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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:

  1. You stop healing naturally at 17 (🍗 × 8.5)
  2. You cannot sprint at 6 (🍗🍗🍗)
  3. 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).
    • Craft a bed as soon as possible, and use it whenever you find yourself above ground at night.
    • Place plenty of torches to prevent mob spawning.
  • Reduce jumping. While mining, carry some cobblestone or logs, and, whenever possible, craft and place stairs, slabs or ladders 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. Jumping while sprinting is especially energy consuming.
  • While crossing bodies of water, use a boat instead of swimming, as the former is faster and does not deplete the hunger bar.

Effects of hunger

Main article: 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.

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 (🍗 × 9) and
having /gamerule naturalRegeneration set to true
6.0   per 1♥ healed
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 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,‌[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

Main article: 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.

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 apple
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Restore a lot of health and gives you an extra 16♥ × 8 for damage absorption.
  • 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:
Golden apple
Restore 🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • 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.
  • Compared with potions of regeneration, their effects are available without the need for brewing, which is only possible via accessing the Nether in singleplayer.
    • Not to mention that golden apples are stackabke up to 64, but potions are not.
  • Tree farming can provide a good supply of apples. Trading with farmer villagers can also get them in quantity.
  • Can be used to cure zombie villagers. If generated structures are turned off, this is the only way to obtain villagers and trade with them.
  • Although they restore fewer hunger points, they grant 5 seconds of regeneration II and 2 minutes of absorption, giving the player an extra 4♥♥.
  • 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:
Golden carrot
Restore 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Finding carrots can be difficult, as they are only found in pillager outpost and shipwreck chests, growing in village fields, or dropped with an 1120 chance from zombies.
  • Finding the golden carrot itself is also difficult, as they can be found in ruined portal and bastion remnant chests.
  • Though cheaper than golden apples, they still need gold nuggets to be crafted.
  • The trading offer is 3 golden carrots for 3 emeralds, which can be expensive, though the price can be lowered with zombification and curing, or the Hero of the Village effect.

Good

These have a nourishment of 1.6 — the most nourishing of the ordinary foods.

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Steak and cooked porkchop
Restores 🍗🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • They restore one of the highest amount of hunger and saturation (12.8 points) of any food in the game.
    • Two pieces regenerate 25.6 saturation, filling the saturation bar, so the player don't need to eat again for a long time.
  • 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 raw porkchops.
    • Cows, mooshrooms and hoglins also supply the player with leather.
  • Hoglins are a source of porkchops in the Nether.
  • Raw beef and porkchops can be cooked quickly using a campfire or soul campfire when away from a reliable source of food.
    • All these mobs can also be killed while on fire to get cooked meat directly.
  • Cooked beef ‌[BE only] and cooked porkchops are offered by butcher villagers at reasonable prices.
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.
  • At least two animals of a type must be found to breed them for a reliable supply of meat.
  • Breeding pigs requires carrots, potatoes or beetroots, which can be difficult to obtain, if there are no villages with carrot or potato farms nearby, or shipwrecks with supply chests, as they only very rarely drop from zombies.
  • Hoglins are hostile mobs that can cause massive damage, and they can only be hunted and bred in the Nether, because in other dimensions they zombify.
Cooked mutton and cooked salmon
Restores 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Can be found relatively early on, provided there are sheep, and/or salmon nearby.
  • Restore 9.6 saturation.
    • Two pieces regenerate 19.2 saturation (equivalent to 20), filling the saturation bar completely.
  • Breeding sheep also supplies the player with wool.
  • Salmon spawn commonly in rivers and oceans in large schools, and respawn relatively quickly without needing to breed them.
  • Salmon can be caught in any body of water with a fishing rod.
  • Raw mutton and raw salmon can be cooked quickly using a campfire or soul campfire when away from a reliable source of food.
    • 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.

