Like Minecrak states below you, I do feel that this is still a valid concern of mine and that's why I bumped it. I think it would be far worse to make an additional post about the same gripe when I already have a post about it. Report if you like. I bumped to show how much I'm still annoyed by the hunger depletion rate.
Yes but we don't have to graze like cattle all day long to get enough food to heal, and stay alive.
Precisely my problem. Like others here, there's plenty of food in the game to have. I understand saturation and primarily eat cooked meat. This is an additional annoyance, because there is little point in eating anything else. Before they increased the depletion, it was enjoyable to take a stack of bread or chicken down with me into the mines, but that's pointless now. Then consider the really low sat foods like melon and apples which might just be worse than zombie meat anymore.
Having the food isn't the problem. Eating after every few moments and during every fight is annoying. Once I'm well-armored, it's not like the fights are dangerous, but having to eat so freaking often gets old really, really fast.
I can protect the villagers. I can be careful and sleep until they are well fortified. I even like the mobs of zombies when I'm fighting and gaining xp. But, it's still annoying to constantly have to do these things and frankly, the doors break too easily now. We could use a middle ground here.
I've always wondered why the villagers don't fight back. All of the villagers aren't going to have the know-how to do so, but why aren't there village warriors?
Just something that always bugged me.
That's why the golems are there to defend them and until 1.6, they were able to successfully. It made a nice blend and worked well. Now, it's broken.
I stand by my post. I have no problem with making the game more challenging and exciting. I have a problem with making it more irritating to play and the hunger depletion is just bothersome.
wow people say that they miss when everything was difficult/hard to find and now that they made it more difficult like you requested your all like *its to hard* i like it
That's why the golems are there to defend them and until 1.6, they were able to successfully. It made a nice blend and worked well. Now, it's broken.
Yes, thanks to zombies breaking down doors. I think that addition was kind of cool if you had a house with 1 door and you sometimes had to defend your front door from home invasion, but for a large house or a village, it destroys everything gameplay-wise.
It's one of the main reasons people don't usually make open towns even though the devs should encourage making towns open since, like you said, the iron golem is supposed to act as the deter for the enemy.
At first (when everyone wanted it removed), hunger didn't bother me. Now, with these overpowered zombie spawning mechanics, food and tools drain rather quickly. What makes it worse? Healing only really occurs when you have a full energy bar, below 90% you don't heal at all. That's always been an issue for me, I think it should heal you exponentially slower until 75%, stopping completely at 70%.
All of these changes don't make the game harder, just more annoying. It discourages you from actually playing the game. Zombies spawn extremely easily and they're the most common mob, so it's not even really survival anymore, it's "zombie apocalypse" mode. It turns the game into a huge uncomfortability. "Want a door? Nope, they'll break that down. Under the safety of a cliff? Nope, they'll seek you out and jump off the cliff to get to you. Sun starting to rise, no zombies around, is it safe? No, some zombies spawned, now they're on fire. I'll just stand still as to not deplete my hunger." I'm not going to be surprised if they make zombies able to find buttons, levers, and pressure plates to intentionally use to get in, and bust dirt and wood blocks to get in, as well as swim up waterfalls so the only safe entrance to a base will be pillaring, breaking cobblestone, or activating wooden buttons with arrows.
Villages are incapable of defending themselves, as other have stated. I have *never* seen a village with a naturally spawned iron golem. Zombies' new "sight" range paired with villager golems' slowness and poor AI are an incredibly bad combination. 1 or even 2 golems may not be enough to protect a normal village, due to the fact that they are large, slow, and don't coordinate. How villages typically spawn isn't usually "iron golem friendly" due to how close they are, iron golems often get stuck on other mobs trying to travel in the opposite direction, especially other iron golems. Sometimes they follow each other instead of having individual "rounds" making multiple iron golems effectively useless. They also target non-zombie hostiles that don't even pose a threat to villagers, and I have seen them get killed by a single skeleton due to the knockback from the arrows.
I think quite a few things need to be re-worked. Zombie's huge sight radius is a problem. not because they engage you sooner, but because they are effectively omniscient in a certain area, which combined with their overpowered spawning makes you easily engulfed in zombies. Instead, if they can see so far, they actually need a sight-and-hearing based awareness. If a zombie was 100 blocks away looking straight at you, he'd see you. If his back was turned, he would not. If you placed/broke a block near him or shot an arrow (missing him), he'd turn around to see what it was. Different actions would have different noise levels, and it would lead the zombie to investigate, instead of hordes seeking you out.
Villages need to be reworked entirely. They need to have better house detecting mechanics, ALL houses need to be fully lit and have doors. Villagers need to be able to defend themselves from the start. Not just iron golems, either, something quicker. Maybe manned turrets as well? Something to really give villages a fighting chance. Imagine if you started attacking villagers and they went to battlestations on top of the houses, and the blacksmith's turret was shooting arrows at you and the priest was shooting potions at you. I'm not saying *all* villages should be able to defend themselves completely, but they should last more than one night if you're nearby. It would also be cool if trading actually affected the defenses of a village, like you sell 1 dispenser to a villager that wants it, it goes away, it is spawned, and you get a large relationship bonus compared to regular trading. Heck, if there were plots spawned outside of villages, if you traded them materials they could build more houses.
Most of the issues I have are annoyances and not difficulties, ones that are not noticed on an established world (well, except the new zombie mechanics).... I feel like if they actually make things different, instead of just changing values, they can add difficulty without annoyance. Especially when it comes to mob AI (which is not finished because they moved the guy they hired for AI to scrolls.....). Right now mobs are really predictable. You can snipe them from long distances, hit them from behind blocks, and knock them into pits. It would be a whole different experience if there were completely different AI modes (idle, investigating, attacking, defending, fleeing), and mobs were more aware of the environment (when attacking/defending) and could coordinate with other mobs (of the same or similar species).
And by that last part I mean that zombies would be sort of a "linking mob". They could coordinate with all other humanoid mobs (skeletons, endermen, zombie pigmen, zombie villagers) in the same state, whereas other mobs would only be able to coordinate with their own species and zombies.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Back in Beta 1.7.3, you couldn't get unbreaking on your tools or armor. With every hit your armor degraded, and as it did, the armor lost armor points as well. This meant that you became less protected the more you got hit.
The biggest thing was that your health did not regenerate at all. You had to eat food to regain health.
This is really no different. The more you take damage, the more you need to eat. It's almost a throwback to the beta days. I for one, like the hunger change. It makes me actually nervous about combat, rather than just hurling myself into the swarm and knowing that I will survive with 8 hearts left.
At first (when everyone wanted it removed), hunger didn't bother me. Now, with these overpowered zombie spawning mechanics, food and tools drain rather quickly. What makes it worse? Healing only really occurs when you have a full energy bar, below 90% you don't heal at all. That's always been an issue for me, I think it should heal you exponentially slower until 75%, stopping completely at 70%. Now it's more of a system of food healing out of combat and potions/golden apples healing in combat, which makes quite a bit of sense to me. On top of that, food piles up extremely quickly in the old system, it's nice that you actually deplete in food so that the food system isn't almost entirely null.
