In GTNH, managing your food supply becomes crucial, especially if you don’t consider unlimited teleportation as mere “quality of life.” Let’s examine the food situation in GTNH, specifically in Minecraft version 1.7.10.
For players familiar with modern versions (Minecraft 1.11+), actions generally consume more food in GTNH’s 1.7.10. Walking and sneaking notably consume food, unlike in later versions. Combined with GTNH’s increased gameplay requirements compared to vanilla Minecraft, you’ll need a substantial food supply to stay well-fed.
The most effective way to manage your food situation is to minimize unnecessary consumption. Sprinting significantly impacts early-game food consumption rates. Consider walking during the early game - at default speed, you can walk 5-6 blocks before getting a tick of exhaustion, while sprinting causes exhaustion every single block.
Using half slabs to avoid jumping is a traditional food-saving strategy, though it’s more challenging in GTNH due to needing a saw. However, you can craft:
Consider taming a horse to avoid running and jumping entirely. Horses spawn in the overworld (though specific biome rates vary). Pre-steam options include:
Since food consumption is time-based rather than distance-based, increasing movement speed can help efficiency:
By MV tier, speed enhancement becomes more about efficiency than hunger management.
| Booster Distances | Walking | Sprinting | Traveller Boots (w) | Traveller Boots (s) | Nano Boots (w) | Nano Boots (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grass | 14 | 18 | 18 | 22 | 32 | 36 |
| Brownstone Road | 18 | 18 | 19 | 22 | 32 | 36 |
| GT Concrete | 18 | 24 | 24 | 28 | 42 | 48 |
| Chisel Concrete | 26 | 33 | 33 | 41 | 61 | 67 |
As you can see, walking around with Nanoboots is about as fast as sprining on Chisel concrete without any boots. For this reason the Thaumcraft boost are incredible items to reduce your overall food consumption speed given you won’t have to sprint everywhere with them anymore. For the record there is also a Haste enchantment that goes on boots, which increaes your movement speed depending on the strength of the enchantment (up to level III normally), but long term this would only see use on Ichorcloth/Boots of the Horizontal Shield. It can also be put on regular Boots of the Traveller, though
Gaining Hearts (and why being buff matters in GTNH) Every new food you eat will record its shanks value (the colored in meat haunches, not the gold outlined shadow thereof) in your food journal. Every 50 half shanks recorded you get +1 maximum health permanently, up to a practical maximum of around +55-57 hearts for eating just about everything. This alone is a good reward for diving into food making, because of one other mechanic that is noticeably different in GTNH compared to what you’re probably used to from newer versions: Health regen. Health in GTNH regenerates at a glacial pace, to the point where it’s impractical to duck out of a fight, slam down a loaf of bread, and regenerate an arm and half a leg within just a couple of seconds. You will get access to faster health regeneation methods eventually, including fully passive ones, but not for a while. Adding that mobs are at their most dangerous early on, before you’ve got effectively a portable rail/machine gun hybrid (TiC crossbows are delightfully overpowered in 1.7) and no machine miners to take the aggro off of the pigman infesting the Nether, extra hearts are most important early on. They still have some uses later, with Blood Magic in particular, but early on they’re especially important
In addition to eating food you can craft TiC Heart Canisters to get up to another +30 hearts. Red, Yellow and Green canisters require a wand capable of 50, 100 and 200 Vis to craft respectively, the empty canisters require an HV tier Assembling Machine. Uptiering hearts also requires Arcane Infusion Having a sufficiently high percentage in a given nutrient gives you a rank of Toughness, which gives you +2 maximum hearts. Properly balancing all five groups - Dairy, Fruit, Grain, Protein and Vegetable - adds up to +10 maximum hearts, in addition to the other passive buffs that nutrition provides Wearing Botania’s Ring of Odin gives you +10 hearts in addition to immunity to various environmental hazards. Gaia Pylons need Naquadah plates, though. In GTNH you can combine the Ring of Odin/Thor/Loki into the Ring of Aesir, which combines their effects. They can also accept Runic Shielding Thaumcraft Runic Shielding effectively gives you additional hearts that will take damage before your armor does, which requires Vis from a wand to recharge instead of hunger. Some items (notably Botania’s baubles) can be infused with levels of Runic Shielding, and existing levels can be strengthened
