Spoilage Enhanced

Food in Minecraft never goes off. This mod makes it — and it keeps going off while the food sits in your chests.

How it works

Every edible carries its own freshness timer, counted in game time. When the fresh period runs out the item turns stale; when the stale period runs out it turns rotten. Nothing is destroyed — rotten food stays in your inventory and still has a use.

Shelf life is per item, roughly by how fast the real thing goes off. Milk lasts about half a game day, raw fish and meat about one, produce and cooked dishes one and a half, bread and baked goods two, dried and preserved food up to four. Cooking and preserving are worth doing because they buy you time, not just saturation.

The three stages

Milk is a special case: stale milk still clears your effects, rotten milk does not and poisons you instead. Feeding rotten food to an animal cancels breeding and leaves it poisoned and weak. Spoiled items cannot be cooked.

Stacks rot individually

A stack of ten apples can genuinely be five fresh and five rotten. Hover it and the tooltip shows how many of each; hold Shift for the breakdown and the time to the next change. When you take from a stack, the worst piece goes first — otherwise splitting a stack between chests would launder spoilage away.

Storage is not a freezer

Food ages in placed chests, barrels and shulker boxes, in your ender chest, in hoppers, in storage minecarts, in fridges and brewing stands, in villager and wandering-trader inventories, in llama, donkey and mule chests, and in an allay's hands. Bundles age too, including a bundle inside a shulker box inside a chest.

Food found in dungeon and village chests arrives already aged: roughly 60% fresh, 30% stale, 10% rotten.

Rot is a resource

Rotten food is the best compost in the game — a guaranteed composter fill, against 65% for stale and 30% for fresh. Spoiled produce is worth carrying home.

You cannot plant rotten seeds. A growing crop has no freshness clock at all: the timer starts when the plant is actually ripe, so nothing rots in the ground. Dig one up early and you get rotten produce for your trouble.

It works with other mods

Food from other mods is detected automatically — from the item's own components, from the conventional c:foods tag, and from recipes. A fruiting tree whose fruit is picked by hand, and therefore appears in no loot table, is learned from the harvest itself. Nothing needs to be configured for a modded food to start spoiling.

What you see

A freshness bar on the item, a coloured stage in the tooltip, and a line on the HUD for the block you are looking at. Five languages, loaded from your game's language setting with no resource pack: English, Русский, Українська, Español (España), Español (Latinoamérica).

Configuring it

config/spoilage_enhanced.json opens with a step-by-step guide: how to make an item spoil, how to give it a custom shelf life, how to stop something spoiling. Anything you write there is never overwritten by auto-detection.

The global pace is one number — spoilage_speed_multiplier. 2.0 spoils twice as fast, 0.5 twice as slow. Apply changes in game with /spoilage config reload; no restart needed.

Installing

One jar for Fabric, Forge and NeoForge. Required on both client and server. On Fabric it needs the Fabric API.