I agree with Antison, but what if we have different ideas about what "balanced" means? Is the goal to make the early game more forgiving when you're new on a MP server and don't know anybody and you spawn 10000 blocks from the nearest unprotected land? To make hunger feel relevant in the mid-to-late game, and not just "I carry a stack of 64 bread because I'm not rich enough to carry a stack of 64 steak yet?"
Is that last goal even possible by simply tweaking the way the existing hunger mechanic works? Or is the actual goal to get the player to farm multiple food types? If so, do carrots, potatoes and wheat "count" as different crops? Or are they so similar, in terms of gameplay, that we should just call them all "plants" and force the player to spec into meat production?
Do we want a realistic simulation of real-world nutrition for educational purposes? Or a ticking clock for the player to scour the map for new seeds, like in Blightfall?
The answer is different maps/servers/modpacks/players will have different needs. "Balance" is a loaded term that means nothing. (Personally, I'd love to see something like Spice of Life implemented the way it worked back in the old days, reducing food effectiveness by a certain (configurable) percent every time you reuse the same food. But not even Spice of Life's developer wants to do it that way anymore, probably because of the huge variety of foods introduced by various cooking mods, so that's probably not a mod concept that most players or server operators would want.)
Turns out, it's actually super easy to just make a bunch of new food items. It's a bit harder to change how hunger works, as a mechanic. But accounting for every new mod that might come out in the future is almost impossible.
TL;DR: Food in minecraft is complex, man. And it only gets more-so when you add other food mods into the mix. How you gonna "balance" all that, without even knowing what mods the player is going to load?
Here's one idea that would probably work, (from a gameplay point of view) if your goal is "balance player effort VS hunger shanks restored." Note that I have no idea whether mcreator exposes the tools to do all of this:
After all other mods that could add food items have loaded:
Comb through the items and make a list of which ones are edible
Set every edible item's hunger restoration to half a shank
For each food item on this list, check and see whether that food can be crafted using other items
If a food item can be crafted, increase the hunger restored by half a shank for every crafting or smelting operation
If a food item can be crafted, increase the hunger restored by half a shank for every ingredient over one.
So Pumpkin Pie has 3 ingredients and 1 crafting step, so it should restore 2 shanks.
Cake has 9 ingredients, so it should restore 4.5 shanks, divided by the number of "cake uses."
Or does cake have 4 ingredients? 🤔 Should we concern ourselves with how long each individual ingredient takes to farm? What about how rare the first seed is as a drop or animal is as a spawn? And all our carefully-planned calculations could go out the window once we expose our mod to actual players, and they start telling each other "nah, man, go all carrots. It's the most optimal strat. They modded the hunger values on this server."
Oh, take it from me, it's possible. The food mechanics irritated me too, so I made a food/nutrition mod for it- and I agree too, a lot of mods- food mods in particular- fall into the trap of just adding loads of new content without adding anything new, and without changing existing systems to account for it.
What kind of mod are you looking to make? My recommendation is to look through different categories, maybe check out different fourums or PlanetMC for inspiration. ...Not much of a request, I guess, but I don't really know what to recommend in particular.
You'd be surprised what you can accomplish without custom code- and even if you need to do custom code, everything I've done so far is usually just manually changing values that MCreator doesn't cover, or pasting in stuff from the Minecraft Wiki or Github.
...As for my food mod, no custom code required. In fact, the entire nutrition system works soley with Scratch blocks, which essentially just change around different variables whenever the player eats something, and give effects accordingly.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a ton you can accomplish without custom code- and I've only ever had to use it in a handful of very specific circumstances that Mcreator doesn't cover. (At one point to get some custom projectiles working, another time to get armor to pacify piglins, and a bit more frequently to put special stuff on loot tables like damaged items or enchanted books.) Even so, don't be too afraid of custom code either. Once you've got the basic idea of how a lot of this stuff works, it's at least a bit more intuitive.
...As for some actual mod ideas:
Mod that adds unique plants or mobs that can only be found in different biomes, weather, moon phases, etc.
Any mod that adds new enchantments could be pretty cool.
