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Can someone please enlighten me what would be the best choice for a renewable source of food that would restore a good amount of hunger? I had a mushroom farm in my 1.7 map that worked quite well, but lately I hear the a lot of talk about chickens?

Also I'm not sure how farming/slaughtering chickens, or pigs, or cows, works with the way animals do/don't spawn now. I'm a bit confused on that whole side of things.

Very keen on some kind of automatic harvesting system if it's possible, where I can just press a button and it'll harvest/slaughter, without me having to do much (or any) resetting of the farm - I know it is with mushrooms but not sure how you manage that with animals.

Is a mushroom farm still the way to go, or are there better ways now?

Well I would probably keep a nice sized Mushroom farm along with one to get Bread. Then get chickens but make sure they lay eggs before you kill them all. Once you test those then you choose the one best for you. There is no "better" way.

chickens are probably the best, but will require a good amount of eggs to start chicken farming...

Wheat is still really effective too, but requires a lot more attention and time once you get it going...

Fish are my personal first choice, because they're easy to get. You just need a pool of still water and a fishing rod. They're about as filling as bread, so they're not the best food item out there.

My personal favorite is mushroom soup. Since bonemeal grows giant mushrooms, its extremely easy to get mushrooms. Like one giant mushroom seems to give you about 10 of that type of mushroom. So you can very easily turn 1 red and brown mushroom into 10 bowls of mushrooms soup if u have 2 bonemeal and 9 wooden planks. Mushroom soup giving i think 4 hearts. The one big disadvantage is that mushroom soup doesnt stack. but it is the msot reliable in my opinion. This will be especialy true once notch makes animals more rare. So if u dont want to mess with animal breeding u can just spwnd 30 seconds making like 15 bowls of soup and your golden for a looong time.

Quote from Feddlefew

Fish are my personal first choice, because they're easy to get. You just need a pool of still water and a fishing rod. They're about as filling as bread, so they're not the best food item out there.

The problem is that fishing is really slow after a while...


The problem with mushrooms and bread is that you need a crafting table to make well meats don't...

zombie flesh, it spawns every night

Quote from Saribabe

Can someone please enlighten me what would be the best choice for a renewable source of food that would restore a good amount of hunger? I had a mushroom farm in my 1.7 map that worked quite well, but lately I hear the a lot of talk about chickens?

Also I'm not sure how farming/slaughtering chickens, or pigs, or cows, works with the way animals do/don't spawn now. I'm a bit confused on that whole side of things.

Very keen on some kind of automatic harvesting system if it's possible, where I can just press a button and it'll harvest/slaughter, without me having to do much (or any) resetting of the farm - I know it is with mushrooms but not sure how you manage that with animals.

Is a mushroom farm still the way to go, or are there better ways now?

As far as efficiency goes, a wheat farm is the best. Animals DO spawn, however it seems as though you need at least 1 or 2 nearby in order for that to happen, so don't go killing all the cows, pigs, and chickens you find. The main advantage a wheat farm is that unlike mushroom soup (the last time I checked it anyways), bread can stack, and mushroom soup cannot. Also, wheat takes less time to grow.

Chicken farming is slow. You have to wait for them to lay eggs before you can kill em for meat. If you have a large farm, you get more eggs, but you also need more eggs. I have been thinking about possibly a dual chicken farm- make a batch of chickens who only drop eggs, then take the dropped eggs and put em in a hatcher/killer. This may work, but my computer starts to lag when I have a lot of chickens.

I'm thinking wheat for bread is probably the best renewable food source ATM.

The nether is the most efficient once you have iron stuff bow and fishing rod

you kill some pigmen with your iron sword you'll get cooked pork, you kill ghasts with bows and thats it.


Easy way to farm pigmen:
1 go to nether, you'll need a fishing rod and swords
2go on a nether mountain(at least 2 blocks high so you cant jump up
3 piller up
4 make sure there is no way that pigmen come from the back or the top somewhere
5 make out a group of pigmen and fish one of them up on the mountain
6 kill him
7 reapeat step 6 till all the pigmen are gone
8 go down from the mountain and make more pigmen angry
9 piller up again after you sprint there
10 repeat step 6 till 10 untill you have a lot of food

i made 140 cooked pork chops in 20 minits

Fish. They provide 3 foodits, stack, and can be easily acquired in infinite supply anywhere you feel like having a pond.

I used to use mushroom soup, but this update makes that a bad choice.

While testing out this update on a new world I ate zombie meat the first time I starved, found so many zombie spawners early on so had unlimited of it. But the poison effect makes it undesirable even if its easily circumvented.

But then I got my wheat farm finished and have unlimited bread. It heals a decent amount and stacks.

I finally found melon seeds, and melon farms are somewhat slow to start up, but once it's going it provides melon slices so fast. The small hunger amount it heals is a bit of a drawback tho, and actually finding melon seeds can be a pain.

I'm setting up a chicken farm, which is a great thing to do for feathers, eggs, and chicken meat, but it can take a while to set up, and I'm not at the point where it's an efficient food source. With a ton of chickens it seems like a rewarding process tho.

Hunting a herd of cattle or pigs in lands you don't mind depleting the animals is a highly efficient food source, but less than renewable. But I've gotten a full stack of raw beef doing that, and cooked it lasts for a very long time.

I haven't tried hunting zombie pigmen yet, that sounds highly efficient and renewable, tho has some setup time and sounds riskier than a wheat farm.

Cake and cookies sound awful now, not that they were efficient before, but now they seem even worse.

Personally I don't have the patience to fish all my food. Early on it's a decent unlimited food source, but slow going.

So all in all I'd say a wheat farm is the best bet. Easiest to setup to levels where it's more than you'll ever need. And it seems to heal around 2.5 hunger.

I'm relying on my wheat farm at the moment. It's pretty modest by some standards, but after one harvest (of about half the farm) I'm already making a profit.

It's certainly not something that you should use right off the bat (hunting for meat is most useful early on), but it's definitely the most reliable.