Karl's Freshness

You harvest your crops, cook your meals, and stockpile provisions for the journey ahead. Days later, deep underground, you pull out that beef stew and find it just as fresh as the day you made it. A little strange, isn't it? In reality, food spoils. Why shouldn't it in Minecraft?

Freshness addresses this by giving every food item a shelf life. Fresh foods provide full nutrition. Over time, they become stale, offering reduced hunger and saturation. Left longer, they spoil—minimal nutrition with a side of nausea. Eventually, they rot entirely, transforming into rotten flesh or bone meal.

Spoilage is not a simple timer. Environment plays a role. The Nether doubles decay speed. The End slows it. Rain and water accelerate spoilage. Items dropped on the ground decay faster than those kept in inventory. These factors are displayed directly in the tooltip so you always know what's affecting your food.

Cooking

Cooking serves a dual purpose: producing better meals and recovering freshness from aging ingredients. The formula takes the average freshness of all inputs, then restores half of what was lost.

Example: 50% cabbage + 100% carrot → average 75%. Half the 25% loss is 12.5%. Result: 87.5% freshness.

This mechanic applies across all supported cooking stations—Farmer's Delight cooking pot and skillet, campfires and furnaces, Kaleidoscope Cookery wok, steamer, stockpot, and shawarma spit. The cutting board transfers decay without recovery (chopping does not restore freshness).

Eating Effects

• Fresh (50%+): Full hunger and saturation. Green indicator.
• Stale (21%–50%): 2/3 hunger, 1/3 saturation. Yellow indicator.
• Spoiled (1%–21%): Half hunger, no saturation, 10 seconds of nausea. Red indicator.
• Rotten (0%): Converts to spoilage result—rotten flesh for meats, bone meal for vegetables. Bowl-based foods return the bowl.

Compatibility

Freshness integrates natively with Farmer's Delight and Kaleidoscope Cookery. All food items from these mods include pre-configured spoilage data. Every cooking station participates in the freshness system. Ingredients left in these stations also decay over time.

Features

• Durability bar indicator: green → yellow → red at a glance.
• Tooltip displays exact freshness percentage and estimated remaining time.
• Environmental multipliers shown in tooltip: dimension, water, rain, container effects.
• Stacking items with different freshness uses a weighted average.
• Container preservation multipliers configurable per block or item via config/freshness/container_multipliers.json.
• All configuration files located in config/freshness/ with sensible defaults.

Feedback

This mod was built out of a desire for more realistic food mechanics. Bug reports and suggestions are welcome.

Known IssuesMoving food items in Creative Mode resets their freshness