All of these changes don't make the game harder, just more annoying. It discourages you from actually playing the game. Zombies spawn extremely easily and they're the most common mob, so it's not even really survival anymore, it's "zombie apocalypse" mode. It turns the game into a huge uncomfortability. "Want a door? Nope, they'll break that down. Under the safety of a cliff? Nope, they'll seek you out and jump off the cliff to get to you. Sun starting to rise, no zombies around, is it safe? No, some zombies spawned, now they're on fire. I'll just stand still as to not deplete my hunger." I'm not going to be surprised if they make zombies able to find buttons, levers, and pressure plates to intentionally use to get in, and bust dirt and wood blocks to get in, as well as swim up waterfalls so the only safe entrance to a base will be pillaring, breaking cobblestone, or activating wooden buttons with arrows. They did change the sight distance back for 1.7 so it's not as bad now. Not only that, but the vanilla mobs are weak, so don't even give me that.
Villages are incapable of defending themselves, as other have stated. I have *never* seen a village with a naturally spawned iron golem. Zombies' new "sight" range paired with villager golems' slowness and poor AI are an incredibly bad combination. 1 or even 2 golems may not be enough to protect a normal village, due to the fact that they are large, slow, and don't coordinate. How villages typically spawn isn't usually "iron golem friendly" due to how close they are, iron golems often get stuck on other mobs trying to travel in the opposite direction, especially other iron golems. Sometimes they follow each other instead of having individual "rounds" making multiple iron golems effectively useless. They also target non-zombie hostiles that don't even pose a threat to villagers, and I have seen them get killed by a single skeleton due to the knockback from the arrows. I think every spawned village should start out with an iron golem, making them better wouldn't be good because it would make them too powerful if you made one yourself.
I think quite a few things need to be re-worked. Zombie's huge sight radius is a problem. not because they engage you sooner, but because they are effectively omniscient in a certain area, which combined with their overpowered spawning makes you easily engulfed in zombies. Instead, if they can see so far, they actually need a sight-and-hearing based awareness. If a zombie was 100 blocks away looking straight at you, he'd see you. If his back was turned, he would not. If you placed/broke a block near him or shot an arrow (missing him), he'd turn around to see what it was. Different actions would have different noise levels, and it would lead the zombie to investigate, instead of hordes seeking you out. Already addressed this I guess..
Villages need to be reworked entirely. They need to have better house detecting mechanics, ALL houses need to be fully lit and have doors. Villagers need to be able to defend themselves from the start. Not just iron golems, either, something quicker. Maybe manned turrets as well? Something to really give villages a fighting chance. Imagine if you started attacking villagers and they went to battlestations on top of the houses, and the blacksmith's turret was shooting arrows at you and the priest was shooting potions at you. I'm not saying *all* villages should be able to defend themselves completely, but they should last more than one night if you're nearby. It would also be cool if trading actually affected the defenses of a village, like you sell 1 dispenser to a villager that wants it, it goes away, it is spawned, and you get a large relationship bonus compared to regular trading. Heck, if there were plots spawned outside of villages, if you traded them materials they could build more houses. All houses do need doors to be considered houses as of now, but any specifications beyond what it is now would limit houses too much. A house would be perfectly safe if it consisted of 1-block and a wall, no zombies would be able to attack the villager, you don't need it lighted in that case, the exceptions go on and on.. Trading villagers dispensers as turrets would be very cool and would make up for the lack of defense, not really sure where they would spawn though. Them building more homes is iffy, would you have to clear land for them first like in mods? What if you built around the village yourself and simply want emeralds in return for your supplies (not wanting them to expand). Although I guess the 'being required to clear land first' would be the solution to that.
Most of the issues I have are annoyances and not difficulties, ones that are not noticed on an established world (well, except the new zombie mechanics).... I feel like if they actually make things different, instead of just changing values, they can add difficulty without annoyance. Especially when it comes to mob AI (which is not finished because they moved the guy they hired for AI to scrolls.....). Right now mobs are really predictable. You can snipe them from long distances, hit them from behind blocks, and knock them into pits. It would be a whole different experience if there were completely different AI modes (idle, investigating, attacking, defending, fleeing), and mobs were more aware of the environment (when attacking/defending) and could coordinate with other mobs (of the same or similar species). They don't need better AI, they need to be able to crouch. They can't do much more beyond that, unless they did an entire update as an AI update.
And by that last part I mean that zombies would be sort of a "linking mob". They could coordinate with all other humanoid mobs (skeletons, endermen, zombie pigmen, zombie villagers) in the same state, whereas other mobs would only be able to coordinate with their own species and zombies. It would be cool if mobs had some sort of 'wait for me' AI where they try to stay out of view for 5 seconds, if the other nearby mobs don't catch up to them they go on without them or if a skeleton recognizes that other mobs are going to attack a player that they stand behind the other mobs. Maybe even have mob personalities, where some kamikaze and some wait behind a wall, that way they aren't as predictable.
Back in Beta 1.7.3, you couldn't get unbreaking on your tools or armor. With every hit your armor degraded, and as it did, the armor lost armor points as well. This meant that you became less protected the more you got hit. The biggest thing was that your health did not regenerate at all. You had to eat food to regain health. This is really no different. The more you take damage, the more you need to eat. It's almost a throwback to the beta days. I for one, like the hunger change. It makes me actually nervous about combat, rather than just hurling myself into the swarm and knowing that I will survive with 8 hearts left.
In beta 1.7.3, eating was instantaneous and didn't make you completely vulnerable for a couple seconds.
Having to stop and eat while being swarmed by zombies makes you get hit more, which makes you need to eat more. By the end of the night, you've eaten five or six steaks for a battle that would only have taken one or two before. This doesn't increase difficulty, it's just tedious. (this is regarding the recent change in hunger stuff, not a comparison of 1.7.3 beta to now.)
They changed it so that regenerating half of a heart depletes half of a meatstickthing or equal amount of saturation. This was not a good change and should be reverted.
Despite being a bit tedious, I like the zombie siege and the fast baby zombies. Way too much rotten flesh though.
I also like to rescue villages I find as a challenge. Blocks in front of doors work well but as stated earlier, it's glitched and zombies can spawn inside houses and reach villagers through corners.
The constant eating during battle is only slightly annoying and I can live with it either way. I would be in favor of Mojang relaxing the hunger a bit and upping the damage from mobs to compensate.
One other thing Minecraft needs now is a Zombie "lure" of some sort. Perhaps something crafted/built that the player can set out and Zombies will home in on instead of villagers. These could be used to lure Zombies away from villagers into traps.
