Needs, Not Necessities

Needs, Not Necessities is a survival overhaul for NeoForge designed to make survival more meaningful without making it tedious.

Instead of constantly babysitting bars and timers, the mod focuses on preparation, clear consequences, and long-term character needs. Hunger, thirst, rest, comfort, meals, regeneration, health, and other systems can all work together—or be enabled and disabled individually to fit your modpack.

Survival Without the Busywork

When the custom Hunger system is enabled, it completely replaces Minecraft's normal hunger mechanics and HUD.

Rather than constantly draining food points, your character moves between readable hunger states based on how well-fed they are. Other systems such as Thirst, Rest, Comfort, Active Meals, passive regeneration, and base health changes can be configured separately.

Pack makers can disable systems they don't want while keeping the rest of the mod intact.

Food and Active Meals

Food is more than a temporary hunger refill.

Prepared foods can provide Active Meal bonuses based on the ingredients used to craft them. If an ingredient is itself a prepared food, its recipe ingredients can also contribute to the final meal.

This works recursively, allowing complex recipes to inherit bonuses from the foods used to make them while safely preventing recipe loops.

Different food groups can stack together normally, while repeatedly using ingredients from the same group gives diminishing returns. By default, each repeated contribution is worth 50% as much as the previous one, although this can be changed through configuration.

Active Meal defaults use common food tags whenever possible, making them compatible with a wide variety of modded foods without requiring special handling for individual items.

Mod Compatibility

Farmer's Delight Nourishment pauses the custom hunger countdown by default, allowing its existing meal mechanics to work naturally alongside Needs, Not Necessities.

Vanilla Instant Health and Regeneration effects also scale with the player's maximum health, allowing them to remain useful when other mods or configurations increase player health.

Compatibility hooks are available for other mods and modpack developers as well.

Inventory Status Panel

The client requires Panels Not Screens 0.1.0 or newer.

Needs, Not Necessities uses it to provide a small draggable survival-status panel inside the inventory.

The carrot handle can be used to:

• Open or collapse the panel
• Move it around the inventory
• Dock it in different positions

Your chosen handle position and panel state are saved locally.

Hovering over the Hunger, Thirst, or Rest rows displays the effects and modifiers currently being applied by that state, making it easy to understand exactly what each need is doing.

The handle icon can also be customized through:

panel_icon_sprite

It accepts either a GUI sprite or an item/block texture and defaults to:

minecraft:item/carrot

Comfort

Comfort lets nearby furniture, lighting, hearths, and similar blocks affect your character.

The mod can automatically recognize common blocks such as:

• Beds
• Chairs
• Benches
• Sofas
• Tables
• Lights
• Hearths

These automatic classifications are generated when datapacks reload and cached so the game does not need to repeatedly perform expensive matching during normal gameplay.

Modpack authors can customize these groups using a generated server configuration.

Setting the configuration to:

{}

completely disables automatic block matching.

Datapacks always take priority over automatic detection. If a block or block tag is explicitly assigned through a datapack, Needs, Not Necessities will use that definition instead.

This gives modpack creators full control while still providing sensible automatic compatibility out of the box.

Built for Modpacks

Nearly every major feature is modular and configurable.

Needs, Not Necessities is intended to provide a survival framework rather than force one specific style of survival gameplay. A pack can use the entire system or simply use the portions that complement its existing mechanics.