and they have left over saturation, this saturation gets drained, healing at a rate of 2HP👁 ❤️ every second. Just as with the hunger-based regeneration, every 1HP👁 💔 regenerated deducts 1.5 saturation. With the maximum amount of 20 saturation, the player can rapidly regenerate up to 13HP👁 ❤️ × 6.5.
You start taking starvation damage at 0 (👁 🦴 ). The rate at which you take this damage is dependent on difficulty. However, reaching zero health is only possible on Hard and Hardcore difficulties.
A hidden, secondary form of hunger called "saturation" is always exhausted before hunger drain. Eating food will replenish various amounts of both hunger and saturation.
The depletion of saturation and hunger is managed by another hidden variable called "exhaustion". This variable accounts for stamina costs until either the saturation or hunger gauge can be reduced by a full point.
The most important tip is to avoid taking damage. Natural health regeneration uses far more hunger points than almost anything else. This includes all types of damage like combat, falls, fire, poison, drowning, etc.
Armor will sharply reduce damage taken from most causes. Full diamond and netherite armor reduce damage you incur up to 80%.
Using more powerful weapons also shorten fights by killing things faster, leaving them fewer chances to hit you. Likewise, ranged weapons allow you kill most mobs from a safer distance.
Especially avoid poison. Common enemies with poison are cave spiders and witches. If poisoned, cure it quickly otherwise the poison can take a lot of health points.
Avoid fighting when you can -- 60 blows either way costs as much as healing a point of damage. Taking falling damage does count as a blow.
Avoiding monsters and using a bed at night are the main things here.
Reduce jumping. While mining, carry some cobblestone or logs, and, whenever possible, craft and place stairs, slabs or ladders instead of jumping. 120 jumps cost as much as healing one point of damage.
Avoid sprinting, as it rapidly depletes your hunger bar. Jumping while sprinting is especially energy consuming. Sprinting 60 meters costs as much as healing one point of damage.
Jumping costs four times as much hunger if you are also sprinting, so 30 sprint-jumps equal healing one point of damage. If you must jump, jump while walking.
Sprint-jumping is a more hunger-efficient method of transportation on even ground than standard sprinting. When going uphill, it will likely be worthwhile to not sprint at all: sprint-jumping is most hunger-efficient for horizontal or downhill travel.
While crossing deep water, using a boat or making bridges are faster than swimming and does not deplete the hunger bar. Swimming 600 meters costs as much as healing one point of damage.
Normal walking does not increase exhaustion or deplete the hunger bar at all.
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).
For players who want to see these hidden hunger mechanics in-game, the AppleSkin client-side HUD mod can display food, saturation, and exhaustion information that is normally hidden.
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.
full 0:15 duration of Hunger III, at 0.3 per second
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" invisible above your hunger bar, that's reduced before hunger at the same speed.
When your hunger drops below 18 (👁 🍗 × 9), you stop naturally healing. Then 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 10HP👁 ❤️ 👁 ❤️ 👁 ❤️ 👁 ❤️ 👁 ❤️ , while on Normal mode, it can reduce you to 1HP👁 💔 . On Hard mode, starvation can kill you.
Eating is essential to keep your health up, but it is not always needed. On Easy and Normal modes, the health bar will stop decreasing before death. If you are careful and do not take any further damage, then you can continue playing normally. Obviously, this is much riskier in multiplayer servers with PvP (player versus player), as well as adventuring.
Food is a specific type of item 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. Different types of food fill 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 (e.g. flint and steel) is an easier method to obtain meat without the need of cooking.
Food 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, then, 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 bucket, obtained by using a bucket on a cow. While milk doesn't restore hunger or saturation, it does remove any status effects that the player currently has, so use it carefully. Another option are honey bottles, which only remove poison, do have some food value and are stackable up to 16.
Very rare and not renewable after the 1.9 Combat Update (except through a glitch involving ominous vaults, but that requires a lot of players to collaborate).
Cause temporary constant health regeneration that is not dependent on the player's hunger.
The rate of regeneration is faster than the natural health regeneration in Bedrock Edition and before Java Edition 1.9, making them useful in combat and emergency situations.
Restore 9.6 saturation, a large amount considering their low hunger restoration.
They can be eaten while the hunger bar is full, which means the player can maintain a high level of saturation (and the natural regeneration it offers) without being only able to eat until the hunger bar starts draining.
Disadvantages:
Require 8 👁 Image gold ingots to be crafted, meaning that they are too expensive to be an efficient food source in Survival mode, unless with an efficient gold (zombified piglin) farm
Though cheaper than golden apples, they still need gold nuggets to be crafted.
The trading offer is 3 golden carrots for 3 emeralds, which might be expensive, though the price can be lowered with zombification and curing, or the 👁 Image Hero of the Village effect.
Their availability is dependent on the presence of animals within sight, which can be random and require extensive traveling depending on the biome the player spawns in.
At least two animals of a type must be found to breed them for a reliable supply of meat.
Sheep can also be killed while on fire to get cooked mutton directly.
Disadvantages:
Their availability is dependent on the presence of animals within sight, which can be random and require extensive traveling depending on the biome the player spawns in.
Similarly, to beef and pork, at least two sheep must be found to breed them for a reliable supply of mutton.
Salmon cannot be bred, so the player has to hunt for them every time they need food, not to mention salmon are agile and hard to hit.
Since salmon are aquatic mobs, it's almost impossible to kill them with fire to get cooked salmon directly, unless the player has a Fire Aspect sword.