I think you're all forgetting a major factor here:
Alpha, before "hunger," you needed to eat just to heal. Food didn't stack, and there was no guarantee that you'd get food from killing a pig or cow. Don't wanna eat? Don't fight. Don't wanna defend a village? Move away, keep its location in mind, and head back when you need to trade or need some Testificate interaction. If you're not ready to defend a village, then do what must be done: if you love it, you must let it go. Personally, I've never had an issue with any of it. If I need to eat, I'll kill mobs by day and stock up. If I don't need to eat, like back in Alpha, I stock up just to heal. Don't whine if you're not prepared. Yeah, ok, so you fight a bit, heal up, then you need to eat. Have you ever fought in real life? Even just hand to hand, like in a karate tournament, fighting and other stressful situations can made you ravenous. It makes perfect sense.
Here's an idea: If you're going to complain about the hunger, propose a fix that's balanced and put it in a suggestion thread. Discuss the fix here until it's thought out enough to be credible.
*edit* I should probably have also mentioned how much more powerful and smart mobs are now, making it very good that there's regen and not the need to eat individual food items to heal. Going into the inventory constantly in the current meta would probably kill you. Be thankful.
(...) If you want to build, go to Creative mode. If you want to play, survive in Survival mode.
And if you want to look like a simpleton, propose "Black" and "White" as the only two mutually exclusive possible choices while the truth of player playstyles probably falls everywhere along the full color specturm, or, at the very least, covers the entire greyscale range.
On topic:
Even a small farm will give you humongous amounts of food. Eating one piece every couple minutes to compensate for playing "hack n slash" with basic tools, is nothing. IUf you has to eat say every 5 seconds, then ok I'd agree with you, but every 2 minutes is nothing.
It is relatively easy to get a full set of diamond stuff within a few playing sessions. And to enchant those.
Attack bonuses means less strikes needed to kill mobs = less hunger spent on attacking.
Better armor (diamondso r ehcnants) = less wounds = less hunger spent on regeneration.
Stairs and slabs = less jumping needed = much less hunger sent on moving around.
Potions of Swiftness, minecraft rails, boating paths, and horse = less need to sprint all the time in order to be able to simply go somewhere = much less hunger spent on movement.
Using fences or walling off your base, plus proper lighting = much smaller "zombie hordes" = less combat = less hunger spent.
Totally lighting up the entire wilderness around your base for *80* blocks (yeah I lots and lots of torches) = out of range of zombie horde aggro radius + putting fences at that range = zero zombies within aggro range = total peace and quiet forever.
Congratulations on missing the point on pretty much everything I tried to say.
Now it's more of a system of food healing out of combat and potions/golden apples healing in combat, which makes quite a bit of sense to me. On top of that, food piles up extremely quickly in the old system, it's nice that you actually deplete in food so that the food system isn't almost entirely null.
Did I say they should remove hunger? No. I said they should make it so you don't need to be completely full to heal. Slow it down as you get lower instead of stopping immediately. Kinda makes sense because now you have to eat much more often than previously with the hunger system, because they increased a hunger penalty for healing. You know, even if they did this, even if they lowered the healing penalty it would still result in a greater net loss of food. It would just be a little less annoying since you wouldn't stop healing so much, just slow down. Healing 1/2 heart every 30 seconds would not be great enough to keep you alive in combat but would give you filler that added up.
They did change the sight distance back for 1.7 so it's not as bad now. Not only that, but the vanilla mobs are weak, so don't even give me that.
It's still annoying. I am talking about annoyance not difficulty, which can exist at any difficulty, so don't even give me that. My point is just making the range larger is too simplistic of a change that doesn't work. Right now, most mobs have a small enough range that you pretty much have to be near them for them to see you, but with Zombies, this is not the case. This is not "ultra-hardcore" or "zombie-apocalypse" mode, and such changes should have never left testing at all. If you want mobs to be more "difficult" because they engage combat more, you need to do more than increase 1 range variable. You need to actually make mobs (or at least the mobs needing more possible range) have a perception system, one that the player would witness firsthand. This would allow you to be able to avoid or accidentally be engaged by a hostile, being more entertaining than "I can't walk out my door". Sneaking would lower your hitbox but sacrifice speed.
They don't need better AI, they need to be able to crouch. They can't do much more beyond that, unless they did an entire update as an AI update.
Whut.
I think every spawned village should start out with an iron golem, making them better wouldn't be good because it would make them too powerful if you made one yourself.
They were fine when they were added in, but recent changes to AI makes them useless and incapable of defending villages. Zombies spawn too easily with too high of a range, meaning iron golems can not fight off and reach all zombies in time, and skeletons' changed shooting ability can allow ONE skeleton to kill them. You make them with 3 iron BLOCKS, why SHOULDN'T they be OP? Also, notice I said there need to be faster alternatives and more ways for villagers to defend themselves, I didn't even mention changing iron golems completely. One of which was a manned turret, meaning something needs to control it (in this case, a villager). And as I said, 1 iron golem would not be enough with the current mechanics.
All houses do need doors to be considered houses as of now, but any specifications beyond what it is now would limit houses too much.
not really sure where they would spawn though.
Them building more homes is iffy, would you have to clear land for them first like in mods? What if you built around the village yourself and simply want emeralds in return for your supplies (not wanting them to expand). Although I guess the 'being required to clear land first' would be the solution to that.
I'm not saying house qualification, really, but house generation and detection. It shouldn't rely solely on villagers to define houses, but houses should define other houses, too. Villager AI is really crappy, based on what house a villager chooses to go to. Most villagers run to the nearest house and clump up, ignoring perfectly good houses further out, despite being connected to the village. This means (as there is no present villager nearby) the game doesn't treat it as a house.
On top of their houses (I guess they'd need to know how to use ladders), in pedestals nearby, in their "backyards", and possibly even new balconies? They also could just be on the ground.
A village would spawn with more "plots" (basically, cobblestone lots/foundations) available in it already, as well as the "objective" to build more houses. When you fulfill their needed trades, they attempt to build it. Basically they would try to build it (slowly) every day until complete. If there were no plots available, the will rarely attempt to find flat areas suitable for a plot, which you can provide materials for, for them to build, which would create the objective of building a house.
Here's an idea: If you're going to complain about the hunger, propose a fix that's balanced and put it in a suggestion thread. Discuss the fix here until it's thought out enough to be credible.
Lol, yes. Because Mojang doesn't just take bad suggestions from Reddit, and I'm sure such a thread wouldn't be locked for redundancy.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Lol, yes. Because Mojang doesn't just take bad suggestions from Reddit, and I'm sure such a thread wouldn't be locked for redundancy.
Congratulations on being unable to construct a respectful response. Seems to be a skill these days. What I meant by that was, basically, that complaining here isn't doing any good either. If you think creating a thread would get it locked, find the original and post there. OR, since you seem to think Reddit works, why not go there instead? No one's getting anything done here, aside from, apparently, one-up'ing and complaining.
