
Dynamic Nutrition
A realistic diet and nutrition mod based on real food data, where every food gives carbs, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Eating a varied diet and cooking your meals gives you effects for each nutrient, and it works with most food mods
Compatibility
Minecraft: Java Edition
Platforms
Supported environments
Tags
Creators
Details
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.
Activity
Food burned draws on the nutrients your activity uses: carbs when running or swimming, protein when fighting, minerals when working with tools, vitamins when healing, fat in the cold and when swimming, and vitamins and minerals in the heat. The total stays the same, so this moves decay and adds none. Protein and fat also keep you full for longer than carbs.
With Tough As Nails, Cold Sweat, Legendary Survival Overhaul, Survive or Frostiful installed, your real body temperature decides whether you count as cold or hot, on the versions and loaders listed in the README. Elsewhere the biome decides.
AppleSkin's saturation preview shows what a meal will really give. Tested versions and loaders are in the README.
Ketosis
A full in-game day of low carbs with fat to spare turns your body to fat for fuel: carbs barely fall, fat falls faster, low carbs stop slowing you and meals last longer. Your fat percentage turns yellow while it lasts, and hovering it explains why. Eating real carbs ends 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. It sits above the other bars in that column, so a bar from another mod keeps its place and the strip moves up. Tested with Tough As Nails, Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks, Thirst Was Taken, Legendary Survival Overhaul, Survive, AsteorBar, ParCool, Cold Sweat and Dehydration, on the loaders and versions listed in the README
- The food finder opens from the question mark on the nutrition screen, or by clicking a nutrient. Pick a nutrient to list the foods with the most of it, or use the star for the best foods for you right now. Foods that can harm you have their names in red
- Holding a food previews it: the strip fills in white up to where the meal would land, and the nutrition screen shows a pale extension on each bar
- 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, including base values for common modded ingredients such as flour, butter, cheese and tofu, 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. A dish takes the mix of its ingredients in proportion, so fried rice is mostly carbohydrates, and its size follows its hunger value. 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 18 test packs with over 400 food mods on 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 (30,668 foods), 97.6% of the foods got values this way; on NeoForge 26.2 (28 food mods) 99.5%, and on 26.1.2 (45 food mods) 98.5%. 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. A second file
lists the ingredients each value was derived from.
Languages
English, Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Korean. The translations are machine-assisted; corrections are welcome on the issue tracker.
Settings
Cloth Config gives the mod a settings screen in five tabs: the strip beside the hunger bar, the inventory button and tooltips, variety, hunger, and the nutrient effects, where each of the ten has its own strength, from 0 to turn it off to 100, and either icon can be hidden. Where Cloth Config is optional, the mod runs on its default settings without it.
Supported versions
| Minecraft | Fabric | NeoForge | Forge |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26.1 to 26.3 | Yes | Yes | n/a |
| 1.21.11 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1.21 to 1.21.1 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1.20 to 1.20.1 | Yes | 1.20.1 | Yes |
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
| Mod | Fabric | NeoForge | Forge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fabric API | Required | n/a | n/a |
| Cloth Config | Required on 1.21.x, optional otherwise | Required on 1.21.x, optional otherwise | Optional |
| Cloth Config API Forge | n/a | n/a | Optional, for the settings screen on 1.21.11 |
| Mod Menu | Optional | n/a | n/a |
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.

