Introduction

Mojang’s changes to the food system have been the death of survival map making. This has heralded the end of an era where mapmakers used Minecraft's base mechanics and clever level design to shift a sandbox game into strategic gameplay. Maps such as NAIL, Super Hostile, and Vinyl Fantasy were dominating the map genre for quite some time… until saturation was changed.

These changes destroyed a mapmaker’s ability to balance weapons, items, healing, movement, and pacing effectively within a survival world. In a realm where level and environment design dominated map making, these changes were devastating.

A “survival” map is generally defined as using entirely vanilla Minecraft mechanics in a controlled world environment. This means giving the player gear and tools, and balancing it around Minecraft’s base enchanting system, combat system, and all other aspects of vanilla gameplay

The Changes

^{From http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Hunger#Mechanics}

Originally, food was a gradual drain that you’d only have to deal with once in awhile. This was a great mechanic that worked well. But suddenly, these massive spikes (0.8 and 3.0) were recently added to drain your hunger much faster only for the situations each action was used.

Health Regen Nerf

1.6 Release - July 1, 2013 - Natural health regeneration now costs hunger points/saturation points

~~~Why the health regen nerf is good and points as to why Mojang may have added it.

• A single hit from a hardmode cave spider can not only deal 12-15 hp in damage, but starting in 1.6 they also made it drain 9-11 saturation points from regenerating that health, making a single cave spider hit effectively drain half your food bar. Cave spiders were already a pretty brutal mob, but 1.6 effectively gave them a pretty huge buff.

• Same goes for witches. A witch’s poison does up to 36 damage for the full 45-second duration on hard difficulty, and your health will be trying to regenerate that damage for that entire duration, draining exhaustion every time it does, which is effectively able to drain all of your food bar.

• What is the point of stopping health regeneration below 18 food. Determine pros and cons for this?

Sprint-Jump Nerf

1.7 Release - October 25, 2013 - (unlisted change) Sprint-jumping now adds additional exhaustion. (before, sprint-jumping was just counted as jumping, so it went from 0.2 to 0.8)

~~~Why this is good and points as to why Mojang may have added it.

• Sprinting allows the player to move at around 5.612 meters/second, 30 percent faster than the normal walking speed of around 4.317 m/s.

