Dynamic Nutrition

Hunger tells you how long since you last ate. It says nothing about what you ate.

Dynamic Nutrition adds the other half. Five nutrients, filled by different foods, drained at different rates, with values built from real nutritional composition rather than from a category label. Eat well and you are rewarded. Live on bread and you will notice.

Five nutrients, from real data

Carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals.

A carrot is worth far more vitamins than cooked beef, and cooked beef is worth far more protein than a carrot, because the numbers come from actual per-100g composition. Vegetables are poor in macronutrients and rich in micronutrients, exactly as they are in life, so the mod rewards the diet you would expect it to.

Each nutrient drains at its own speed. Carbohydrates burn fastest, fat is storage and barely moves. Five bars that emptied together would be one bar with five labels.

Variety is the mechanic

Eating the same food over and over is worth less. Of your last eight meals, every repeat of a food beyond the first costs part of its value, down to a floor it never falls below.

A rotation of eight or more foods costs you nothing. Three foods costs about a third. One food forever lands on the floor. It affects nutrition only and never hunger, so it composes with vanilla and with every other food mod instead of fighting them.

A diet worth keeping

Every nutrient carries its own effect. Above its green line, carbohydrates give Speed, protein Strength, fat Resistance, vitamins Regeneration and minerals Haste. Below its red line each one turns into Slowness, Weakness, Hunger, Blindness or Mining Fatigue. Every one of the ten runs at half the vanilla strength by default, and every one has its own setting from nothing to full.

Two icons, not ten. Every buff your diet earns shows as Well Nourished and every debuff as Malnourished, both at once when one nutrient is high and another is low. Hover either one beside your inventory and it lists exactly which effects it stands for, each coloured like its nutrient. No mystery debuff, no wondering for three days why you feel slow.

A potion or a beacon giving the same effect keeps its own icon, so you never see an effect twice. Milk does not clear them either: the cure for a deficiency is food.

The two thresholds differ per nutrient, and they are argued from the body rather than from the spreadsheet. Fat has months of reserve and its deficiency is close to unheard of, so it is forgiving. Protein has no storage pool at all. Vitamins are the deficiency diseases with names. Both lines are marked on every bar, and a mark turns white once you are past it.

Every food mod works, with nothing to configure

Values resolve in four stages. Explicit data first, then item tags, then the recipe graph, so bread is a carbohydrate because wheat is. Anything still unresolved is worked out from the c:foods convention tags that both loaders ship.

That last stage is why a food from a mod nobody has written a compatibility patch for still feeds you something sensible. On a modded test instance, three quarters of the foods present resolved without a single line of configuration.

What you see

• Press N, or use the small button in your inventory, for the full screen. The keybind is the primary route, so if the button ever collides with another mod you can simply turn it off
• A strip beside the hunger bar shows all five at a glance. Each section is ten pixels, so one pixel is worth exactly ten points
• Food tooltips show what that food is worth to you right now, including when variety has reduced it. Hold F3 and H for where the value came from

For modpack authors

/dynamicnutrition export writes the whole resolved table to a CSV, including how each value was derived, so you can check the balance of your own pack in a spreadsheet.

/dynamicnutrition unassigned lists any food that resolved to nothing.

Settings

Cloth Config is optional. Install it for a settings screen in four tabs: the HUD strip, the inventory button and tooltips, the variety mechanic, and the nutrient effects, where each of the ten has its own strength and either icon can be hidden. Without it the mod runs on its defaults.

Credits

Several of the interface textures are derived from Minecraft's own and remain Mojang's property.

An original mod, written from scratch. Not a fork or a port.