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:
  • Meats restore more hunger and saturation than baked potatoes.
  • Finding the first potato can be difficult; they can be found only in structure chests, villages or as a rare drop from zombies.
Beetroot
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Beetroots can be used to breed pigs and can be crafted into red dye.
  • No other actual advantages.
Disadvantages:
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 seeds can only be obtained from village farms, structure chests and wandering traders.
  • Beetroot grows somewhat slower[verify] than other crops, and they only yield one beetroot for each harvest.
  • Like other stews, beetroot soup does not stack when crafted.
Bread
Restores 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Wheat takes little resources to farm and maintain.
  • Restore 6 saturation.
  • One of the easiest foods to obtain early in the game.
  • Piles of hay bales commonly generate around plains, desert and savanna villages, which can be converted into bread, providing an ample source of food.
Disadvantages:
  • Wheat growing takes time, and three batches are required per bread loaf.
  • Compared to 1-4 carrots and potatoes dropped each plant, each wheat plant only yields a single piece of wheat.
  • Bread can only be crafted with a crafting table.
  • Lots of bone meal may be needed to force grow a single stalk of wheat.
  • Wheat requires a light level of 9 for growth.
  • Meats restore more hunger and saturation than bread.
Carrot
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Finding the first carrot is hard, as it is found only in villages, structure chests, or rarely drops from 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[verify] 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 animals which needs the player to breed the animals.
  • Again because of the eggs, 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 as usual).
Disadvantages:
  • Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than cooked chicken.
  • Eggs hatch into baby chickens, which need to grow before they are able to lay more eggs, or can be killed for meat.
Cooked cod
Restores 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Can be fished from any body of water, even underground or in the End.
  • Compared to salmon, cod is more commonly caught while fishing.
  • Restore 6 saturation.
  • Cod commonsly spawn in most ocean biomes in large schools, and respawn quickly without needing to breed them.
Disadvantages:
  • Fishing takes some time, especially underground and while not raining, making it slow to gather large amounts of fish.
  • Finding cod mobs is also quite difficult, as they can only be found in regular, lukewarm and cold ocean biomes.
  • Other meats restore more hunger and saturation.
Cooked rabbit
Restores 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Other meats restore more hunger and saturation than cooked rabbit.
  • Rabbits are difficult to capture, kill and farm.
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.
  • 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 the Nether.
    • Even if these blocks are found, the player can't obtain them without Silk Touch.
  • Spreading based mushroom farms are slow.
  • Huge mushroom farming requires bone meal, which is hard to obtain in large quantities in early game.
Rabbit stew
Restores 🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Like other stews, rabbit stew does not stack.
  • Unless purchased from a villager, they are difficult to craft.
  • A bowl of rabbit stew restores less hunger and saturation than all of its ingredients combined.
  • Crafting rabbit stew requires 5 ingredients including the bowl, which can be hard to memorize.
  • As with most other animals, two rabbits are required to start breeding them.
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[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 is 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.
  • When crafted with an oxeye daisy, it gives 8‌[JE only]/6‌[BE only] seconds of Regeneration instead, which heals ♥♥, making it all but essential when /gamerule naturalRegeneration is turned off.
  • By using a flower and then a bowl on a brown mooshroom, a large amount of the corresponding suspicious stew can be created.
  • When crafted with an azure bluet, it gives 8 seconds of blindness, the only way to get this effect in survival mode, and is required for the How Did We Get Here? advancement.
Disadvantages:
  • Like all other stews, suspicious stew doesn't stack (though the ingredients do).
  • 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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Apple
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Apples only drop from two types of leaves.
  • Restore 2.4 saturation and few hunger points, making them worse than most other foods.
  • Either breaking leaves to get them or finding a village can be difficult.
Chorus Fruit
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Can be eaten even when the hunger bar is full, allowing you to further raise saturation.
  • Once obtained from the outer end islands, cheap to farm.
  • 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.
  • Chorus flowers have to be manually broken or shot with a projectile, which can be annoying.
  • Restore 2.4 saturation.
Dried kelp
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Found easily in oceans and lakes.
  • Eaten 0.5 seconds faster than other foods.
  • Can be turned into dried kelp blocks, a lasting fuel.
Disadvantages:
  • Is only worth eating if you have large amounts, and is more useful in its block form where it can be used as fuel.
  • You have to cook regular kelp to get it.
  • Restore 0.6 saturation.
Melon slice
Restores 🍗
Advantages
  • Melon farming is 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 melon slices, which can be used to make a potion of Healing.
  • For food efficiency minded players, melon slices are almost never wasted on overfilling the hunger bar.
  • Melon slices can be crafted back into melon seeds.
  • Melon plant stems will stay productive indefinitely without the need to replant them.
Disadvantages
Poisonous potato
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Can be used on servers to show how much potato farming you have done ( pun intended).
  • No additional advantages otherwise.
Disadvantages:
  • Have a 60% chance to inflict the poison effect.
  • Rarely found in chests.
  • Restore 1.2 saturation and few hunger points.
  • Can't even be composted.
Potato
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Potatoes may be found in plenty in village farms.
Disadvantages:
  • Potatoes are far less nourishing than baked potatoes.
  • Restore 0.6 saturation and few hunger points.
Pumpkin pie
Restores 🍗🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Pumpkin pie has a high hunger restoration value. Good choice for restoring hunger points before eating something with more saturation.
  • Its crafting recipe is shapeless, and fits within the 2×2 crafting grid of the player's inventory. This makes it possible to craft it anywhere without a crafting table or furnace, as long as one is carrying the necessary ingredients (pumpkins, sugar and eggs).
  • Restore 4.8 saturation.
  • All ingredients required to craft pumpkin pie can be farmed completely automatically, using pistons and/or hoppers.
Disadvantages:
  • Meats 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 one per plant at a time.
Raw beef, raw porkchop, and raw rabbit
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Raw beef and raw porkchops are relatively quick to get.
  • Unlike raw chicken, these meats do not carry a chance of contracting food poisoning when eaten.
  • Cooking them gives their cooked versions.
  • Cows and mooshrooms can drop up to 3 raw beef, and pigs and hoglins can drop up to 3 and 4 raw porkchops respectively.
Disadvantages:
  • The availability of raw meat is dependent on the presence of animal mobs.
  • Raw meat offers significantly less food value than cooked meat.
  • Restore 1.8 saturation.
  • Killing hoglins isn't the best option unless it's a Nether survival, because they are hostile and deal massive damage.
Raw chicken and raw mutton
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Chickens are relatively easier to find[verify] in the world than pigs or cows, and and sheep are also easy to find.
  • Chickens die faster, as they have only 4♥♥ 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.
  • Sheep can be sheared to get wool.
  • Chicken farming can be automated, making for a useful way of collecting eggs, raw chicken and feathers, as long as the chunk is loaded.
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.