One of the easiest foods to obtain early in the game.
Piles of 👁 Image hay bales commonly generate around plains, desert, and savanna 👁 Image villages and can easily be converted into an ample supply of bread.
Disadvantages:
Growing wheat takes time. Three 👁 Image pieces are required per bread loaf.
Each wheat plant only yields a single piece of wheat, while 👁 Image carrot and 👁 Image potato plants each yield one to four carrots or potatoes.
Chickens can be bred with any of several kinds of 👁 Image seeds, and their eggs make breeding with seeds optional.
Only a single chicken is needed to start a chicken farm; the eggs can be collected until more chickens spawn (which can then be bred with seeds).
Because of eggs, cooked chicken can be farmed completely automatically, while farming other animals requires the player to feed them their breeding foods.
Disadvantages:
Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than cooked chicken.
Eggs hatch into baby chickens, which need time to grow before they can lay more eggs or be killed for meat.
Like other stews, mushroom stew does not stack, so crafting a lot of stew at once takes up a lot of inventory space. Though this can be avoided by storing all the ingredients and the bowl in a bundle, and only crafting the amount you need.
A bowl of stew requires both types of mushrooms, which is bad news if you only have one type.
Mycelium, podzol and nylium aren't easy to find, the first two found in rare biomes, the third only found in 👁 Image the Nether.
Even if these blocks are found, the player can't obtain them without Silk Touch.
A bowl of rabbit stew restores less hunger and saturation than all of its ingredients combined.
Crafting rabbit stew requires a crafting table. The bowl can be crafted easily (and is reusable), but each of the four other ingredients needs to be separately found and perhaps farmed.
The ingredients can be somewhat difficult to find, especially the cooked rabbit, as the rabbit only spawns in some specific biomes. You're better off buying it from a villager
It's equivalent to a 👁 Image mushroom stew, but with an extra status effect depending on the flower used. Even with the flower, it can still be crafted in the player's inventory.
When crafted with 👁 Image blue orchid or 👁 Image dandelion, suspicious stew grants the effect 👁 Image Saturation for 7[JE only]/6[BE only] ticks (0.35/0.3 seconds), meaning an additional 7 (👁 🍖 👁 🍗 👁 🍗 👁 🍗 ) hunger and 14 saturation, for a total of 13 (👁 🍗 × 6.5) hunger and 21.2 saturation. While some of the saturation will likely be wasted, especially if the player was too hungry to begin with, the stew will at least raise the saturation to match the hunger gauge.
As long as the player has 7 (👁 🍖 👁 🍗 👁 🍗 👁 🍗 ) hunger, eating a single bowl of saturation suspicious stew will raise both hunger and saturation to full.
Remembering the correct flower for the recipe is very important, accidentally eating a blindness stew while near a lava pool or cliff is a recipe for disaster.
Once a suspicious stew is crafted, there is no indication to the nature of its effect. This also applies to stew purchased from villagers.
The above points make it risky to eat any suspicious stew that you didn't craft yourself, thus its name.
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.
Can teleport the player to otherwise inaccessible locations, such as nearby unexplored caves or inside an enclosed structure.
Can teleport a falling player to the ground, saving them from a fatal fall.
Disadvantages:
The teleportation is random.
Has a cooldown of 1 second before it can be eaten again.
Only obtainable end-game.
Aside from being broken by hand, 👁 Image Chorus flowers have to be manually broken or shot with a projectile, which can be rather tedious for players with bad aim.
Each 👁 Image melon block drops 3-7 melon slices, so you can quickly get a lot in only one harvest.
👁 Image Melon blocks generate frequently in all 👁 Image jungle biomes, this makes them an abundant early game food if the player happens to spawn in one
The availability of raw meat is dependent on the presence of animal mobs.
Raw meat offers significantly less food value than cooked meat.
Restores only 1.8 saturation.
Killing hoglins isn't the best option unless it's a Nether survival, because they are hostile and are quite hard hitting, especially for unprepared players.
Raw rabbit is inaccessible if you're not in a biomes where rabbits spawn
Chickens are easily killed, as they have only 4HP👁 ❤️ 👁 ❤️ health, making obtaining raw chicken both time effective, and food/saturation effective.
Supplies of raw chicken are easier to maintain, as chickens also drop 👁 Image eggs which can be hatched into chicks for mass production of raw chicken rather than being dependent on 👁 Image wheat seeds or 👁 Image wheat for breeding.
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.
Easily obtained, either when fighting zombies, or after they burn in the sun.
Rotten flesh can be a good emergency food when no better food is available: If many pieces are eaten at once, the 👁 Image Hunger effect do not stack up, instead it will last only 30 seconds from the last piece eaten, and consume less hunger than granted by a single piece of rotten flesh. Accordingly, eating multiple pieces of rotten flesh will still leave the player less hungry and perhaps allow some healing.
In combat, eating rotten flesh is a good way of keeping your hunger topped off so that your health keeps regenerating, without wasting better quality food.
Rotten flesh can be used to feed and breed 👁 Image wolves without poisoning them.
Disadvantages:
Has an 80% chance to trigger 👁 Image Hunger, depleting the hunger for thirty seconds.
Only restores 0.8 saturation.
Venturing underground or into the night for rotten flesh may be dangerous for unskilled or undergeared players.
If you have any potatoes or carrots, and some bone meal (craft 3 from one skeletonbone, 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 short grass near a river or lake, make and use a hoe, then plant wheat 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.
