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{{wip}} or {{stub}}.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:
- You stop healing naturally at 17 (
× 8.5) - You cannot sprint at 6 (


) - You start taking starvation damage at 0 (
). The rate at which you take this damage is dependent on difficulty. However, reaching zero health this way is only possible on Hard and Hardcore difficulties.
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.
Conserving energy
Several techniques can reduce your need for food:
- Avoid fighting when you can. For example, any neutral mob won't attack unprovoked. Also, all monsters have a limit on how far they'll travel to reach you (e.g. they won't usually cross a ravine if they're far enough from the ends).
- Reduce jumping. While mining, carry some cobblestone, stairs or ladders and, whenever possible, place a stair block instead of jumping.
- Craft a stone sword or stone axe when you can, then follow with iron armor and an iron sword. Healing depletes your hunger bar quickly, and full iron armor reduces the damage you take by 60%. Dealing melee blows also depletes your hunger, and swords or axes usually do the job with fewer attacks than any other tool.
- Avoid sprinting, as it rapidly depletes your hunger bar.
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. 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.
| Action | Exhaustion level increase |
Units |
|---|---|---|
| Swimming | 0.01 | per meter |
| Breaking a block | 0.005 | per block broken |
| Sprinting | 0.1 | per meter |
| Jumping | 0.05 | per jump |
| Attacking an enemy | 0.1 | per attack landed |
| Taking damage that is normally protected by armor | 0.1 | per distinct instance of damage being received |
| Hunger status effect (food poisoning) | 0.1 | per second, per Hunger status effect level |
| Jumping while sprinting | 0.2 | per jump |
| Regenerating health by having at least 18 hunger ( having /gamerule naturalRegeneration set to true
|
6.0 | per 1 |
| Food poisoning from raw chicken or rotten flesh, or taken damage from husks. | 3.0 | full 0:30 duration of Hunger I, at 0.1 per second |
| Food poisoning from pufferfish | 4.5 | full 0:15 duration of Hunger III, at 0.3 per second |
When exhaustion reaches 4, it resets itself and decreases saturation. When saturation reaches 0, the hunger bar will start to ripple, and hunger starts to drain away in place of saturation. 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. In fact, many players drain their hunger to 0 while building. 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 and suspicious stew,[Java Edition only] 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, but (mostly) only when you are actually hungry (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, find in structure chests, farming, and killing mobs. Many of the more nourishing foods (for example, meat and fish) need to be cooked (smelted) for full effect. Burning mobs provides a slightly easier method to obtain meat without the need of a furnace, smoker or campfire. The player can burn a mob by making it walk into lava, press use the block under it with a lava bucket, or by lighting the squares around it on fire with a flint and steel. You can also obtain cooked meat by killing a mob with a sword or bow with the Fire Aspect/Flame enchantment.
Foods can be divided into five tiers, according to how much saturation they restore per hunger unit. This is known as nourishment, 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, or at any point wasting saturation points by going over the limit (the hunger value after consuming the food). By doing this, the player will use every piece of food to its maximum potential. The downside of this approach, however, is that the player 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. Basically, one should probably do this when they are 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.
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.
Supernatural
Crafted with gold, these have a nourishment of 2.4.
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- Enchanted golden apples
- Restores


- Advantages:
- Restores a lot of health and gives you an extra 16 health.
- Cause temporary constant health regeneration that is not dependent on the player's hunger.
- Restore 9.6 saturation, considering their low hunger restoration
- Give 2 minutes of absorption IV, regeneration II[JE only]/V[BE only], resistance and fire resistance.
- Disadvantages:
- Very rare and not renewable.
- Take time to eat, and some seconds to heal health points. Splash potions or lingering potions are a good alternative, if you have brewing capability.
- Found only on structures (mineshafts, woodland mansions, desert pyramids or dungeons).
- Golden apples
- Restore


- Advantages:
- Cause temporary constant health regeneration that is not dependent on the player's hunger.
- Compared with potions of regeneration, their effects are available before the player is able to brew or even go to the Nether in singleplayer.
- Tree farming can produce a good supply of apples. Trading with villagers can also get them in quantity.
- Can be used to create a village by curing zombie villagers. If Generated Structures are turned off, this is the only way to have villagers and trade with them.
- Although they restore few hunger points, they grant 5 seconds of regeneration II and 2 minutes of absorption, giving the player an extra 2 hearts.
- Restore 9.6 saturation, a large amount considering their low hunger restoration.
- Disadvantages:
- Require 8 gold ingots to be crafted, meaning that they are too expensive to be an efficient food source in survival mode, unless a gold or emerald farm can be made or you mine in the nether for gold.
- Take time to eat, and some seconds to heal health points. Splash potions or lingering potions are a good alternative, if you have brewing capability.
- Finding them on structures (dungeon, mineshaft, igloo, stronghold, underwater ruins, desert pyramid, woodland mansion, Ruined Portal chests) is rare.
- Golden carrots
- Restore



- Advantages:
- Restore 14.4 saturation, the highest of any food currently in the game (only beaten by suspicious stew with saturation effect).
- Can also be used to make potions of night vision.
- Are cheaper than golden apples.
- Can be crafted or bought from a farmer villager, and restore
more than they do.
- Disadvantages:
- Finding Carrots can be difficult, as they can be found in structure chests or dropped (with low probability) from zombies.
- Although they are cheaper, they still need gold nuggets to be crafted.
Good
These have a nourishment of 1.6 — the most nourishing of the ordinary foods.
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- Steak and cooked porkchops
- Restores




- Advantages:
- Steak and cooked porkchop restore the highest amount of hunger and saturation (12.8 points) of any food in the game except supernatural foods.
- Can be found relatively early on, provided there are cows, mooshrooms and/or pigs nearby.
- Cows, mooshrooms and pigs can be bred to supply the player with raw beef and porkchops.
- Breeding cows and mooshrooms also supply the player with leather.
- Raw beef and porkchops can be cooked quickly using a campfire when away from a reliable source of food.
- 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.
- Only once at least two animals have been found, a reliable supply of food can be established.
- Breeding pigs requires carrots, potatoes or beetroot, which can be very difficult to obtain, if there are no villages with carrot or potato farm nearby, as they only very rarely drop from zombies.
- Rabbit stew
- Restores





- Advantages:
- Rabbit stew can be purchased from butcher villagers.
- Restore the most hunger points from any food on the game (only beaten by suspicious stew with saturation effect, or a whole cake).
- Restore 12 saturation.
- Disadvantages:
- Like mushroom stew and beetroot soup, rabbit stew does not stack.
- Unless a player has a village, they are difficult to craft.
- Rabbit stew restores less hunger and saturation than all of its ingredients combined, though it's more efficient.
- Cooked mutton and Cooked salmon
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Can be found relatively early on, provided there are sheeps, and/or salmons nearby.
- Restore 9.6 saturation.
- Sheeps can be bred to supply the player with raw mutton.
- Breeding sheeps also supply the player with wool.
- Salmon generates commonly on rivers.
- Fishing can be in a 3x5x3 body of water.
- Salmon is safer than some other food sources, as water can be brought to a shelter with a bucket.
- Raw mutton and raw salmon can be cooked quickly using a campfire when away from a reliable source of food.
- 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.
- Only once at least two animals have been found, a reliable supply of food can be established.
- Salmon cannot be bred.
Normal
These have a nourishment of 1.2 — the staple foods, cheap and fairly nourishing.
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- Baked potato
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Restore 6 saturation.
- Baked potatoes restore a good amount of hunger and saturation.
- Potatoes can be farmed quickly and in large quantities, as each potato plant can drop up to 4 potatoes.
- Disadvantages:
- Beetroots
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Beetroots can be used to breed pigs and can be crafted into red dye.
- No other actual advantages.
- Disadvantages:
- Beetroot can only be found in villager farms and snowy tundra village house chests.
- Beetroot crops grow somewhat slower than other crops, and they only yield one beetroot for each harvest.
- Finding beetroot seeds takes some exploration, found only on structure chests.
- Eating one beetroot is only marginally more useful than not eating at all.
- Restores 1.2 saturation.
- Beetroot soup
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Restores 7.2 saturation.
- It restores the same amount of hunger as six beetroots while taking only one-sixth as much time to eat.
- Uncrafted beetroot soup takes up less inventory space than uncrafted mushroom stew (up to 10 servings).
- Disadvantages:
- Beetroot can only be found in villager farms and snowy tundra village house chests.
- Beetroot crops grow somewhat slower than other crops, and they only yield one beetroot for each harvest.
- Like stews, beetroot soup doesn't stack when crafted.
- Bread
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Bread takes little resources to farm.
- Restore 6 saturation.
- A wheat farm is easy to maintain.
- Bread is one of the easiest foods to obtain early in the game
- Disadvantages:
- Wheat grows slowly, and three are required per bread loaf.
- Lots of bone meal may be needed to grow a single stalk of wheat.
- Farms require a light level of 9 for growth.
- Meats restore more hunger and saturation than bread.
- Carrots
- Restores


- Disadvantages:
- Finding a carrot is hard to find, found only on villages, structure chests, or rarely dropped by zombies.
- Restore 3.6 saturation.
- Meats and baked potatoes restore more hunger and saturation than carrots.
- Cooked chicken
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Restore 7.2 saturation.
- Chickens are easier to find than most other passive mobs, and also lay eggs and provide feathers.
- Chickens only need seeds to breed.
- Because chickens lay eggs, cooked chicken can be farmed completely automatically, compared to farming of other animal meat which needs the player to breed the animals.
- Disadvantages:
- Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than cooked chicken.
- Eggs hatch into baby chickens, which need to grow before they are farmed.
- Cooked cod
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Fishing can be in a 3x5x3 body of water.
- Restore 6 saturation.
- Safer than some other food sources, as water can be brought to a shelter with a bucket.
- Disadvantages:
- Cooked rabbit
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Can be obtained relatively early on depending on the presence of rabbits.
- Restore 7.2 saturation.
- Cooked rabbit can be purchased from butcher villagers.
- Can be used to craft rabbit stew, which is better.
- Disadvantages:
- Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than a cooked rabbits.
- Rabbits are difficult to find, and to kill.
- Mushroom stew
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Disadvantages:
- Like other stews, mushroom stew does not stack, so crafting a lot of stew at once takes up a lot of inventory space.
- Mycelium, podzol and nylium aren't easy to find (the first two found on rare biomes and the third one found on the Nether).
- Suspicious stew
- Restores


*
- Advantages:
- Flowers and mushrooms are easy to find.
- Restore 7.2 saturation.
- It's almost like a mushroom stew, but with the notable addition of a status effect depending on the flower used.
- When crafted with blue orchid or dandelion, suspicious stew grants the effect Saturation for 7 ticks, meaning an additional



and 14 saturation, for a total of 





and 21.2 saturation. - When crafted with a oxeye daisy it has the effect of an 8-second Regeneration instead, which heals 1.6 hearts, making it all but essential when natural regeneration is turned off.
- Disadvantages:
- Suspicious stew may have negative effects too (Blindness, Poison, Weakness, or even Wither). Remembering the correct flower for the recipe is important.
- Once a suspicious stew is crafted, there is no indication to the nature of its effect.
- These two facts make it inadvisable to eat any suspicious stew that one didn't craft oneself; hence its name.
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.
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- Pumpkin pie
- Restores




- Advantages:
- Pumpkin pie has a higher hunger restoration value than most uncooked foods, being the "largest" of the third-tier foods. It's an excellent choice for restoring a badly drained hunger meter, before eating something with more saturation.
- The crafting recipe for pumpkin pie is shapeless, and fits within the 2×2 crafting grid of the player's inventory. This makes it possible to craft pumpkin pie anywhere without a crafting table or furnace, as long as the player is carrying the necessary ingredients.
- All ingredients required to craft pumpkin pie can be farmed completely automatically, using pistons and/or hoppers.
- Disadvantages:
- It's still a third-tier food -- steak and cooked porkchops restore the same amount of hunger, and far more saturation, than pumpkin pie.
- Pumpkins are relatively rare, so it may take some time and traveling before the player is able to establish a pumpkin farm.
- Pumpkin plants are slow to grow a pumpkin and only yield a single pumpkin per plant at a time.
- Apple
- Restores


- Apples are found when oak leaves or dark oak leaves are broken or decay or trading with an apprentice level farmer villager.
- Advantages:
- Apples can be obtained very early in the game and restore good enough hunger early in the game.
- Apples can be used as emergency food when player runs out of food while exploring.
- Apples doesn't need to be cook on a furnace to eat.
- Disadvantages:
- Apples have only a chance of dropping for certain types of leaves.
- Apples aren't very good food compared to other foods player can obtain later in the game.
- Melon
- Restores

- Advantages
- Melons are renewable and their farms are easy to automate.
- Each melon block drops 3-7 melon slices, so you can quickly get a lot in only one harvest.
- Melon slices can be crafted into glistering melons, which can be used to make Potions of Healing.
- Melons are almost never wasted on overfilling the hunger bar.
- Melons can be crafted back into melon seeds.
- Melon plant stems will stay productive indefinitely so long as they are protected.
- Disadvantages
- Melons can be difficult to obtain.
- Melon seeds can only be found in chests in abandoned mineshafts, dungeons, and woodland mansions.
- Melon stems grow slowly and don't instantly spawn melon blocks even when grown with bone meal.
- Melons provide almost no food saturation, so a diet of melons necessitates frequent stops to eat. A better use of melons is to first fill the hunger saturation with food such as meat, then use melon to fill the bar the rest of the way.
- Restores


- Advantages:
- Can be eaten even when the main hunger bar is full, letting you raise your saturation above normal.
- Once gotten from the end islands, cheap to farm.
- Disadvantages:
- Will teleport you when eaten
- Only obtainable end-game
- Raw chicken and Raw mutton
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Chickens are relatively easier to find in the world than pigs or cows.
- Chickens die faster, as they have only 4 units of health, making obtaining raw chicken both time effective, and food/saturation effective.
- Supplies of raw chicken are easier to maintain, as chickens also drop eggs which can be hatched into chicks for mass production of raw chicken rather than being dependent on seeds or wheat for breeding.
- Chicken farming can be automated, making for a useful way of collecting eggs/raw chicken/feathers while you are doing something else, as long as the chunk is loaded.
- Raw chicken and raw mutton can be used to feed wolves.
- Disadvantages:
- Raw chicken has a 30% chance of giving the player food poisoning, which is one reason why it's better to cook it first (the other being more food value). However, food poisoning just barely counteracts one raw chicken's food saturation, and will not even drain half a hunger shank. This makes it a very minor drawback, especially when eating multiple raw chickens at once. Because food poisoning does not stack, and because raw chicken has a very high food saturation value, eating multiple raw chickens at a time will easily restore more hunger than the poison can take away.
- Raw beef, Raw porkchop, and Raw rabbit
- Restores


- Advantages:
- Raw beef is relatively quick to get at all stages of the game without requiring specialized tools, and even faster to collect when the player has a stone sword (or better) and a sizeable herd nearby.
- Unlike raw chicken, raw beef does not carry a chance of contracting food poisoning when eaten.
- Cooking raw beef yields steak, a food item that restores 4 units of the food bar and 12.8 saturation when eaten.
- Cows and mooshrooms can drop up to 3 raw beef, as opposed to a chicken, which can only drop 1 raw chicken.
- Disadvantages:
- The availability of raw meat is dependent on the presence of animal mobs.
- Raw meat offers significantly less food value than cooked meat.
- Potato
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Potatoes may be found in plenty in villager farms.
- Disadvantages:
- Potatoes are far less nourishing than baked potatoes.
- Poisonous potato
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Rarely dropped when farming potatoes.
- Can be found in shipwreck chests.
- Usable as emergency food.
- Disadvantages:
- Poisonous potatoes have a 60% chance to inflict the poison effect.
- Dried Kelp
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Found in plenty cold oceans.
- Eaten 0.5 seconds faster than other foods
- Can be turned into Dried Kelp Block.
- Disadvantages
- Is only worth eating if you have large amounts, and is more useful in its block state where it can be used as fuel.
- You have to cook regular kelp to get it.
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.
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- Cookies
- Restores

- Crafted from two units of wheat and one unit of cocoa beans.
- Advantages
- The ingredients can be farmed in large quantities.
- 8 cookies are made each time.
- 1 batch of cookies relieves 19.2 points of hunger with only 2 units of wheat, much more efficient than bread.
- Disadvantages
- When fed to a parrot, a cookie will kill the parrot instantly.
- Cookies have a very low nourishment value.
- Honey Bottle
- Restores



- Advantages:
- Remove poison.
- Disadvantages:
- Restore low saturation.
- Cake
- Restores
(slice), 