Lucky Block mods are, (as far as I know), a tried-and-true way to goof off with code however you want.
...And so on and so forth. Once again, I recommend the Minecraft Fourum, or the Official Minecraft Feedback website as a good place to look for requests or features that people are interested in.
I would like to see a mod trying to balance the food/farming system of Minecraft
I agree with Antison, but what if we have different ideas about what "balanced" means? Is the goal to make the early game more forgiving when you're new on a MP server and don't know anybody and you spawn 10000 blocks from the nearest unprotected land? To make hunger feel relevant in the mid-to-late game, and not just "I carry a stack of 64 bread because I'm not rich enough to carry a stack of 64 steak yet?"
Is that last goal even possible by simply tweaking the way the existing hunger mechanic works? Or is the actual goal to get the player to farm multiple food types? If so, do carrots, potatoes and wheat "count" as different crops? Or are they so similar, in terms of gameplay, that we should just call them all "plants" and force the player to spec into meat production?
Do we want a realistic simulation of real-world nutrition for educational purposes? Or a ticking clock for the player to scour the map for new seeds, like in Blightfall?
The answer is different maps/servers/modpacks/players will have different needs. "Balance" is a loaded term that means nothing. (Personally, I'd love to see something like Spice of Life implemented the way it worked back in the old days, reducing food effectiveness by a certain (configurable) percent every time you reuse the same food. But not even Spice of Life's developer wants to do it that way anymore, probably because of the huge variety of foods introduced by various cooking mods, so that's probably not a mod concept that most players or server operators would want.)
Turns out, it's actually super easy to just make a bunch of new food items. It's a bit harder to change how hunger works, as a mechanic. But accounting for every new mod that might come out in the future is almost impossible.
TL;DR: Food in minecraft is complex, man. And it only gets more-so when you add other food mods into the mix. How you gonna "balance" all that, without even knowing what mods the player is going to load?
Here's one idea that would probably work, (from a gameplay point of view) if your goal is "balance player effort VS hunger shanks restored." Note that I have no idea whether mcreator exposes the tools to do all of this:
So Pumpkin Pie has 3 ingredients and 1 crafting step, so it should restore 2 shanks.
Cake has 9 ingredients, so it should restore 4.5 shanks, divided by the number of "cake uses."
Or does cake have 4 ingredients? 🤔 Should we concern ourselves with how long each individual ingredient takes to farm? What about how rare the first seed is as a drop or animal is as a spawn? And all our carefully-planned calculations could go out the window once we expose our mod to actual players, and they start telling each other "nah, man, go all carrots. It's the most optimal strat. They modded the hunger values on this server."
It's food for thought.
I Don't Think That Is Possible
Oh, take it from me, it's possible. The food mechanics irritated me too, so I made a food/nutrition mod for it- and I agree too, a lot of mods- food mods in particular- fall into the trap of just adding loads of new content without adding anything new, and without changing existing systems to account for it.
What kind of mod are you looking to make? My recommendation is to look through different categories, maybe check out different fourums or PlanetMC for inspiration. ...Not much of a request, I guess, but I don't really know what to recommend in particular.
To Clarify, I Am Looking To Make A Mod That Is Possible Whitout Manually Codeing Something
You'd be surprised what you can accomplish without custom code- and even if you need to do custom code, everything I've done so far is usually just manually changing values that MCreator doesn't cover, or pasting in stuff from the Minecraft Wiki or Github.
...As for my food mod, no custom code required. In fact, the entire nutrition system works soley with Scratch blocks, which essentially just change around different variables whenever the player eats something, and give effects accordingly.
I guess what I'm saying is that there's a ton you can accomplish without custom code- and I've only ever had to use it in a handful of very specific circumstances that Mcreator doesn't cover. (At one point to get some custom projectiles working, another time to get armor to pacify piglins, and a bit more frequently to put special stuff on loot tables like damaged items or enchanted books.) Even so, don't be too afraid of custom code either. Once you've got the basic idea of how a lot of this stuff works, it's at least a bit more intuitive.
...As for some actual mod ideas: