Famine is a lightweight survival-focused mod that rebalances Minecraft’s hunger system to make food production and farming essential parts of progression.

All food items, including those added by other mods, restore significantly less hunger and saturation, while hunger depletes faster through increased exhaustion. This creates a more demanding survival experience where players must plan their trips, invest in farms, and manage resources instead of relying on a small supply of high-value food.

Food is no longer a quick reset button.
Movement has weight.
Recovery takes planning.

Food Rebalance

Every food restores a fixed number of hunger points
2 points = 1 hunger shank
Raw foods barely sustain you

Saturation Reworked

A single multiplier controls how long food lasts
Safety cap prevents extreme values

Movement-Based Hunger Drain

Sprinting increases hunger drain
Sprint-jumping is discouraged, not disabled
Hunger depletes more slowly at low levels
Movement has weight and cost

Sleep Costs Food

Sleeping consumes hunger
Sleep will never reduce hunger to zero (½-shank minimum)

Starvation & Debuffs

Starvation damage at 0 hunger behaves normally
Slowness at low hunger
Mining Fatigue and Weakness at critical hunger
Low hunger is survivable, but dangerous

Health Regeneration Reworked

Healing starts above 3 shanks
Healing is much slower at low hunger
Healing consumes hunger
No instant recovery after combat

Respawn Balance

Respawn hunger scales with difficulty:
Peaceful / Easy: full hunger
Normal: 8 shanks
Hard: 6 shanks

Multiplayer First

All gameplay logic is server-side
Configurations are enforced per-world
Clients cannot desync hunger values
Designed for dedicated servers and long-term worlds

Configuration

Famine is highly configurable via server config:

Per-food hunger values
Global saturation behavior
Defaults provided for all vanilla foods

Credits & Inspiration

This mod was inspired by ProgWML6’s Hunger Overhaul, a classic mod that explored deeper hunger mechanics back in 1.12.2.

Famine is a modern, Forge-native reinterpretation of that philosophy for Minecraft 1.20.1

Modpack & Distribution Policy

You may include this mod in CurseForge-hosted modpacks provided that:

The mod is not rehosted in any form
The mod or modpack is not sold, monetized, or gated behind paid access
All terms of the mod’s license for the relevant version are followed

If you’re unsure whether a specific use is allowed, please refer to the license or ask before distributing.