(whole)
- Advantages:
- Cake can be used repeatedly in multiplayer and can be shared by several players as a feast item.
- Cake is a renewable resource.
- Cake can be eaten instantly without any eating animation and without switching the currently selected item.
- Cake can be used as mounting for a TNT cannon and produces a range greater than that of a slab.
- Similar to a slab, you do not need to jump to walk over cake.
- Cake restores a lot of hunger when eaten as a whole.
- Disadvantages:
- Cake requires several different items to craft: sugar, wheat, an egg and three buckets of milk. In addition, a crafting table is required to use the recipe.
- Once cake is placed, it cannot be retrieved.
- If the block below the cake is broken, the cake will disappear.
- Cakes need to be placed to be eaten, which means they cannot be eaten in places where one cannot build (e.g. spawn protection).
- If you only eat part of a cake, you'll have to come back to that exact spot to eat the rest of it later on.
- Cake is not stackable in Java Edition.
- Cake has a low saturation level, causing you to become hungry again in a very short amount of time.
- Cake is the least effective of all wheat-based foods.
- Rotten flesh
- Restores


- Advantages:
- Rotten flesh can be a good emergency food when other sources are depleted if used in high doses, restoring more food points than the hunger effect can take away.
- While 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 may be used to feed and breed wolves without poisoning them.
An example of how eating rotten flesh can cause the hunger status effect, or food poisoning.
- Disadvantages:
- Rotten flesh has an 80% chance to trigger food poisoning, making hunger deplete for thirty seconds.
- Rotten flesh only restores 4 hunger points.
- Killing zombies for rotten flesh may be dangerous for unskilled players as it only comes from hostile zombies and their variants.
- Rotten flesh restores less saturation than other meats.
- Tropical Fish
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Tropical fish have no advantages over other foods.
- Disadvantages:
- Tropical fish is a rare catch from fishing.
- The tropical fish mob can only be found in warm ocean[Bedrock Edition only], or in warm, lukewarm oceans and deep variants.[Java Edition only]
- Tropical fish restores a very little amount of hunger.
- Pufferfish
- Restores

- Advantages:
- There are no real advantages to eating pufferfish.
- Being the only way to obtain nausea, eating pufferfish is needed to get the advancement "How did we get here?".
- Pufferfish are a useful ingredient in brewing potions of water breathing.
- Disadvantages:
- Pufferfish inflict hunger, poison, and nausea effects, draining


and keeping you down to
for 48 seconds.
- Pufferfish inflict hunger, poison, and nausea effects, draining
- Raw cod and Raw salmon
- Restores

- Advantages:
- Raw cod or salmon can be used tame cats, trust ocelots, or feed dolphins.
- Can be obtained by fishing or killing cod, guardians, elder guardians, polar bears, or dolphins.
- Disadvantages:
- Raw cod is not nearly as nourishing as cooked fish.
- Spider eyes
- Restores

- They only restore
and poison you for 4 seconds (draining 
over time), and do not restore a large amount of saturation. They only could ever be useful if you are already at/near
(since poison does not drain your health past half a heart) and you only need to restore a small amount of hunger to start healing again. Only ever eat spider eyes if you have to, because it is best to leave them in your brewing lab.
Farming Strategies
Automation
A number of food items can have their production automated.
- Raw and Cooked chicken
- Eggs can be collected from chickens by hoppers and then thrown by dispensers to make baby chickens. Timed mechanisms can then kill or burn the chickens after they grow up to produce raw or cooked chicken automatically.
- Melon
- Melons can be harvested with pistons and hoppers at regular intervals with a clocked mechanism or as soon as they grow by detecting them with redstone power or a block update detector.
- Rotten flesh
- Rotten flesh can be auto-harvested with a mob farm.
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.
- Mushroom stew
- If you have both kinds of mushrooms handy and enough wood for bowls (three planks of any type), you can make mushroom stew.
- Milk
- If you have a bucket and a cow, milk the cow. The milk will let you fill up on rotten flesh, raw chicken, spider eyes, or poisonous potatoes, and then cure the illness.
- Rotten flesh
- Eat five at once and not only can you heal, you also end up with about 80% full hunger. If you do nothing while waiting for the hunger effect to wear off, this is even more effective.
- Local animals
- Kill a cow, pig, sheep, or chicken. Cook the meat if at all possible, but even eating it raw will fend off utter starvation.
- 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 is also a good idea.
- 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.
- Fishing
- If you have string, wood, and water, fishing is relatively quick; you can get one or two fish within a minute. Note that you can fish in a waterfall.
- Doing nothing
- You won't lose hunger bars 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.
Helpful tips and tricks for food
- Always keep an eye on your hunger bar.
- Make sure to have at least a half of a stack of food at all times.
- Obviously, eat when your health is low.