Your hearts will change color to denote >10 hearts. The order is Red (1-10) -> Orange (11-20) -> Yellow (21-30) -> Green (31-40) -> Blue (41-50) -> Purple (51-60) -> Magenta (61-70) -> Pink (71-80) -> Gold (81-90) -> Turqoise (91-100) -> Frozen (101-110)
Tips and Tricks: Forbidden Magic adds an item called the Nutrition Ring, which increases the amount of food and saturation you get from eaten food. This item does work (and work well, if not well enough for it’s cost), but your food journal will only record the base value of a given food
Dealing with Nutrition (finding more ingredients) A new addition to GTNH 2.4.0 is the Nutrition mod, which makes you balance your diet between dairy, fruit, grain, protein and vegetable intake. You will get passive buffs for doing so, or penalties if you don’t. Note that relying on a Healing Axe will not yield these buffs, but won’t inflict debuffs either (For the record: The full set of buffs from 90+% in all five food groups is Toughness V, Resistance I, Strength I and Haste I) Getting the buffs from balancing your nutrition groups is going to involve getting all kinds of ingredients, some of which are harder to source (in bulk) than others. I trust putting down farms doesn’t require explanation or guidance, so here’s some tips to get more of the less common stuff:
Mince Meat Raw/Cooked meat can be macerated into regular/cooked Mince Meat, which serves as a substitute for Pork, Beef, Chicken or generic meat in various recipes. This is a more convenient method of substituting meat than Firm Tofu, although the latter has more uses. Still worth saving the tofu, though
Good sources of Mince Meat include excess fish from GT++ fish traps, excess chicken meat from Animal Traps, harvesting Flesh blocks in the Nether (which macerate into 9 mince meat), or farming Flesh Roots from Nether Gardens. Flesh Blocks are best mined with Silk Touch to mine whole blocks, but if that isn’t an option simply punching Flesh blocks will yield flesh chunks, four of which craft into a flesh block. Losing 75% of your meat profit isn’t great, but better some than none. Flesh Blocks spawn in Viceral Heap biomes, which shouldn’t be too rare to find. They look quite distinct, as well
If you have a compressor and excess Rotten Flesh you can also compress the Rotten Flesh into a Block of Flesh from Thaumcraft, which in turn can be macerated into 9 Mince Meat. Sanitary? Not particularly, but it’s not like that’s even the fifth worse thing that Steve can freely chow down on
Animal Traps Animal Traps from Pam’s Havestcraft passively produce animal-related items when given one of three types of bait and time. You cannot automate inputting the baits, but can automate outputting the produce. Though be warned this will need filtering, otherwise it will extract the bait as well The earliest option for filtering Animal Traps is either EnderIO conduit filters or, more exotically, Robot Arms on Chest Buffers (or Machine Hulls with a Conveyor Module to export the items). Bait is stored in slot 18, so set the robot arm to import from slot 0 (top-left trap output slot)
| Bait | Leather | Feather | Bone | Egg | Raw Chicken | Raw Porkchop | Raw Beef | Raw Venison | Raw Rabbit | Raw Turkey | Raw Mutton | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit Bait | Rare | Very common | Rare | Rare | Very common | —————————- | ————————- | ———————– | Very common | ———————– | ———————– | |||
| Grain Bait | Rare | Very common | Rare | Rare | Very common | —————————- | Rare | ———————– | ———————– | Rare | ———————– | |||
| Veggie Bait | Rare | Very common | Rare | Rare | Very common | Rare | ————————- | Rare | ———————– | ———————– | Rare |
Fish Traps and GT++ Fish Catchers There’s two early game methods of automating fish catching: The cheaper Fish Trap from Pam’s, or the more expensive Fish Catcher from GT++. The former has the same quirks as the Animal Traps and requires Fish Bait to work, which cuts heavily into your seafood profit Fish Catchers don’t require bait or special considerations when automating, but do require Steel to craft - and a fair bit of it if you don’t have MV machines to make the recipe cheaper. Though for that cost they’ll produce a steady(-ish) supply of vanilla and Pam’s fish, seaweed, and the occasional sand, bone, ink sack, slimeball and (very rarely) gold nugget