• Sprinting for ~7.2 seconds drains 1 saturation

• Walking for ~72 seconds drains 1 saturation

~~~A list of when and where you would need to sprint-jump, so that it can be pointed out what styles of gameplay they are nerfing with this change? * Caving * You can’t easily escape anything * You can’t charge into danger

After exhaustion levels were increased, the difference of effectiveness between higher and lower saturation levels were less.
Cooked Chicken 1.5 = 66 sprint jumps
Cooked Steak 1.5 = 102 sprint jumps
Cooked Chicken 1.7 = 16.5 sprint jumps
Cooked Steak 1.7 = 26 sprint jumps
Because the larger numbers of exhaustion were added, the advantages of food with higher saturation was much less noticeable. The saturation of steak allowed for 36 more jumps than chicken in 1.5; however, that number reduced to less than 10 in 1.7.

Overall Points

• they keep slowing gameplay down!
• Melons were a usable food back then. No more. Survival maps pretty much require steak now, but in combat maps these will still drain faster then melons ever did. ~~~Why?

One of the most fun things to do in Minecraft is sprinting to locations, through caves, or across a battlefield. This nerfed all of those activities. For what purpose?

Thoughts

• Three_two (Vinyl Fantasy, Cluster Chunk)

  It felt like they were trying to add a stamina meter to balance the auto-sprint button but, for some reason cheesed it and integrated stamina into hunger/health regen. It was a killer in pvp and CTM for a while. Vechs quit, and CTM morphed into more of shoot & loot / dungeon crawler like gameplay. (which ended up being good for the genre) but, still a killer. PvP basically went from resource based gameplay to give 'em iron blocks and a stack of steaks and let 'em kill each other.

• TrazLander (Nail, Revolution (with Team Whiskey Brigade))

  I consider myself a PvE master; and here I was, playing together with PvP masters, working in harmony with them to complete challenges and destroy an opposing team. I have NEVER seen a genre that could bring these two unique types of people together, with their own unique speciality and style of play, as some PvE/PvP Minecraft maps had. But these hunger changes, they were an extremely massive nerf to these style of maps. Charging anywhere, keeping yourself alive, it all became too difficult. It became un-fun. I miss it. I still haven’t seen another actual fully-released game replicate this unique genre created through custom maps made in Minecraft.

• Thungon (Divided Together/Slippery Slope RFW, Octc collabs)

  When 1.6 snapshots first started coming out, two types of games emerged: quick games(maps without food or resources/minigames), and long games with very simple rules(Ultrahardcore). The middle ground which was previously there vanished. Quicker games were brought into possibility by added gamerules, effects, and commands to opt into faster games by changing the default game for desired results. However, long simple games were brought into greater possibility by changing the core game and making its slow crawling pace the new default. Since commands weren’t added to allow for the old default, it has vanished, and the middle ground along with it.

• Etho (Canadian)

  In my opinion, the issue is how little the food buffer is. If you could eat food until your saturation was maxed out (even though it would waste food) then you wouldn't have to eat as often and the effect of losing hunger from recovery wouldn't happen nearly as frequently. Currently if you get damaged, you pretty much need to eat again within a few seconds only to get your recovery ability back. It would be nice if you could eat a bunch of food so that you would only need to eat like every 15 to 20 seconds if you are taking damage.
  Food is a big part of the game so they definitely need some way of making you eat, but the frequency of it is what I find to make it such a tedious mechanic. I'm not really sure how they should balance the food system to be honest, just that they need to decrease the frequency of eating some how.

Food system fixes

• Lower sprint-jumping, from 0.8 to 0.3 exhaustion. (which is the same as doing/receiving damage)
• Lower exhaustion drain from health regen, from 3.0 to 0.5 exhaustion.
• Stews and Soups are an inventory management nightmare. These foods revert eating back to what it was in BETA 1.7 when no foods would stack. ** These can be annoying, and tend to not be used in survival maps, or survival at all. What I wouldn’t mind seeing is these becoming a “use” item like a pickaxe, where taking sips drains its durability bar. They could also have a .2-second animation (compared to other food’s 1.5 second animation), making them not better, not worse, but a rather nice different option. Saturation and Food granted would need to be lowered, and ingredients increased to balance this, but it would make a unique quick-use food that you might like to have around or be happy to have run across. I can already imagine keeping Mooshrooms in rest-areas to refill people’s soup durability. It’s beautiful and hilariously Minecrafty-thought. ** Same for milk in a bowl for a poison cure.
• Saturation /effect will not reset exhaustion to 0, creating an imbalance for starting Survival maps with any kind of pre-game lobby. In a competitive environment you want things to be even between teams. I know this is a super minor nitpicky thing. But we have to have a way to reset this value, whether added to the saturation /effect, or through other means.
• Knowing how much you’re saturated is invisible. It would be nice if there was an indication for how much you’re saturated.

Survival Mapmaking-Related Balancing Issues

• Add witches to regional difficulty so that they only start spawning after a certain period of time (e.g. 4-5 hours) after a chunk is loaded and/or limit their spawning to swamp biomes.
  • Witch huts were added as a home for witches. These can be viewed as a “dungeon” with a mini-boss that you conquer. Suddenly they threw that out the window and make them spawn randomly anywhere. Here’s this mini-boss-level mob that can randomly spawn right in the beginning of your CTM map, or in the first cave you enter on your freshly made world. I can only assume they were going for a Spider Jockey-level of encounter, but this is nothing like that. This is something that has 26 hp (more than you) in all difficulty levels, debuff you, heal itself, bring you to 1 hp, and drain your entire food bar with a SINGLE attack. This isn’t your basic level mob.

Survival Mapmaking-Related Feature Requests

• Add the ability to edit what witches can throw