When starting a new world, people often pay close attention to their hunger bar and how fast it depletes; especially when you spawn in a desert with little to no food resources. You’ll want to keep it high at all times as it will allow you to move quicker in your world, and it never becomes irrelevant; it’s always something to pay attention to. But what if you can’t eat? How do you fix Minecraft not letting you eat?
There are three reasons why Minecraft might not let you eat. It’s either that your hunger bar is full, so you have to lose the hunger to be able to eat, you are playing the game in peaceful mode, or your key binding is all wrong, and you need to set them up. Standardly, the key binding for eating is the right mouse button, so if you’d like to eat, you need to hold the food in your hand and hold use.
Now that you know the potential reasons why Minecraft won’t let you eat, I want to seek out a more in-depth answer to all of these questions and explain how the hunger mechanics work, so you never have to wonder about it again if you’re ever faced with a similar problem in the rest of this article.
The hunger bar and how it works
When you load up a new survival world, 2 bars are relevant to food and how great your time playing out a world will be: the hunger and health bar. The hunger bar is presented as ten drumstick icons, and the health bar is presented as ten heart icons. Each drumstick represents two values, so in reality, your hunger bar is full when it’s at ten drumsticks but 20 otherwise.
The hunger bar depletes slowly or fast, depending on what action you are performing, but it doesn’t deplete in sets of 2 for each drumstick. It depletes gradually, and you might not notice a change when you first start performing an action like mining or sprinting. But it’s still clearly visible when you pay close attention to it.
What you might not know, but what is still an incredibly important part of how fast the hunger bar depletes is food saturation. Food saturation is essentially determined by the quality of the food you eat. What you eat also matters in Minecraft, as it turns out. Let’s look at some of the most saturating foods in Minecraft.
Food saturation values
The only immediate action you see when you eat food is how much your hunger bar restores itself and how much health you restore when the hunger bar gets filled to 20, but what you don’t see is the saturation value of each food which is essential of what quality your food is. Is it a simple carbohydrate or a complex one? Does it have protein and good fats, or is it just filled with simple sugars?
If you know anything about macronutrients in real life, it might be easy for you to guess the saturation values of certain foods in Minecraft. I’m not going to bother you with the details, so I’ll list a few of the most saturating foods that’ll make your hunger bar deplete a lot slower:
- Rabbit Stew – Although rabbit stew has a saturation value of 12, which is by far one of the highest saturation values of any food in the game, to get to a rabbit stew, you’ll need a lot of ingredients, so other foods might be more valuable.
- Cooked Porkchop – The cooked Porkchop, with its saturation value of 12.8, makes you feel full for much longer, has a higher saturation value than rabbit stew, and it’s much easier to obtain since all you have to do is kill a pig and cook the raw porkchop in a furnace.
- Cooked Chicken – Cooked chicken is made in the same way as a Porkchop and has a saturation value of 7.2
- Cooked Mutton – Cooked mutton is prepared in the same way as cooked chicken and porkchop and has a saturation value of 9.6
Do you lose hunger if you stay still in Minecraft?
Have you ever gone AFK to stack up on items with your automatic farm only to come back after a while to realize you’ve died? The cause might just be that you were too hungry and died after a while. Although your hunger bar depletes slowly when you’re not moving, it still does if your saturation bar is not full, and if you go AFK when your hunger bar is not full, it is an indication of your saturation levels being completely gone, which will make you lose hunger.
To combat this issue, it’s best to eat something nutritious, fill your hunger bar to full, and then go AFK. This way, your saturation bar will get filled, and you won’t lose hunger at all since the saturation bar won’t deplete if you’re not moving.
Creative and peaceful mode hunger bar
As I mentioned, one reason why Minecraft won’t let you eat is that you’re in peaceful mode. In creative, however, you should still be able to eat even though there’s no hunger or health bar in it. The hunger bar still depletes but doesn’t affect you at all, so if you eat something in creative mode and can’t eat anymore, it’s an indication that your hunger bar is full.
Eating key bindings
As I said, your eat key bind should be on your right mouse button. In Bedrock Edition Minecraft but on consoles, you’ll either press and hold the L2 button or the LT button for Xbox users. On Wii U, you’ll find die by pressing and holding the ZL button; the same holds for Nintendo Switches. Finally, you’ll tap and hold the center button on Pocket Edition Minecraft.
If your hunger bar isn’t full and you aren’t performing the eating animation, your key binds are likely different for one reason or another. To change them, you need to go into the settings menu and find the Controls option. From there, you need to find the eating key bind and replace it with whatever you see fit.
Is there an eating command?
You can find the command that allows you to eat in Minecraft. Still, this command is hard coded into Minecraft using computing language and is there to make eating a functioning mechanic. Hence, no, there’s no command in-game that you can type in to eat in Minecraft. Why would you even need it now that you know how to fix not eating issues in Minecraft?