Fresh Water/Milk, Glyph of the Bovine You can shapeless craft Buckets of Water/Milk into four Fresh Water/Milk, which can be used for Pam’s recipes instead of a full bucket, greatly stretching your water/milk supplies. Also no, there is no Cow in a jar in GTNH. That’s a feature from later Pam’s versions that (intentionally) wasn’t backported The earliest way to automate milking cows (to my knowledge) is using a Thirsty Tank with a Glyph of the Bovine. Simply place the tank somewhere, point the Glyph towards a cow, and the rest happens automatically. Note that this method requires an MV Precision Laser Engraver, due to the Arcane Stone Brick Slab required in the Bovine glyph recipe, although you do get a free Glyph of the Bovine as a quest reward for crafting your first Thirsty Tank. Thirsty Tanks themselves are craftable in early LV if you get alu from a Kobold (or other loot) to craft a basic wand, for the record
Learning where to find stuff (NEI, biome tags, Nature’s Compass) Chances are that you’re missing some fruits and perhaps even some gardens from Pam’s to complete your collection of ingredients. If you look up the uses of the various Gardens in NEI, or the recipes for ingredients, you’ll find a Garden Drops tab. This tab lists what ingredients can drop from which garden, as well as which biomes these gardens can spawn in. Specifically it will lists what biome tags are required, and which tags are forbidden - Grass gardens can be found in biomes that have the PLAINS tag, but not biomes that have the COLD tag, for instance Pam’s trees work similarly. “Temperate” fruit trees - that is, trees whos saplings are crafted with an Oak sapling - are found in biomes that have the FOREST tag. Tropical trees, crafted from Jungle saplings, are found in biomes with the WET and/or SWAMP tag. DEAD prevents both types from spawning
To see which biomes have which tags ingame requires a Nature’s Compass, which is craftable in early LV. Nature’s Compasses can also be used to locate a biome within 10K blocks of your current position, if any exist, which is greatly helpful for finding I.E. Lavender Fields if you want Lavender flowers
Having a rough time finding Water Gardens? Well, you’ve got a few options. They can spawn in Shield biomes, rivers, or Twilight Lakes (which are rare Twilight Forest biomes with no special features or structures). They also have a crafting recipe, and you can plant gardens to have them slowly spread and duplicate themselves (I’m not sure about the exact mechanics/limits, but just place a single garden in a chunk and it should spread eventually). Right click a garden to pick it up rather than break it into Pam’s crops. You can also get 8 water gardens as a quest reward for crafting a vanilla boat
Tips and Tricks: GT tools made out of Amber (which is mainly found among shard veins in the Twilight Forest) have innate Silk Touch, for all your flesh harvesting needs. Make sure to craft an Amber Shovel, since a pickaxe/axe will not mine the block (a sword will, but slower and using more durability than a shovel) Milking a mooshroom in-world will result in a regular bucket of milk, but milking a mooshroom through a Glyph of the Bovine will instead produce Mushroom Soup. This automagy liquid is one I don’t know the properties of too well, but apparently it helps with getting warped if you bathe in it? Not sure Looking for a lot of fruit trees? Temperate Rainforest and Shield are two biomes that have both the FOREST and WET biome tags, meaning they’re valid spawn locations for both temperate and tropical fruit trees. Twilight Swamps (regular and fiery) are also good places to hit up for a lot of fruit trees Pam’s fruit tree nodes cannot be harvested with a Silk Touch shears in GTNH, although they can be moved with a Dislocation focus. You can also use fertilizer on fruit nodes to quickly grow them - very useful to carry along on a long trip to immediately bring a stack of new fruits back home Biomes o’ Plenty fruit trees spawn and their fruits can be used to cook Pam’s foods with, but they cannot be used to craft Pam’s fruit tree saplings. I’m also not sure if they can regrow at all, but in any case it’s a little bit extra you can collect and bring home during any exploration trips Farmer villagers can buy Pam’s crops and/or sell fruit trees. Getting a specific fruit tree this way is difficult as farmers have a ton of different trades they can roll, but early on it’s a great way to get at least a few random fruit trees going GT Butchery Knives can safely kill passive mobs (as in they won’t randomly explode, because of course they do) and tend to have Looting enchantments by default. It’s the “intended” solution to killing passive mobs, although as silly as this puzzle/solution is the inherent Looting is at least worth it