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Cake
Restores 🍗 (slice), 🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗🍗 (whole)
Advantages:
  • Cake can be used repeatedly and can be shared by several players as a feast item.
  • Can be used as a decoration block.
  • Cake can be eaten instantly without any eating animation and without switching the currently selected item.
  • 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 milk buckets. 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.
  • 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.
  • Is not stackable in Java Edition.
  • Restore just 0.4 saturation, or 2.8 as a whole.
Cookie
Restores 🍗
Advantages
  • Crafted from two units of wheat and one unit of cocoa beans.
  • 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.
  • Restore 0.4 saturation.
Honey Bottle
Restores 🍗🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Remove poison.
  • A player only needs to harvest it from a beehive or bee nest.
  • Can be eaten while the hunger bar is full.
  • Compared to milk that removes all effects and cannot be stacked, honey bottles can stack to 16 and only removes poison.
Disadvantages:
  • Restore 1.2 saturation.
  • Harvesting it can be difficult without campfires or dispensers, as bees can get angered and will die after attacking the player once.
  • Can only stack up to 16.
Pufferfish
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Pufferfish inflict hunger, poison, and nausea effects, draining 🍗🍗🍗 and keeping you down to ♥ for 48 seconds.
Raw cod and raw salmon
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Raw fish is not nearly as nourishing as cooked fish.
Rotten flesh
Restores 🍗🍗
Advantages:
  • Rotten flesh can be a good emergency food when other sources are depleted; if many pieces are eaten at once, the 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.
  • 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.
Disadvantages:
  • Has an 80% chance to trigger food poisoning, depleting the hunger for thirty seconds.
  • Only restores 0.8 saturation.
  • Killing zombies for rotten flesh may be dangerous for unskilled players.
Spider eye
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • None, it is best to leave them in your brewing lab.
  • The only reasonable use is to fulfill the A Balanced Diet advancement.
Disadvantages:
  • They give poison for 4 seconds.
  • Restore 3.2 saturation.
Sweet berries
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
  • Are easily obtainable in large quantities while in a Taiga biome.
  • Sweet berries can be used to trust foxes.
  • Sweet berry bushes can be used as defenses, while can be used to get more berries.
Disadvantages:
  • The bush block causes damage to anything that enters its hitbox (except foxes).
Tropical Fish
Restores 🍗
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
  • Can only be rarely caught from fishing.
  • The tropical fish mob can only be found in warm ocean[BE only], or in warm, lukewarm oceans and deep variants.‌[JE only]
  • Tropical fish restore little hunger and saturation.

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, 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.
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.
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.

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