Whether you’re playing OneBlock, Creative, or any of a whole host of other game modes, knowing your way around the foods in Minecraft is important for staying alive and playing efficiently, so we’ve come up with a guide to help.
A long time ago, food in Minecraft restored health directly, but that’s no longer the case since the change in 2011. Food now restores hunger instead, and if your hunger level is at 90% or above, you can start to regenerate health, but only if you have enough saturation. Confused yet? You’re not alone. The hunger mechanic is a complicated thing and even veterans of the game still have trouble understanding how it works.
Explaining the hunger mechanic
Hunger in Minecraft is displayed by 10 drumstick icons in the form of a hunger bar above the hotbar. It’s depleted by a range of actions including sprinting and fighting and can be replenished by eating food. You can also buy food items from the OneBlock shop. Seems simple, right? Unfortunately, it gets a bit more complicated than that.
Hunger also has an invisible value called saturation tied to it, which gets depleted before hunger starts to deplete. Different foods restore different amounts of hunger and saturation, and the ones that restore the most saturation are generally considered best seeing as that’s what gets depleted first – more on that in a bit though.
In addition to hunger and saturation, there’s another hidden value called exhaustion. This builds up over time as you perform activities, and once it gets high enough, you’ll start to lose saturation and then hunger.
Now that we’ve covered the hunger mechanic, let’s talk about the best foods you can get your hands on in Minecraft to efficiently maintain both your hunger and saturation levels.
The objectively best foods in Minecraft
In Minecraft, a food’s nourishment value is typically used to determine how good it is. This value is defined as the ratio of saturation to hunger points restored, and three foods share the top spot with a value of 2.4:
- The enchanted golden apple, also known as the Notch apple, is widely regarded as the best food item in the game. In addition to restoring 4 hunger points and 9.6 saturation points, it grants a variety of status effects that can last for up to 5 minutes upon consumption. These effects include Regeneration II, Absorption IV, Resistance, and Fire Resistance. This item can’t be crafted in the game but can be found as rare loot in a variety of generated structures.
- Golden apples restore the same amount of hunger and saturation as their enchanted variants, but only provide Regeneration II and Absorption upon consumption. They can also be crafted using an apple and 8 gold ingots.
- The golden carrot is the last food item in the top three, and though it doesn’t grant any special effects, it restores 6 hunger points and 14.4 saturation. It can be crafted using a carrot and 8 gold nuggets.
If you ask us, golden carrots are the way to go seeing as they’re really easy to produce in large quantities compared to the golden apples. If you're playing on Minecraft creative servers, you don't need to worry about your hunger depleting! Just focus on building.
High nourishment alternatives to golden food items
Not everyone has access to tonnes of gold to produce the aforementioned golden food items, so let’s go over some alternative food items with a slightly lower nourishment rating that are much easier to obtain. Specifically, we’re going to talk about steak, porkchop, mutton, and salmon.
All 4 of these meats restore 8 hunger points and 12.8 saturation points, making them fantastic for keeping your Minecraft character fit and healthy. And the best part? They’re all super easy to come by as the mobs that drop the raw meats can be found virtually everywhere in the game. You just need to collect the food, cook it up, and you’re set!
One really cool thing to quickly mention is that if you kill a cow, pig, sheep, or salmon with fire or a fire aspect sword, the mob will drop cooked meat rather than raw meat. How cool is that? If you want to gather top tier food fast, running around killing these mobs with fire is definitely the way to do it.
Foods to avoid at all costs
Some foods in Minecraft grant negative status effects like poison, which can be deadly, so we figured we’d give you a list of them so you know what to avoid. Here they are:
- Pufferfish: Though edible, this fish poisons your character and makes them nauseous upon consumption, so definitely avoid eating it. You’re better off using pufferfish to make potions of water breathing.
- Raw chicken and rotten flesh: Both of these foods have a chance to give you the hunger status effect, which causes your hunger bar to deplete faster than normal. Avoid eating them unless you have no other foods available.
- Spider eye and poisonous potato: These foods will poison you when consumed, so definitely stay away from them. Don’t even eat them as a last resort.
Other foods with unique properties
To close out our food and hunger guide, let's go over a few foods with unique properties that are good to know about. You never know, maybe one of them will help get you out of a tricky situation in the future.
- Milk: Milk clears any and all status effects.
- Honey bottle: Drinking honey will clear poison.
- Chorus fruit: This food item is exclusively found in The End, and teleports you a few blocks in a random direction when consumed. It can be useful for getting past physical barriers.
Conclusion
There you have it, that’s the end of our guide. Hopefully, you've learned something new that you’ll be able to take forward with you in your Minecraft adventure. And hey, there’s no shame in referring to this guide again if you need to – that’s what it’s for after all. Thanks for reading!