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"Tell me your stories, I'll lend you my ear. Tell me your horror, I'll make it disappear." ~ Fault Line by August Burns Red
OP, a player needs to eat a lot only if he act like a noob, which is easy to do if you think the following are good ideas:
- Think that the beginning and mid-game should have no challenge and that the game should present you with abysmally minimalistic food requirements all game long, and not just near the endgame once you have the best stuff.
- Eating subpar foods. Anything with high saturation is best: Cooked Porckhop and Steak, obviously, but as 2nd "good enough" choices you also have Baked Potato, Cooked Chicken, Mushroom Stew, Bread, Cooked fish, and Carrot. Everything else is junk food and should be treated as such. If you do "serious" work, then use "serious" foodstuff too. When I go out mining for hours to bring a serious load of ores back home, I bring a stack of steak. When I go mining for less than an hour just to goof around with friends, I bring cookies, melons, cake and pie.
- Not putting stairs and/or slabs in those places you walk through often (and that have some denivellation), thus needing to jump quite often when crossing those places = wasted hunger.
- Running all the time, while not carrying a lot of a good or better saturation food.
- Using subpar weapons (more strikes needed to kill a nob = more hunger spent) and subpar armor (more damage = more health that needs regeneration = more hunger spent), and going out of your way to put yourself in situations where you will need to do a lot of fighting.
- Not choosing a strong Smithe (or at last Sharpness) enchantment as you "'default" weapon. (Sharpness was better but since 90% of the monsters we now fight are zombies, Smithe now actually saves you a lot more combat time, strikes, raw diamonds and also XP needed for repair and maintenance).
- Not fencing off your base perimeter(or at least those parts you use most often).
- Not lighting your base PLUS ALSO A SOLID AREA around it. In fact, if you totally light up 80 blocks AROUND your base, (and put ANOTHER fence there a that 80 blocks limit), I doubt you'll ever see a single zombie (or other night mob) in your base, even less a horde (and on the rare case it happens anyway, it will be quite small).
- Fighting like a moron in a way that makes you get hit all the time, like rushing to melee right in the middle of a pack of say 4 zombies. Merely pillar-jumping 2 blocks high is enough to let you strike at a full horde of zombies without fear of retaliation, so use it (amongst other tricks). Other stupid ways to fight are: Getting surrounded. Fighting near something dangerous like lava or a ravine (especially dumb if you place yourself between the environmental danger and the mobs). Trying to rush a skeleton in water or trying to rush 2+ skeletons (it will take so much time getting there, you'll get hit a lot).
There are so many tricks ot making combat (or preserving your hunger bar) much easier - or much harder - for yourself I won't list them all here. But suffice it to say: I love that the game's hunger management is a bit more geared towards forcing you to play a bit more intelligently, and to fall in the "no need to worry at all about hunger anymore" only near endgame, rather tha taking you by the hand with a feature that was so pitifiully devoid of any real impact in the game it was almost as if it wasn't there.
The best setup is like this:
Diamond Sword with Smithe V enchantment, when combined with making jumps on your first attack, makes for one-hit-kill critical hits on zombies. This reduces a good bit of the "spawnie more zombies when you strike one" effect. Also, this makes your sword lasts a LOT longer.
The strongest possible Unbreaking (ideally Unbrekaing III) on your costliest pieces of equipment. This cuts down a lot on the XP price to replace them. And of course Fortune III on your diamond pickaxe so that you don't spend hours finding more diamonds.
In normal situations, you simply CANNOT maintain all of your enchanted diamond equipment, because it will wear off faster than you can repair it. So you select wisely: your sword of course, since you'll use it a LOT more than the rest, and while you NEED to use the sword to kill foes, if you play well you CAN avoid being hit.
Cost is durability divided by diamonds needed (for unenchanted armor) = in order chestplate as costliest, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. which is the same order as the raw cost if you don't tak durability into account. Or even, the experience level cost for enchanting and repairing. So since you are limited, put enchantments first diamond chestplate, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. Anything you canhnot maintain (i.e. repair) fast enough while still retaining enough XPO accumulation to enchant OTHER new stuff, should be iron instea of diamonds.
My setup is best diamond word + diamond chestplate both strongly enchanted, and wth Unbreaking III (if possible) and either then unenchanted iron for the rest or enchanted whatever diamond stuff I have no use for. Other "uses" being mainly just trading them or storing a collection of enchanted stuff forever. So might as well just use the "bad enchantments" diamond stuff!
It would become EatCraft only if you needed to eat say every 5 or 10 seconds or something like that. THEN that would force you to focus mainly on the food aspect of the game. But at once a minute or so even when fighting a lot, and much less than that the rest of the time, it's currently quite fine as it is, and for most of the game you'll need to eat only a few times per minecraft game day. Yes you need to eat more frequently in the beginning but this is only for a short while. Then you need to eat less once you have iron stuff and a lot less later on. Also, instead of just filling up the bar and then forgtting it completely, not you have to watch it every once in a while especially when you fight a lot, to make sure you don't fall in halth points too much because you don't renegerat anymore. Other games have healing potions that you must consume after (and also during!) EVERY battle, so having to spent a single second to right-click food every few fights that is nothing here.
So now you have to play intelligently AND watch your hunger, instead of being able to be successful too easily. Also, even with the "upped" need for food, unless you are really crappy at farming, you usually end up with more food that you'll need, relatively quickly in this game. At least now the food gets used more than merely "rarely".
The easiest way to start the game is to simply (after getting stone tools) pick a direction and explore the world, killing animals along the way to get meat or exploring the very beginning of caves for iron. When the sun starts going down, you enter a cave or if night catches you, you just run and don't stop for mobs. Eventually you'll have amassed stacks of vital stuff "on the go" wood, cooked meat, coal and iron, you name it.
Really, the only reason a player would need to eat so often is primarily because he'd play like a noob.
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I was having a bit of trouble with food early on but it's gotten easier as I've learned what works and what to avoid. It does bug me that taking damage affects your hunger as well now but I've found strategies to make sure food stays in good supply. Ouatcheur makes some good points but if you're playing on easy you don't really have to go all out just to survive.
My usual loadout is some iron armor, boots and leggings and a diamond sword. I don't really bother enchanting them unless I have some extra xp to spare. That seems to be plenty enough to keep me alive, as long as I don't get in over my head. Some of the creatures in the nether require a bit more preparation but I can usually avoid any conflicts I don't want to get myself into. Once I'm able to start brewing fire resistance potions, blazes and such aren't much of a threat.
What I would suggest is investing in some leads/leashes as soon as possible which means you need to find a swamp as soon as possible to get slime balls. It may sound like a small thing but not having to go through the agonizing process of holding out food and hoping animals follow you and don't stray too far behind makes a lot of difference. It also saves time early on by not requiring a bunch of fences or similar structures to keep your animals contained.
