Have you eaten?

The basics of food in Minecraft

When playing Minecraft, your hunger bar slowly goes down and needs to be replenished with food. Certain activities like sprinting around your Minecraft house will deplete your hunger even more quickly. If you don’t eat anything, you will start taking health damage over time.

There are so many different types of food in the game and some are easier than others to find. Some types of food include animal meats, farmed crops, and fish. Typically, cooked meat products from animals are some of the best and most accessible foods for restoring hunger.

Hunger is the food icon visible above the player’s main inventory bar and appears as a row of small meat icons. Every player can have a maximum of 20 hunger points (with each full meat icon being worth 2 hunger points). So for example, if you ate an apple which restores 4 hunger points, you would instantly add 2 meat icons to your hunger bar.

Saturation is more complicated and is an invisible value that determines how long a food keeps you full before the hunger bar starts going down again. Have you ever noticed that eating a cookie does not keep you full very long, but eating a steak does? This is because steak has a much higher saturation level than a cookie.

When first starting out, you may be wondering what is the best beginner food in Minecraft? Typically, the easiest foods to get early on are apples (from tree leaves) and bread (grown from wheat). Both are very easily accessible as you’ll find apples from simply cutting trees and wheat seeds can be found just by clearing grass.

Note that wheat seeds will need to be planted on tilled soil (right clicking dirt with a hoe), near water, and with sufficient light to grow. Some Minecraft biomes don’t have many trees (like deserts or plains), so for your first survival base it can be a good idea to build near a forest or similar biome.

Later on, farming animals like cows for beef/steak is an excellent food source all-around. Cows can be easily bred for meat by right clicking two nearby cows while holding wheat in your hand.