Hunger suddenly NOT going down. What did I do right?

[shnabbles]

Ok. I know I'm a noob and posting a lot today, but I've been playing all day and a lot of that has been dedicated to the hunger aspect of this game. Which I'm fine with.
However, about 45 minutes ago, my full hunger bar just stopped decreasing and you all know how fast it normally decreases.
I'm still mostly foraging. Ate some good/some bad mushrooms while out exploring. Got hit by a wolf to one bar. Made some poultices and healed up. And now, the food bar has been full this entire time.  I looked at satiety regarding mushrooms and saw nothing special about them. Maybe it was some kind of in-a-row combo? If there's a secret to staying full, I must know!

[Streetwind]

It's likely a combination of a bug and a feature.

The feature: if you eat a cooked meal, like the kind you prepare in a claypot and eat with a bowl, you get a grace timer during which the food bar doesn't decrease. It's supposed to last 30 seconds for every 100 satiety value consumed.

The bug: if you go to bed while under the effect of this grace timer, it will sometimes start increasing instead of decreasing while the world is time accelerated. This leads to having a really, really long grace timer after you wake up again.

This is a really old bug, occuring since at least 1.15.x. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be fixed recently or not - I just remember some discussion about it a month or three ago.

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by Streetwind

[shnabbles]

Well, good to know, but there was no sleeping or that level of cooking. I'm still foraging and proud of my cattail collecting patience.
Directly after I posted this question, the satiety started going down, but it was full for at LEAST 1/2 an hour. Hasn't happened since.
Have people tested mushroom combinations? 

[Omega Haxors]

There's a hidden mechanic which is really badly designed which essentially gives you invisible bonus hunger.

Every 8 seconds the hunger system ticks. What this does is take a variable which accumulates whenever you walk/run (it goes up more than 4x as fast if you run, and goes up slowly if you stand still) and then multiplies that by your hunger drain multiplier to determine how many calories (satiation) it takes away, and then sets the activity value to 0.

However, it doesn't end there. There's 6 hidden variables (one for each nutrition type) which goes up every time you eat a food of any kind. Whenever you eat a food, the amount of saturation provided is compared to each variable corresponding to the relevant nutrition type and if it's higher, it will set that to the value of the nutrition of the food eaten. The amount this goes up is usually a tenth of the caloric value but this is set on a per-food basis. Now what happens when the hunger tick starts, is that it will take the saturation loss and subtract EACH (bottoming out at 0) nutrition variable instead. Once those run out, your hunger bar drops like normal. This also means that only your highest nutrient matters for this system, as the lower nutrients will 0 out well before it has a chance to do anything.

So if you accumulate 100calorie loss of energy in a tick, and ate a food item with 1000 meat nutrient and 30 fruit, you'll get 10 ticks of free before your hunger bar goes down. The reason you didn't notice this until now is that you've been eating berries which give almost no saturation per bite so you only get a tiny fraction of this system. Once you switch over to prepared meals, you start getting a LOT of calories in a bite of food, which allows you to get the full benefit.

The combination of running around a lot in the early game, sleeping, and panning leads to the system being all but completely invisible to most players, then once you're established you unlock cooking and mostly stay put, you're then suddenly dropped into massive bonus head-first and it feels like hunger mechanics are completely disabled after having struggled completely up to that point. Now with this knowledge you can eat your berries slowly (one per hunger tick) and get the bonus early.

While i'm at it:
Other sources of hunger drain (restoring health, sleeping, panning) will take energy directly from your hunger bar using this system rather than waiting for the hunger tick. These do not account for your hunger drain multiplier, and will always consume a fixed amount. Otherwise sleeping in armor would be a death sentence.

I wrote a mod which effectively disables this mechanic as a downside, which is why I know so much about it.

Edited August 18, 2023 by Omega Haxors

[Vallen]

The TL;DR is that most foods primarily in the form of "meals" in a bowl may give you brief periods of being "full" and the "better" the meal, the longer it can last.