Also, don't off the zombie pigmen. Just don't. Not until you're sure you're ready. Something in the past couple of updates changed them where you attack one and about a hundred of them end up swarming around you. Also don't mine anything of value within their line of sight because that will them off too aparently. I swear, at this point I think the zombie pigmen are the most dangerous things in the game once they get angry.
OP, a player needs to eat a lot only if he act like a noob, which is easy to do if you think the following are good ideas:
- Think that the beginning and mid-game should have no challenge and that the game should present you with abysmally minimalistic food requirements all game long, and not just near the endgame once you have the best stuff.
- Eating subpar foods. Anything with high saturation is best: Cooked Porckhop and Steak, obviously, but as 2nd "good enough" choices you also have Baked Potato, Cooked Chicken, Mushroom Stew, Bread, Cooked fish, and Carrot. Everything else is junk food and should be treated as such. If you do "serious" work, then use "serious" foodstuff too. When I go out mining for hours to bring a serious load of ores back home, I bring a stack of steak. When I go mining for less than an hour just to goof around with friends, I bring cookies, melons, cake and pie.
- Not putting stairs and/or slabs in those places you walk through often (and that have some denivellation), thus needing to jump quite often when crossing those places = wasted hunger.
- Running all the time, while not carrying a lot of a good or better saturation food.
- Using subpar weapons (more strikes needed to kill a nob = more hunger spent) and subpar armor (more damage = more health that needs regeneration = more hunger spent), and going out of your way to put yourself in situations where you will need to do a lot of fighting.
- Not choosing a strong Smithe (or at last Sharpness) enchantment as you "'default" weapon. (Sharpness was better but since 90% of the monsters we now fight are zombies, Smithe now actually saves you a lot more combat time, strikes, raw diamonds and also XP needed for repair and maintenance).
- Not fencing off your base perimeter(or at least those parts you use most often).
- Not lighting your base PLUS ALSO A SOLID AREA around it. In fact, if you totally light up 80 blocks AROUND your base, (and put ANOTHER fence there a that 80 blocks limit), I doubt you'll ever see a single zombie (or other night mob) in your base, even less a horde (and on the rare case it happens anyway, it will be quite small).
- Fighting like a moron in a way that makes you get hit all the time, like rushing to melee right in the middle of a pack of say 4 zombies. Merely pillar-jumping 2 blocks high is enough to let you strike at a full horde of zombies without fear of retaliation, so use it (amongst other tricks). Other stupid ways to fight are: Getting surrounded. Fighting near something dangerous like lava or a ravine (especially dumb if you place yourself between the environmental danger and the mobs). Trying to rush a skeleton in water or trying to rush 2+ skeletons (it will take so much time getting there, you'll get hit a lot).
There are so many tricks ot making combat (or preserving your hunger bar) much easier - or much harder - for yourself I won't list them all here. But suffice it to say: I love that the game's hunger management is a bit more geared towards forcing you to play a bit more intelligently, and to fall in the "no need to worry at all about hunger anymore" only near endgame, rather tha taking you by the hand with a feature that was so pitifiully devoid of any real impact in the game it was almost as if it wasn't there.
The best setup is like this:
Diamond Sword with Smithe V enchantment, when combined with making jumps on your first attack, makes for one-hit-kill critical hits on zombies. This reduces a good bit of the "spawnie more zombies when you strike one" effect. Also, this makes your sword lasts a LOT longer.
The strongest possible Unbreaking (ideally Unbrekaing III) on your costliest pieces of equipment. This cuts down a lot on the XP price to replace them. And of course Fortune III on your diamond pickaxe so that you don't spend hours finding more diamonds.
In normal situations, you simply CANNOT maintain all of your enchanted diamond equipment, because it will wear off faster than you can repair it. So you select wisely: your sword of course, since you'll use it a LOT more than the rest, and while you NEED to use the sword to kill foes, if you play well you CAN avoid being hit.
Cost is durability divided by diamonds needed (for unenchanted armor) = in order chestplate as costliest, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. which is the same order as the raw cost if you don't tak durability into account. Or even, the experience level cost for enchanting and repairing. So since you are limited, put enchantments first diamond chestplate, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. Anything you canhnot maintain (i.e. repair) fast enough while still retaining enough XPO accumulation to enchant OTHER new stuff, should be iron instea of diamonds.
My setup is best diamond word + diamond chestplate both strongly enchanted, and wth Unbreaking III (if possible) and either then unenchanted iron for the rest or enchanted whatever diamond stuff I have no use for. Other "uses" being mainly just trading them or storing a collection of enchanted stuff forever. So might as well just use the "bad enchantments" diamond stuff!
It would become EatCraft only if you needed to eat say every 5 or 10 seconds or something like that. THEN that would force you to focus mainly on the food aspect of the game. But at once a minute or so even when fighting a lot, and much less than that the rest of the time, it's currently quite fine as it is, and for most of the game you'll need to eat only a few times per minecraft game day. Yes you need to eat more frequently in the beginning but this is only for a short while. Then you need to eat less once you have iron stuff and a lot less later on. Also, instead of just filling up the bar and then forgtting it completely, not you have to watch it every once in a while especially when you fight a lot, to make sure you don't fall in halth points too much because you don't renegerat anymore. Other games have healing potions that you must consume after (and also during!) EVERY battle, so having to spent a single second to right-click food every few fights that is nothing here.
So now you have to play intelligently AND watch your hunger, instead of being able to be successful too easily. Also, even with the "upped" need for food, unless you are really crappy at farming, you usually end up with more food that you'll need, relatively quickly in this game. At least now the food gets used more than merely "rarely".
The easiest way to start the game is to simply (after getting stone tools) pick a direction and explore the world, killing animals along the way to get meat or exploring the very beginning of caves for iron. When the sun starts going down, you enter a cave or if night catches you, you just run and don't stop for mobs. Eventually you'll have amassed stacks of vital stuff "on the go" wood, cooked meat, coal and iron, you name it.
Really, the only reason a player would need to eat so often is primarily because he'd play like a noob.
Funny you say this. I pretty much did all this (not rush into a pile of zombies bla bla. ). And you know what happened? Got swarmed anyway. I had two or three armored zombies spawn on me, backed by a bow enchanted skeleton. Then I hear HSsssssssssssssss BANG! Mind you I did not die from MR. Creeper but. Down goes my health, food level dipped and I could not run away fast enough to get cover from the skeleton. So of coarse I died.
I went after 1 zombie, just one and got my ass handed to me.
Then to boot the zombies sucked up my diamond sword, package, iron chest armor and helm.
Set back hours over one zombie!
Coarse this does not happen on my other world because my armor is enchanted to hell. I can kiss a creeper (with tong) and not take a full heart.
These changes hurt the new and less experience, and just annoy the snot out of the rest.