Balancing Nutrients and food demands In GTNH there are seven edible foods that yield all five nutrients at once: Enchanted Golden Apple, Ultimate Stew, Delighted Meal, Chicken Curry, Random Taco, Ploughman’s Lunch, and Deluxe Chicken Curry. In theory if you rotated six of those you’d remain balanced in terms of nutrients forever, but of course in practice that is a lot easier said than done. A much more economical solution is to rotate foods that each have three or four of the five different nutrients. Although even some of the top tier foods aren’t that hard to make, should you take a closer look at their recipes
Below I’ll list some suggestions for relatively easy, nutritious and filling food that’s available at a given early tech level. The letters in paranthesis will note whether a food contains dairy, fruit, grain, protein and/or vegetable
| Age | Food (Categories) |
|---|---|
| Stone Age | Berry Medley (F) |
| Chicken Celery Casserole (PV) | |
| Cucumber Salad (V) | |
| Grape/Strawberry Salad (F) | |
| Roasted Root Veggie Medley (V) | |
| Pork Lettuce Wrap (PV) | |
| Stuffed Eggplant (DPV) | |
| Tool Age | Beef Wellington (GPV) |
| Beet Burger (FGPV) | |
| BLT (GPV) | |
| Blueberry Pancake (DFGP) | |
| Cornbread (DGP) | |
| PB&J Sandwiches (FGP) | |
| Leek Bacon Soup (DPV) | |
| Steam Age | Curry Rice (FGV) |
| Delighted Meal (DFGPV) | |
| Deluxe Chicken Curry (DFGPV) | |
| Hearty Breakfast (DGPV) | |
| Random Taco (DFGPV) | |
| Ploughman’s Lunch (DFGPV) | |
| Sausage in Bread (GPV) |
Tips and Tricks: If you want to lose hunger quickly to rapidly eat new food you need to left-click animals with a Healing Axe. No, the irony is not lost on me. This supposedly heals the animal at the cost of hunger, although I’ve not seen it work that way before. Regardless, you will lose food real quick in any case One nutrient type you’re likely to be short on early is Dairy. Crafting Yogurt with (soy) milk and excess leather (see animal traps) is a good way to stretch your milk supplies without needing salt to produce cheese or butter. Once you’ve got passive water you can mass produce Edible Salt, though Got a collection of useless dyes from a lootbag? Throw the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and magenta in your kitchen, combine with bacon (or mince meat), and enjoy several days worth of extremely filling Epic Bacon. Don’t mind the dyes being made with sulfuric acid, Steve can handle it
Committing to the trap option (Healing Axe) One long term solution to hunger, if you don’t mind having an item glued to your hand and giving up the nutrition buffs, is the Healing Axe. This item has a regular crafting recipe that is doable in MV/HV (technically pre-steam if you find an Enchanting Table in a Roguelike Dungeon), but it is also a quest reward for completing probably one of the most infamous quests in GTNH. This quest is technically doable pre-steam if you do some shenaniganry to access the Nether early (which lets you skip the need for Steel to make a Flint and Steel), but let me make one thing clear: This quest is a trap option
So, exactly what do you need? Accessing the quest requires having completed the quest to craft a bed in the first quest tab - not a big deal, and worth doing at any rate - and completing it requires turning in 8 of every type of garden, 128 Firm Tofu and Silken Tofu, as well as 20 each of Delighted Meal, Hearty Breakfast, Rainbow Curry, Supreme Pizza, Sausage in Bread, and Beef Wellington. Crafting all of this food with a well stocked kitchen and some robust farming/food processing options is a non-trivial task, but that’s the thing: You’re doing this quest to obsolete kitchens and farming/food stuff. So of course you’re not going to have (or set up) such infrastructure. Instead you’re going to brute force the cheapest, simplest methods possible until you’ve got your Healing Axe. Does that sound like it’s going to be a fun journey, especially without a supply of good food to stay fed? Can confirm, it won’t be
