Hunger



One of the new aspects of the game added in the Adventure Update is the Food Bar, which governs several aspects of gameplay. Eating food, instead of directly restoring the player's Health, now fills up the Food Bar, which is constantly draining very, very slowly.

If the Food Bar is 90%-100% full you slowly regenerate health, but if you let it drain all the way to 0%, you constantly lose half a heart instead, as you are starving to death. On Easy difficulty, the player's health stops dropping at 5 hearts, Normal stops at 1/2 a heart, and on Hard it keeps draining until you die. .

Contrary to popular belief, having a full Food Bar does not keep your health bar from completely depleting.

While the player is sprinting, the Food Bar will deplete much faster, and they will be unable to sprint at all once the bar falls to 30% or less.

The Food Bar does not drain when playing on Peaceful mode, but its effects on your character's health bar remain.

When you eat Rotten Flesh, your Food Bar gets poisoned and depletes faster. There is also a fairly high chance of your food bar poisoning every time you eat Raw Chicken.

Bugs
Sometimes the Food Bar will stop depleting. This may be due to a glitch with the new food items. Alternatively, there could be a period after eating when the player is not hungry (as they just ate) and the food bar doesn't drain. Evidence of this theory is that whilst the food bar is depleting, the bar will vibrate slightly as a visual sign of it's depletion, however after the player has eaten a food item it seems to stop vibrating for a period of time, which could indicate that it is part of the planned hunger system to give the effect of being full after eating, and to give the player some time to relax and do other things before they have go and search for or eat more food, and after this period the bar will begin to vibrate and deplete again. However, this is just a theory and it may just be due to a bug.