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Like Minecrak states below you, I do feel that this is still a valid concern of mine and that's why I bumped it. I think it would be far worse to make an additional post about the same gripe when I already have a post about it. Report if you like. I bumped to show how much I'm still annoyed by the hunger depletion rate.
Precisely my problem. Like others here, there's plenty of food in the game to have. I understand saturation and primarily eat cooked meat. This is an additional annoyance, because there is little point in eating anything else. Before they increased the depletion, it was enjoyable to take a stack of bread or chicken down with me into the mines, but that's pointless now. Then consider the really low sat foods like melon and apples which might just be worse than zombie meat anymore.
Having the food isn't the problem. Eating after every few moments and during every fight is annoying. Once I'm well-armored, it's not like the fights are dangerous, but having to eat so freaking often gets old really, really fast.
I can protect the villagers. I can be careful and sleep until they are well fortified. I even like the mobs of zombies when I'm fighting and gaining xp. But, it's still annoying to constantly have to do these things and frankly, the doors break too easily now. We could use a middle ground here.
That's why the golems are there to defend them and until 1.6, they were able to successfully. It made a nice blend and worked well. Now, it's broken.
I stand by my post. I have no problem with making the game more challenging and exciting. I have a problem with making it more irritating to play and the hunger depletion is just bothersome.
It's one of the main reasons people don't usually make open towns even though the devs should encourage making towns open since, like you said, the iron golem is supposed to act as the deter for the enemy.
At first (when everyone wanted it removed), hunger didn't bother me. Now, with these overpowered zombie spawning mechanics, food and tools drain rather quickly. What makes it worse? Healing only really occurs when you have a full energy bar, below 90% you don't heal at all. That's always been an issue for me, I think it should heal you exponentially slower until 75%, stopping completely at 70%.
All of these changes don't make the game harder, just more annoying. It discourages you from actually playing the game. Zombies spawn extremely easily and they're the most common mob, so it's not even really survival anymore, it's "zombie apocalypse" mode. It turns the game into a huge uncomfortability. "Want a door? Nope, they'll break that down. Under the safety of a cliff? Nope, they'll seek you out and jump off the cliff to get to you. Sun starting to rise, no zombies around, is it safe? No, some zombies spawned, now they're on fire. I'll just stand still as to not deplete my hunger." I'm not going to be surprised if they make zombies able to find buttons, levers, and pressure plates to intentionally use to get in, and bust dirt and wood blocks to get in, as well as swim up waterfalls so the only safe entrance to a base will be pillaring, breaking cobblestone, or activating wooden buttons with arrows.
Villages are incapable of defending themselves, as other have stated. I have *never* seen a village with a naturally spawned iron golem. Zombies' new "sight" range paired with villager golems' slowness and poor AI are an incredibly bad combination. 1 or even 2 golems may not be enough to protect a normal village, due to the fact that they are large, slow, and don't coordinate. How villages typically spawn isn't usually "iron golem friendly" due to how close they are, iron golems often get stuck on other mobs trying to travel in the opposite direction, especially other iron golems. Sometimes they follow each other instead of having individual "rounds" making multiple iron golems effectively useless. They also target non-zombie hostiles that don't even pose a threat to villagers, and I have seen them get killed by a single skeleton due to the knockback from the arrows.
I think quite a few things need to be re-worked. Zombie's huge sight radius is a problem. not because they engage you sooner, but because they are effectively omniscient in a certain area, which combined with their overpowered spawning makes you easily engulfed in zombies. Instead, if they can see so far, they actually need a sight-and-hearing based awareness. If a zombie was 100 blocks away looking straight at you, he'd see you. If his back was turned, he would not. If you placed/broke a block near him or shot an arrow (missing him), he'd turn around to see what it was. Different actions would have different noise levels, and it would lead the zombie to investigate, instead of hordes seeking you out.
Villages need to be reworked entirely. They need to have better house detecting mechanics, ALL houses need to be fully lit and have doors. Villagers need to be able to defend themselves from the start. Not just iron golems, either, something quicker. Maybe manned turrets as well? Something to really give villages a fighting chance. Imagine if you started attacking villagers and they went to battlestations on top of the houses, and the blacksmith's turret was shooting arrows at you and the priest was shooting potions at you. I'm not saying *all* villages should be able to defend themselves completely, but they should last more than one night if you're nearby. It would also be cool if trading actually affected the defenses of a village, like you sell 1 dispenser to a villager that wants it, it goes away, it is spawned, and you get a large relationship bonus compared to regular trading. Heck, if there were plots spawned outside of villages, if you traded them materials they could build more houses.
Most of the issues I have are annoyances and not difficulties, ones that are not noticed on an established world (well, except the new zombie mechanics).... I feel like if they actually make things different, instead of just changing values, they can add difficulty without annoyance. Especially when it comes to mob AI (which is not finished because they moved the guy they hired for AI to scrolls.....). Right now mobs are really predictable. You can snipe them from long distances, hit them from behind blocks, and knock them into pits. It would be a whole different experience if there were completely different AI modes (idle, investigating, attacking, defending, fleeing), and mobs were more aware of the environment (when attacking/defending) and could coordinate with other mobs (of the same or similar species).
And by that last part I mean that zombies would be sort of a "linking mob". They could coordinate with all other humanoid mobs (skeletons, endermen, zombie pigmen, zombie villagers) in the same state, whereas other mobs would only be able to coordinate with their own species and zombies.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
The biggest thing was that your health did not regenerate at all. You had to eat food to regain health.
This is really no different. The more you take damage, the more you need to eat. It's almost a throwback to the beta days. I for one, like the hunger change. It makes me actually nervous about combat, rather than just hurling myself into the swarm and knowing that I will survive with 8 hearts left.
In beta 1.7.3, eating was instantaneous and didn't make you completely vulnerable for a couple seconds.
Having to stop and eat while being swarmed by zombies makes you get hit more, which makes you need to eat more. By the end of the night, you've eaten five or six steaks for a battle that would only have taken one or two before. This doesn't increase difficulty, it's just tedious. (this is regarding the recent change in hunger stuff, not a comparison of 1.7.3 beta to now.)
They changed it so that regenerating half of a heart depletes half of a meatstickthing or equal amount of saturation. This was not a good change and should be reverted.
I also like to rescue villages I find as a challenge. Blocks in front of doors work well but as stated earlier, it's glitched and zombies can spawn inside houses and reach villagers through corners.
The constant eating during battle is only slightly annoying and I can live with it either way. I would be in favor of Mojang relaxing the hunger a bit and upping the damage from mobs to compensate.
One other thing Minecraft needs now is a Zombie "lure" of some sort. Perhaps something crafted/built that the player can set out and Zombies will home in on instead of villagers. These could be used to lure Zombies away from villagers into traps.
