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Survival, Growth, and Nutrition

Starting limits and growth​

New players start with 6 health and 6 food points by default, represented as 3 hearts and 3 hunger icons on the HUD. Reaching configured experience-level milestones raises the player's maximum health up to the configured level cap.

BehaviorConfiguration
Starting health and foodInitial maximum health; Initial food level
Levels required per growth milestoneLevels per health increase
Health gained per milestoneHealth gained per milestone
Level capLevel cap
Crafting and melee bonuses from levelsCrafting speed per level; Melee damage per level

Maximum health is stored and synchronized by the server. The client HUD renders the actual limit instead of misleading players with vanilla's fixed 20-point scale.

Food energy and eating​

With Use MITE sprint rules enabled, sprinting requires food energy rather than vanilla's fixed food threshold. A player can sprint while either food or overall nutrition remains above zero, so the starting 6-point food limit does not prevent sprinting.

Allow beneficial eating lets a player at the current food limit eat only when the food still has a useful effect. A food is useful when it can restore food, depleted overall nutrition, or a depleted protein, essential-fat, or phytonutrient reserve. Foods without MITE nutrition data retain vanilla eating rules.

The server adds the configured Passive hunger exhaustion per tick every tick. The fraction selected by Passive nutrition consumption ratio is also accumulated against overall nutrition; every 4 accumulated points consume 1 nutrition point. Defaults 0.002 and 0.25 reproduce the MITE rates. Setting the first value to 0 disables both passive drains.

Nutrition is not hunger​

MITE tracks all of the following:

  • Overall nutrition: determines the general physiological reserve.
  • Protein: primarily obtained from meat, fish, eggs, and milk.
  • Essential fats: obtained from selected meat, fish, and prepared food.
  • Phytonutrients: primarily obtained from fruit, vegetables, and crops.
  • Sugar response and insulin resistance: sugary food accumulates a response that slowly decays over time.

Exact food values come from food nutrition data. Server-side balance uses Nutrition per food point, Nutrient reserve per food point, Nutrient reserve decay per tick, Insulin resistance limit, and Insulin resistance decay per tick.

One food cannot satisfy every need

Cooked meat provides substantial protein but may not provide phytonutrients. Fruit replenishes phytonutrients but may also produce a strong sugar response. Long-term survival requires rotating food sources.

Starvation and malnutrition​

Malnutrition begins when protein or phytonutrients fall below 5% of the reserve limit. It raises hunger consumption to 1.5 times the normal rate and reduces natural regeneration to one quarter by default. These penalties use Malnutrition hunger-rate multiplier and Malnutrition natural-healing multiplier. Depleting overall nutrition advances starvation according to Starvation progress per tick and Starvation damage.

Natural healing uses the MITE nutrition-progress formula by default. Enabling Dynamic natural-regeneration threshold switches to vanilla healing with its food thresholds scaled to the current capacity: full capacity for saturated fast healing and capacity minus 2 for normal healing.

Milk cannot remove malnutrition; the missing nutrient must be restored above its threshold. Insulin resistance is also immune to milk and decays according to Insulin resistance decay per tick.

Client interface​

  • Press N to open the nutrition screen by default.
  • Show nutrition button in inventory controls the apple button beside the survival inventory.
  • Show survival HUD controls the HUD.
  • Show detailed tooltips controls food tooltips.
  • Show witch curse HUD controls curse notifications.

Client settings only affect presentation; they cannot change server-owned nutrition or damage rules. See PLR-02, PLR-04, and UX-01 for the corresponding rules.