Talk:Tutorials/Hunger management

This page is pointless. It tells nothing but how much the different food fills the hunger bar and does not even take any energy into consideration. Could someone please copy any unique information from this page to the Hunger page and delete this page. 206.180.152.247 07:13, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

Draft article
Agree that the article as-is does next to nothing to live up to its title. But there are some tips on how to manage hunger that could be added. Having played a lot of hardcore superflat recently, I have some insights into this, so some notes follow. I may add these into the article later depending on whether they take shape enough. If not, deletion might be reasonable.

Hunger Management (draft, comments welcome)

Hunger management is only necessary when you have limited food supplies, which generally means very early on in the game. Once you have more than about half a stack of any food item, hunger management becomes no more than a minor part of your playing style.

The most extreme case for hunger management is when playing in hardcore superflat with structures turned off. In this environment, you have only raw food, you cannot farm wheat, and you are constantly beset by monsters, particularly slimes. In this case hunger management is critical to your survival.

Four common activities deplete your hunger bar at an increased rate: fighting, digging, jumping and sprinting. (See Exhaustion levels for a full list of the activities that deplete your food reserves.) Note from that table that sprinting is ten times as costly as merely walking, and every combat attack is thirty times as expensive. This means fighting too many slimes, digging too ambitious a pit trap to catch mobs in, having to flee too many times, or building terrain that requires you to do too much jumping (and you can't craft steps in this environment) are all activities that will noticeably deplete your reserves. It's particularly important to note that demolishing your own structures counts as digging too - in fact it usually a double penalty, because you'll generally have dug up the blocks concerned once already.

Fighting slimes is a bigger problem than fighting other monsters because they split into sub-monsters than must be fought in turn. That makes fending them off more draining than normal.

However, even in this setting, there is still one farmable mob - chickens - which lay eggs, which you can collect, and make into more chickens without having to kill off the parent animals.

Spider eyes and rotten meat are also edible, but like raw chicken meat, these food types give varying risks of food poisoning. That means you should plan to eat these items only when you are somewhere safe, so that you can recover from poisoning, and in order to recover you should have enough food to bring yourself up to at least 9/10 of full so that you are capable of healing. In particular, you should never eat spider eyes singly because that will cost more food than you gain. The best way to use these items is to eat them expecting to be poisoned, consume several of them at once to bring your food bar up to nearly full, then wait for the poisoning to wear off. Once recovered, you can then use a safe food type, such as pork, beef, fish or cooked chicken, to 'top up' to 9/10 full or more, and then heal any damage you may have suffered. This method works because you can only be poisoned once even if you eat multiple poisonous items at the same time.

Hence a successful long-term game under these, the most extreme difficulty settings, tends to become a chicken-farming exercise. (Or as a possible, slightly harder alternative you can specialise in collecting zombie meat and possibly spider eyes.) But as far as possible you have to avoid fights, sprinting and excessive digging until you find some chickens, then corral them and hatch all the eggs they lay as quickly as possible until you have a substantial chicken farm. Once you have passed a critical point, even in this barren environment, you can build up stacks of food, and once that point is reached you can afford to expend the energy necessary to dig, build and otherwise make the best of the few resources are available to you.

Fighting zombies (as from build 12w07a) will also give iron ingots as a rare drop. This would allow you to make shears even without a crafting table, and that allows you to farm sheep for wool, and use blocks of wool as a building material. Compared to dirt, you are not losing out much in terms of your building's explosion resistance, but shearing a sheep for blocks of wool uses far less energy than digging up the same number of blocks of dirt.

In less constrained environments, more options become available. If you can get an iron bucket, you can milk cows, giving you an antidote to food poisoning without having to kill the cow. But if you have access to iron ingots and a crafting table, you will also be able to access a furnace, so you can cook food, making it more filling and eliminating the risk of poisoning, which means you have less need to use raw chickens, zombie meat or spider eyes as a foodstuff in the first place.

Wheat

Wheat is initially slow to grow. You must find some wild grass or an NPC village, possibly make a hoe or a crafting table, then possibly wait several days for your grain to ripen. Bones from skeletons are very useful here; one bone makes three doses of bonemeal, which makes even a single square of wheat into a loaf of bread plus some extra seeds. (Apply bonemeal, harvest, replant, reapply bonemeal, repeat; by the end of this cycle you will have three wheat and usually a few spare seeds, which means you can add some extra square metres of crops to your plot.)

Breeding

A second use of grain is to feed animals with it, causing them to enter breeding mode. Two wheat can be used to turn two animals into three, and one of those animals can be slaughtered later for one or more points of food. Provided the animals are cooked, using wheat to breed them is more efficient than using it to make bread.

Fishing

Fishing is an excellent choice provided you can get three sticks, two spider string and access to some water. A full day fishing should generate at least a dozen fish.

Mushrooms

Bonemeal plus mushrooms is the most cost-effective use of the bonemeal item, provided you have wood to make some food bowls, and one of each type of mushroom. Two doses of bonemeal generate one giant red and one giant brown mushroom, which will probably yield at least ten of each type of ordinary mushroom, which is forty food points.

82.69.54.207 18:32, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

There, first pass attempt. Comments? Refinements? Worth using? Or add to the Hunger page instead?