Alpha, before "hunger," you needed to eat just to heal. Food didn't stack, and there was no guarantee that you'd get food from killing a pig or cow. Don't wanna eat? Don't fight. Don't wanna defend a village? Move away, keep its location in mind, and head back when you need to trade or need some Testificate interaction. If you're not ready to defend a village, then do what must be done: if you love it, you must let it go. Personally, I've never had an issue with any of it. If I need to eat, I'll kill mobs by day and stock up. If I don't need to eat, like back in Alpha, I stock up just to heal. Don't whine if you're not prepared. Yeah, ok, so you fight a bit, heal up, then you need to eat. Have you ever fought in real life? Even just hand to hand, like in a karate tournament, fighting and other stressful situations can made you ravenous. It makes perfect sense.
Here's an idea: If you're going to complain about the hunger, propose a fix that's balanced and put it in a suggestion thread. Discuss the fix here until it's thought out enough to be credible.
*edit* I should probably have also mentioned how much more powerful and smart mobs are now, making it very good that there's regen and not the need to eat individual food items to heal. Going into the inventory constantly in the current meta would probably kill you. Be thankful.
"Tell me your stories, I'll lend you my ear. Tell me your horror, I'll make it disappear." ~ Fault Line by August Burns Red
And if you want to look like a simpleton, propose "Black" and "White" as the only two mutually exclusive possible choices while the truth of player playstyles probably falls everywhere along the full color specturm, or, at the very least, covers the entire greyscale range.
On topic:
Even a small farm will give you humongous amounts of food. Eating one piece every couple minutes to compensate for playing "hack n slash" with basic tools, is nothing. IUf you has to eat say every 5 seconds, then ok I'd agree with you, but every 2 minutes is nothing.
It is relatively easy to get a full set of diamond stuff within a few playing sessions. And to enchant those.
Attack bonuses means less strikes needed to kill mobs = less hunger spent on attacking.
Better armor (diamondso r ehcnants) = less wounds = less hunger spent on regeneration.
Stairs and slabs = less jumping needed = much less hunger sent on moving around.
Potions of Swiftness, minecraft rails, boating paths, and horse = less need to sprint all the time in order to be able to simply go somewhere = much less hunger spent on movement.
Using fences or walling off your base, plus proper lighting = much smaller "zombie hordes" = less combat = less hunger spent.
Totally lighting up the entire wilderness around your base for *80* blocks (yeah I lots and lots of torches) = out of range of zombie horde aggro radius + putting fences at that range = zero zombies within aggro range = total peace and quiet forever.
For all that work just to that simple end, why not solve your problem from the get-go with peaceful mode?
"Tell me your stories, I'll lend you my ear. Tell me your horror, I'll make it disappear." ~ Fault Line by August Burns Red
Congratulations on missing the point on pretty much everything I tried to say.
Did I say they should remove hunger? No. I said they should make it so you don't need to be completely full to heal. Slow it down as you get lower instead of stopping immediately. Kinda makes sense because now you have to eat much more often than previously with the hunger system, because they increased a hunger penalty for healing. You know, even if they did this, even if they lowered the healing penalty it would still result in a greater net loss of food. It would just be a little less annoying since you wouldn't stop healing so much, just slow down. Healing 1/2 heart every 30 seconds would not be great enough to keep you alive in combat but would give you filler that added up.
It's still annoying. I am talking about annoyance not difficulty, which can exist at any difficulty, so don't even give me that. My point is just making the range larger is too simplistic of a change that doesn't work. Right now, most mobs have a small enough range that you pretty much have to be near them for them to see you, but with Zombies, this is not the case. This is not "ultra-hardcore" or "zombie-apocalypse" mode, and such changes should have never left testing at all. If you want mobs to be more "difficult" because they engage combat more, you need to do more than increase 1 range variable. You need to actually make mobs (or at least the mobs needing more possible range) have a perception system, one that the player would witness firsthand. This would allow you to be able to avoid or accidentally be engaged by a hostile, being more entertaining than "I can't walk out my door". Sneaking would lower your hitbox but sacrifice speed.
Whut.
They were fine when they were added in, but recent changes to AI makes them useless and incapable of defending villages. Zombies spawn too easily with too high of a range, meaning iron golems can not fight off and reach all zombies in time, and skeletons' changed shooting ability can allow ONE skeleton to kill them. You make them with 3 iron BLOCKS, why SHOULDN'T they be OP? Also, notice I said there need to be faster alternatives and more ways for villagers to defend themselves, I didn't even mention changing iron golems completely. One of which was a manned turret, meaning something needs to control it (in this case, a villager). And as I said, 1 iron golem would not be enough with the current mechanics.
I'm not saying house qualification, really, but house generation and detection. It shouldn't rely solely on villagers to define houses, but houses should define other houses, too. Villager AI is really crappy, based on what house a villager chooses to go to. Most villagers run to the nearest house and clump up, ignoring perfectly good houses further out, despite being connected to the village. This means (as there is no present villager nearby) the game doesn't treat it as a house.
On top of their houses (I guess they'd need to know how to use ladders), in pedestals nearby, in their "backyards", and possibly even new balconies? They also could just be on the ground.
A village would spawn with more "plots" (basically, cobblestone lots/foundations) available in it already, as well as the "objective" to build more houses. When you fulfill their needed trades, they attempt to build it. Basically they would try to build it (slowly) every day until complete. If there were no plots available, the will rarely attempt to find flat areas suitable for a plot, which you can provide materials for, for them to build, which would create the objective of building a house.
Lol, yes. Because Mojang doesn't just take bad suggestions from Reddit, and I'm sure such a thread wouldn't be locked for redundancy.
"I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly.
It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out.
I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from:
being forced to choose to stay outside.
My advice: Just keep movin’ straight ahead.
Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."
-George Carlin
Congratulations on being unable to construct a respectful response. Seems to be a skill these days. What I meant by that was, basically, that complaining here isn't doing any good either. If you think creating a thread would get it locked, find the original and post there. OR, since you seem to think Reddit works, why not go there instead? No one's getting anything done here, aside from, apparently, one-up'ing and complaining.
"Tell me your stories, I'll lend you my ear. Tell me your horror, I'll make it disappear." ~ Fault Line by August Burns Red
hunger is not an issue if you take the small amount of time necessary to create an efficient farm.
I also think there are some great ideas here on how to adjust this to maintain the difficulty of the game, while relieving some of the tediousness.
Would be great to see some of these ideas get some traction!
- Think that the beginning and mid-game should have no challenge and that the game should present you with abysmally minimalistic food requirements all game long, and not just near the endgame once you have the best stuff.
- Eating subpar foods. Anything with high saturation is best: Cooked Porckhop and Steak, obviously, but as 2nd "good enough" choices you also have Baked Potato, Cooked Chicken, Mushroom Stew, Bread, Cooked fish, and Carrot. Everything else is junk food and should be treated as such. If you do "serious" work, then use "serious" foodstuff too. When I go out mining for hours to bring a serious load of ores back home, I bring a stack of steak. When I go mining for less than an hour just to goof around with friends, I bring cookies, melons, cake and pie.