My recommendation if you insist on using this quest to get a Healing Axe is to hold off until at least LV. At that point every obstacle, even those that could take literal hours to resolve with bad luck otherwise, can be solved with a proper tool you’re able to craft. The biggest sticking points being the ones that require exploration - before LV you’ve got few tools to make travel easier (copious abuse of /home notwithstanding), zero tools to find the one singular, specific biome you need (Lavender Fields), and zero ways to narrow down good candidates for finding the required fruit trees. Add the obvious lack of an existing Healing Axe given you’re trying to get one, probably an anaemic setup for farming/producing good food (if that), and possibly zero machines to make processing recipes easier/cheaper/better, and you’ve got the perfect storm to make completing this quest as actively painful as possible
With that out of the way let’s break down exactly what you’ ll need to complete this quest. Although if the answer isn’t “a bit of time working in your kitchen” you may wish to strongly consider setting up some infrastructure before diving straight into the deep end. In general that’s good practice in GTNH
| Item Type | Components & Notes |
|---|---|
| Gardens (8 of each) | Leafy Garden, Mushroom Garden, Stalk Garden, Textile Garden, Tropical Garden, Nether Garden, Ground Garden, Berry Garden, Desert Garden, Grass Garden, Gourd Garden, Herb Garden, Water Garden |
| Tofu Production (128) | |
| Firm Tofu | Requires: Soft Mallet, Wet Tofu |
| Silken Tofu | Requires: Wet Tofu, water, Soybean |
| Recipes (20 each) | |
| Delighted Meal | - Base: Deluxe Cheeseburger, Fries, Fruit Smoothie |
| - Components: Potato, Salt, Lettuce, Tomato, Cheese, Hamburger, Raw Beef, Skillet | |
| Hearty Breakfast | - Main: Cooked Pork, Fried Egg, Toast, Potato Cakes |
| - Components: Butter, Heavy Cream, Salt, Skillet, Saucepan | |
| Rainbow Curry | - Base: Curry Rice, Bowl |
| - Flowers: Lavender, Blue Orchid, Poppy, Grass, Burning Blossom, Dandelion | |
| - Spices: Chili Pepper, Coconut Milk, Rice, Salt | |
| Supreme Pizza | - Base: Pizza, Dough |
| - Toppings: Bellpepper, Onion, Spice Leaf, Tomato, Cheese, Raw Pork | |
| - Tools: Knife/Cutting Board, Rolling Pin/Bakeware | |
| Sausage in Bread | - Main: Maple Sausage, Bread |
| - Components: Ketchup, Onion, Dough, Flour, Water | |
| Beef Wellington | - Main: Raw Beef, Dough |
| - Components: Mushroom, Spinach, Flour, Water, Grain |
Special Notes:
a vanilla cauldron Dough Flour Water [Egg] can use an egg or Firm Tofu Flour
Most of these ingredients (and processes, for that matter) are completely straightforward, and with access to LV machines you can also craft bulk amounts of Forestry Fertilizer to straight up not care about exactly how many stacks of wheat/rice/etc. you need because you can just slam down a stack of fertilizer like it’s nothing and get more. Ingredients that deserve special attention are Lavender, Burning Blossom, Coconut and Maple Syrup
Lavender is found primarily (maybe exclusively, though I couldn’t swear to that) in Lavender Field biomes. Don’t have a Nature’s Compass to point you to the nearest one? Pick a random direction and pray. Alternatively bees might be able to cause Lavender to spawn, although I’m not sure if they can Burning Blossom is found in the Nether, although I’m not sure if any particular Y level/biome/etc. has a higher/lower chance of spawning any. So long as you don’t mine ores exploring the Nether isn’t too dangerous, though, and chances are you’ll find some while looking for the eight Nether gardens Coconuts are a tropical Pam’s fruit tree, and spawns in biomes with the WET/SWAMP tag and without the DEAD tag. Don’t have a Nature’s Compass to see biome tags ingame? There’s sure to be at least one external source that lists GTNH biomes and there tags somewhere, otherwise look for swamp-like biomes and you ought to find it eventually. Don’t bother with looking specifically for tropical or jungle type biomes, any biome with the WET/SWAMP tag will suffice and tropical biomes are exceedingly rare in the overworld. The Twilight Forest swamp is also a good place to check if you can Maple Syrup comes from Pam’s trees, and they do spawn in the overworld…but given that their fruit nodes are their trunks rather than on their leaves it can be quite the challenge to find them. Fortunately you can buy a Maple sapling from the Coins tab if you’re really having a rough time finding any