Hunger

The Food Bar is seen on the right, opposite the Health Bar.

Hunger is an aspect of Minecraft added in the Adventure Update, which governs several aspects of gameplay. Eating food, instead of directly restoring the player's Health as it did before the Adventure Update, now fills up the Food Bar, which is constantly drained by the player's actions. The Food Bar is located next to the player's Health Bar on the bottom of the screen and is represented by ten shanks.

While the player is sprinting, the Food Bar depletes much faster. One is not able to sprint if their food level is 6 () or less.

The Food Bar does not drain when playing on Peaceful mode. However, its effects on your health level remain, and switching difficulties has no effect on your Food Bar's current level. Thus, if you change the difficulty level to Peaceful while your Food Bar is empty, it will not restore your hunger level and you will continue to starve, while healing.

Certain foods and potions have a chance of poisoning ("Hunger" potion effect) the player upon consumption, which causes your Food Bar to deplete faster. Rotten Flesh causes poisoning 80% of the time, and Raw Chicken causes poisoning only 30% of the time. Eating a Spider Eye actually deals the player damage ("Poison" potion effect).

[edit] Effects

• When the Food Bar is at 18 ( × 9) points or above, your health will slowly regenerate, at a rate of half a heart every 4 seconds.^[1]
• If the Food Bar is at 6 () points or below, you will not be able to sprint.
• When the Food Bar is at 0 (), your health will deplete at the same rate it would regenerate when at 90% or above. On Easy difficulty, the player's health stops dropping at 5 hearts, on Normal it stops at 1/2 a heart, and on Hard it keeps draining until you die or eat food.^[2]

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

[edit] Food poisoning

Food poisoning is an effect induced by eating either raw chicken or Rotten Flesh, which turns the Food Bar a sickly yellow-green and slowly drains food. Rotten flesh has a high chance (80%) to cause food poisoning, and raw chicken has a limited chance to cause it (30%). Raw porkchop and raw beef do not have any chance of giving you food poisoning.

Name	Icon	Chance to poison
Raw Chicken		30%
Rotten Flesh		80%

[edit] Behavior

Food poisoning lasts 30 seconds, and adds 15.0 to your Exhaustion Level over the duration. This is slightly less than (two "shanks"). In peaceful mode, the Food Bar changes color, but does not get drained.

The duration of food poisoning doesn't stack, so if the player eats many poisonous foods at once, he or she will only feel the negative effects of the most recent poisonous food, plus the consumption time of each other food. Also, since poisoning is recognized by the game as a potion effect, drinking milk will negate the effect as will a potion, allowing the player to eat potentially poisonous food and drinking milk to fill the bar when no other food is available.

As of 1.9 pre4, green swirls rise around you to indicate the sickness when you are poisoned.

[edit] Mechanics

There are four fields in level.dat which are related to hunger:

• foodLevel ranges from 0 to 20 and is represented by your Food Bar. One point equals (half a "shank").
• foodSaturationLevel is an invisible additional hunger variable, which is depleted before main foodLevel value. Eating any food will also add some to this variable. Note that this cannot exceed foodLevel. The Food Bar jitters when this equals 0.
• foodTickTimer increases with every tick when foodLevel is either greater than 17 or equals zero. When foodTickTimer reaches 80 it resets to zero and then heals or deals one point of damage to the Health Bar, respectively.
• foodExhaustionLevel ranges from 0.0 to 4.0 and increases with every action you take. When the exhaustion level reaches above 4.0 it will get subtracted by 4.0 and subtracts 1 point either from foodSaturationLevel or, if foodSaturationLevel equals zero, from foodLevel.

[edit] Exhaustion level increase

Any action not listed here will not increase exhaustion level. For example, you can travel several days by boat and food bar will not decrease.

[edit] Food level and saturation level restoration

Main article: Food

Last Updated: Release 1.2.5

Name	Icon	Food Points	Source(s)	Saturation restored (additional effects)	Effective Quality[note 1] (Food Points + Saturation)
Bread		5 ()	Crafting Dungeon chests Stronghold chests NPC Village chests	6	11
Cake		12 () (six uses - 2 () per use)	Crafting	2.4 (six uses - 0.4 per use)	14.4 (six uses - 2.4 per use)
Cookie		2 ()	Crafting	0.2	1.2
Melon Slice		2 ()	Harvesting a melon block	1.2	3.2
Mushroom Stew*		8 ()	Crafting Using a Bowl on a Mooshroom	9.6	17.6
Raw Chicken		2 ()	Killing chickens	1.2 (30% chance of food poisoning.)	3.2 (2.075)[note 2]
Cooked Chicken		6 ()	Cooking a raw chicken Setting chickens on fire	7.2	13.2
Raw Beef		3 ()	Killing cows	1.8	4.8
Steak		8 ()	Cooking raw beef Setting cows on fire	12.8	20.8
Raw Porkchop		3 ()	Killing pigs	1.8	4.8
Cooked Porkchop		8 ()	Cooking a raw porkchop Setting pigs on fire	12.8	20.8
Raw Fish		2 ()	Fishing	1.2	3.2
Cooked Fish		5 ()	Cooking a raw fish	6	11
Red Apple		4 ()	Stronghold chests Destroyed/despawned oak Leaves NPC Village blacksmith chests Dungeon chests	2.4	6.4
Golden Apple		4 ()	Crafting Dungeon chests, Stronghold chests	9.6 (Health regeneration for 4 seconds.)	13.6
Rotten Flesh		4 ()	Killing zombies and zombie pigmen	0.8 (80% chance of food poisoning.)	4.8 (1.8)[note 2]
Spider Eye		2 ()	Killing spiders	3.2 (100% chance of getting poisoned.)	5.2

[edit] Notes

1. ↑ Roughly how 'long' the food will last. See hunger for details.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Average expected food quality if food poisoning isn't cured.

[edit] References

1. ↑ http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/192-an-interview-with-jeb/
2. ↑ http://twitter.com/jeb_/status/111047534318858240