- Not putting stairs and/or slabs in those places you walk through often (and that have some denivellation), thus needing to jump quite often when crossing those places = wasted hunger.
- Running all the time, while not carrying a lot of a good or better saturation food.
- Using subpar weapons (more strikes needed to kill a nob = more hunger spent) and subpar armor (more damage = more health that needs regeneration = more hunger spent), and going out of your way to put yourself in situations where you will need to do a lot of fighting.
- Not choosing a strong Smithe (or at last Sharpness) enchantment as you "'default" weapon. (Sharpness was better but since 90% of the monsters we now fight are zombies, Smithe now actually saves you a lot more combat time, strikes, raw diamonds and also XP needed for repair and maintenance).
- Not fencing off your base perimeter(or at least those parts you use most often).
- Not lighting your base PLUS ALSO A SOLID AREA around it. In fact, if you totally light up 80 blocks AROUND your base, (and put ANOTHER fence there a that 80 blocks limit), I doubt you'll ever see a single zombie (or other night mob) in your base, even less a horde (and on the rare case it happens anyway, it will be quite small).
- Fighting like a moron in a way that makes you get hit all the time, like rushing to melee right in the middle of a pack of say 4 zombies. Merely pillar-jumping 2 blocks high is enough to let you strike at a full horde of zombies without fear of retaliation, so use it (amongst other tricks). Other stupid ways to fight are: Getting surrounded. Fighting near something dangerous like lava or a ravine (especially dumb if you place yourself between the environmental danger and the mobs). Trying to rush a skeleton in water or trying to rush 2+ skeletons (it will take so much time getting there, you'll get hit a lot).
There are so many tricks ot making combat (or preserving your hunger bar) much easier - or much harder - for yourself I won't list them all here. But suffice it to say: I love that the game's hunger management is a bit more geared towards forcing you to play a bit more intelligently, and to fall in the "no need to worry at all about hunger anymore" only near endgame, rather tha taking you by the hand with a feature that was so pitifiully devoid of any real impact in the game it was almost as if it wasn't there.
The best setup is like this:
Diamond Sword with Smithe V enchantment, when combined with making jumps on your first attack, makes for one-hit-kill critical hits on zombies. This reduces a good bit of the "spawnie more zombies when you strike one" effect. Also, this makes your sword lasts a LOT longer.
The strongest possible Unbreaking (ideally Unbrekaing III) on your costliest pieces of equipment. This cuts down a lot on the XP price to replace them. And of course Fortune III on your diamond pickaxe so that you don't spend hours finding more diamonds.
In normal situations, you simply CANNOT maintain all of your enchanted diamond equipment, because it will wear off faster than you can repair it. So you select wisely: your sword of course, since you'll use it a LOT more than the rest, and while you NEED to use the sword to kill foes, if you play well you CAN avoid being hit.
Cost is durability divided by diamonds needed (for unenchanted armor) = in order chestplate as costliest, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. which is the same order as the raw cost if you don't tak durability into account. Or even, the experience level cost for enchanting and repairing. So since you are limited, put enchantments first diamond chestplate, then leggings, then helmet, then boots. Anything you canhnot maintain (i.e. repair) fast enough while still retaining enough XPO accumulation to enchant OTHER new stuff, should be iron instea of diamonds.
My setup is best diamond word + diamond chestplate both strongly enchanted, and wth Unbreaking III (if possible) and either then unenchanted iron for the rest or enchanted whatever diamond stuff I have no use for. Other "uses" being mainly just trading them or storing a collection of enchanted stuff forever. So might as well just use the "bad enchantments" diamond stuff!
It would become EatCraft only if you needed to eat say every 5 or 10 seconds or something like that. THEN that would force you to focus mainly on the food aspect of the game. But at once a minute or so even when fighting a lot, and much less than that the rest of the time, it's currently quite fine as it is, and for most of the game you'll need to eat only a few times per minecraft game day. Yes you need to eat more frequently in the beginning but this is only for a short while. Then you need to eat less once you have iron stuff and a lot less later on. Also, instead of just filling up the bar and then forgtting it completely, not you have to watch it every once in a while especially when you fight a lot, to make sure you don't fall in halth points too much because you don't renegerat anymore. Other games have healing potions that you must consume after (and also during!) EVERY battle, so having to spent a single second to right-click food every few fights that is nothing here.
So now you have to play intelligently AND watch your hunger, instead of being able to be successful too easily. Also, even with the "upped" need for food, unless you are really crappy at farming, you usually end up with more food that you'll need, relatively quickly in this game. At least now the food gets used more than merely "rarely".
The easiest way to start the game is to simply (after getting stone tools) pick a direction and explore the world, killing animals along the way to get meat or exploring the very beginning of caves for iron. When the sun starts going down, you enter a cave or if night catches you, you just run and don't stop for mobs. Eventually you'll have amassed stacks of vital stuff "on the go" wood, cooked meat, coal and iron, you name it.
Really, the only reason a player would need to eat so often is primarily because he'd play like a noob.
My usual loadout is some iron armor, boots and leggings and a diamond sword. I don't really bother enchanting them unless I have some extra xp to spare. That seems to be plenty enough to keep me alive, as long as I don't get in over my head. Some of the creatures in the nether require a bit more preparation but I can usually avoid any conflicts I don't want to get myself into. Once I'm able to start brewing fire resistance potions, blazes and such aren't much of a threat.
What I would suggest is investing in some leads/leashes as soon as possible which means you need to find a swamp as soon as possible to get slime balls. It may sound like a small thing but not having to go through the agonizing process of holding out food and hoping animals follow you and don't stray too far behind makes a lot of difference. It also saves time early on by not requiring a bunch of fences or similar structures to keep your animals contained.
Also, don't off the zombie pigmen. Just don't. Not until you're sure you're ready. Something in the past couple of updates changed them where you attack one and about a hundred of them end up swarming around you. Also don't mine anything of value within their line of sight because that will them off too aparently. I swear, at this point I think the zombie pigmen are the most dangerous things in the game once they get angry.
Funny you say this. I pretty much did all this (not rush into a pile of zombies bla bla. ). And you know what happened? Got swarmed anyway. I had two or three armored zombies spawn on me, backed by a bow enchanted skeleton. Then I hear HSsssssssssssssss BANG! Mind you I did not die from MR. Creeper but. Down goes my health, food level dipped and I could not run away fast enough to get cover from the skeleton. So of coarse I died.
I went after 1 zombie, just one and got my ass handed to me.
Then to boot the zombies sucked up my diamond sword, package, iron chest armor and helm.
Set back hours over one zombie!
Coarse this does not happen on my other world because my armor is enchanted to hell. I can kiss a creeper (with tong) and not take a full heart.
These changes hurt the new and less experience, and just annoy the snot out of the rest.