Dynamic Nutrition

Dynamic Nutrition

Dynamic Nutrition adds five nutrients to the game: carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Hunger tells you how long it has been since you ate, and the nutrients tell you what you ate. Every food fills them by different amounts, based on real nutritional data, and each one drains at its own rate. Keep a nutrient high and it gives you an effect; let it run low and it gives you a penalty instead.

Nutrients

The values come from real per-100g composition rather than from a category label, so a carrot is worth far more vitamins than cooked beef, and cooked beef far more protein than a carrot. Vegetables are low in carbohydrates, protein and fat and high in vitamins and minerals, as they are in real food.

Each nutrient drains at its own speed. Carbohydrates go fastest, while fat, which the body stores, barely moves.

Variety

Eating the same food again is worth less. Of your last eight meals, every repeat of a food after the first lowers its value, down to a floor it never goes below. A rotation of eight or more foods loses nothing, three foods lose about a third, and a single food eaten every time stays at the floor. Variety changes nutrition only and never hunger, so hunger works the same as without the mod.

Effects

Above its green line, each nutrient gives an effect: Speed for carbohydrates, Strength for protein, Resistance for fat, Regeneration for vitamins and Haste for minerals. Below its red line it gives Slowness, Weakness, Hunger, Blindness or Mining Fatigue instead. All ten work at half the vanilla strength by default, and each one has its own setting from 0 to 100%.

They appear as two icons rather than ten. Every buff your diet earns is grouped under Well Nourished and every penalty under Malnourished, and both show at once when one nutrient is high and another is low. Hover either icon beside your inventory to see which effects it stands for, each in the colour of its nutrient. A potion or beacon that gives the same effect keeps its own icon, so no effect is shown twice. Milk does not clear them, because the cure for a deficiency is food.

The two lines are different for each nutrient and follow how the body stores it. Fat has months of reserve and a real deficiency is rare, so its red line is low. Protein has no store at all, and the vitamin deficiencies are the ones with names. Both lines are marked on every bar, and a mark turns white once you are past it.

On screen

• Press N, or click the small button in your inventory, to open the nutrition screen. The key always works, so if the button overlaps another mod's button you can turn it off in the settings
• A strip beside the hunger bar shows all five nutrients. Each section is ten pixels wide, and one pixel is ten points
• Food tooltips show what a food is worth to you right now, including any reduction for repeats. With advanced tooltips on (F3 and H) they also show where the values came from

Food from other mods

Foods the mod has no data for get their values worked out automatically, in stages. Data written for the food comes first, then item tags, then the recipe, so bread counts as a carbohydrate because wheat does, even through ingredients that cannot be eaten on their own. After that come the food and drink tags, including the ones mods add for their own foods. Then a food served another way, such as a stew in a cup or a serving from a feast, takes the values of the food it comes from. Last, the food's own name is read, so spider meat counts as meat.

In a test pack of 34 food mods (1,183 foods, Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge), 92% of the foods got values this way. Writing values by hand for every mod's food is close to impossible: there are thousands of modded foods, they change from one version to the next, and many are fantasy foods with no real counterpart, so it would take hundreds of hours and still fall behind. Working the values out automatically is what covers the most foods as accurately as possible, and the algorithm will keep improving in future versions.

If a food gets no values, or values that look wrong, please report it on the issue tracker. I am actively looking for edge cases like these. /dynamicnutrition unassigned lists every food that has no values in your game.

For modpack authors

/dynamicnutrition export (operators only) writes the whole table of values to a CSV, with where each value came from, so you can check the balance of your own pack in a spreadsheet.

Settings

Cloth Config gives the mod a settings screen in four tabs: the strip beside the hunger bar, the inventory button and tooltips, variety, and the nutrient effects, where each of the ten has its own strength and either icon can be hidden. Where Cloth Config is optional, the mod runs on its default settings without it.

Supported versions

There is one file per loader, and it picks the right build for the version it is installed on. On NeoForge 1.20.1 the NeoForge file runs the Forge build, which NeoForge supports at that version. Every loader was tested in game on 1.20.1, 1.21.1 and 1.21.11, and Fabric and NeoForge also on 26.1.2, 26.2 and 26.3.

Dependencies

On Forge 1.21.11, Cloth Config has no Forge build, so the settings screen comes from Cloth Config API Forge, a separate project. Because one Forge file covers versions that need different ones, both are listed as optional on the Forge file; install the one for your version.

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.