Best Food in Minecraft – Hunger, saturation, and exhaustion, explained

Unless you're playing in Creative or Spectator mode in Minecraft, you'll have to deal with hunger. It looks like a collection of (presumably) chicken drumsticks and sits right next to the health bar. Managing hunger is a huge part of the survival experience as it is not only responsible for regeneration but also for sprinting. This is why it's important to know how it works and here's all you need to know about it.

How Hunger Works in Minecraft

The hunger mechanic in Minecraft survival mode provides you with positive or negative status effects depending on how much it has diminished. Here's a gist of how it works:

• When your hunger bar is at its maximum, you'll see 10 full drumsticks which amount to 20 hunger points, each represented as half a drumstick.
• If you reach at least 18 Hunger (nine drumsticks), you gain the ability to heal at a rate of one health (half a heart) every four seconds.
• If your hunger bar is full, your natural healing ability heals you at a rate of one health every half a second (Java edition only).
• If your hunger bar drops to six Hunger (three drumsticks) or lower, you lose your ability to sprint.
• If your hunger bar is completely depleted, you will take damage from starvation. This causes you to lose one health every four seconds.
  • If your difficulty level is set to easy, you stop taking starvation damage at 10 Health or lower whereas on normal difficulty, you stop taking starvation damage at one health or lower. For hard difficulty, you continue to take starvation damage until you die or eat something.

Do note that all these do not apply when your difficulty is set to peaceful. Instead, your health will be restored almost instantly.

Related: 20 Best Minecraft 1.19.4 Seeds

How Saturation Works in Minecraft

Alongside hunger, Minecraft also has a separate, but invisible bar known as "saturation" which controls the rate at which your hunger bar decreases.

• You gain saturation by eating specific food that rewards you with saturation points.
• Saturation drains as you go about your game and once it's completely empty, the hunger bar begins to shake in a jittery effect.
• It's important to note that your saturation level cannot exceed your current hunger level. So, for example, if your hunger bar is currently at 10, your maximum saturation cannot exceed 10.
• Each food in Minecraft restores a certain number of hunger points, but overeating doesn't simply apply those excess hunger points to saturation.
• Instead, you need to eat food that restores higher amounts of saturation. We'll go into that in more detail in our recipes list below.

How Exhaustion Works in Minecraft

Exhaustion is a statistic in Minecraft that measures how much food or saturation you lose when performing a specific action. Many actions in Minecraft grant you exhaustion, from swimming to jumping or contracting food poisoning. You lose a point of hunger or saturation whenever you perform enough actions to reach an exhaustion level of four. After this, your exhaustion level resets to zero, and won't take away any more hunger/saturation until it reaches four again.

Here's a list of all actions in Minecraft that lead to exhaustion and how much exhaustion they cause:

Best Minecraft Food

Golden Carrot is easily the best food you can get in Minecraft. all thanks to its high saturation ratio and food points. Although Golden Carrot doesn't have the highest amount of food points (Cake does), it's probably a better idea to ensure that your hunger bar never diminishes in the first place and that's where we come back to saturation.

Related: Minecraft 1.21 Ore Distribution Best level for all ores

Given how your saturation cannot exceed your current hunger level, it makes sense to keep it as full as possible. There are several ways to do this, but we recommend waiting until your hunger bar starts jittering (which signals that your saturation level is low), then eating food that restores a high amount of saturation.

The table below outlines the best to worst foods each sorted by Saturation Ratio. Any item with an asterisk in front has the potential to be poisonous if ingested. You can see the Saturation Ratio of all poisonous food at the bottom of the list.

That's everything you need to know about the best foods in Minecraft! Have a look at our Minecraft 1.21 Woodland Mansion Seeds post if you want to get your hand on a Totem of Undying. You can also check out 15 Luckiest Minecraft Seeds with Rare Spawns for some unique spawn locations!