Balanced Diet Challenge

Why is this mod needed?

This mod is designed to diversify gameplay and make players pay attention to different types of food, rather than limiting themselves to just chicken, beef, and golden vegetables. It introduces several useful changes to the game:

• Encourages trying new types of food
• Teaches avoiding unnecessary damage (improving parkour skills, using water buckets for safe landings, moving more carefully)
• Makes survival more challenging but without excessive restrictions and frustration

The mod doesn't make the game too difficult, but rather makes you think about these aspects.

How does it work?

Essentially, it's a challenge that limits health regeneration until you try different types of food. When you eat all the foods from the "A Balanced Diet" achievement, all health regeneration restrictions are removed.

However, the challenge can be disabled directly in the game, leaving only a convenient tracker for monitoring achievement progress.

New progress tracker

A new achievements tab opens showing which foods you've already tried and which you haven't for the vanilla "A Balanced Diet" achievement (full overview in the gallery).

The mod has two operating modes:

• Challenge mode: enables health regeneration restrictions and tracker
• Tracker mode: enables only food consumption tracking

You can freely switch between modes during gameplay using commands:

/function balanced_diet:mode/tracker

/function balanced_diet:mode/challenge

Achievement progress is saved regardless of the selected mode. Each player is tracked individually and can be in a different mode than other participants.

Challenge mode

(enabled by default)

You start the game with 10 hearts, as usual. However, only 1 heart is a regular red heart, the other 9 are yellow absorption hearts. Absorption hearts don't regenerate naturally after being lost.

For every 4 unique foods you eat, you permanently gain 1 red heart:

Absorption heart regeneration

Absorption hearts regenerate every day at dawn, filling all 10 heart slots, regardless of whether the player slept. Extra absorption hearts are never removed, so permanent overhealing is possible if you eat many unique foods without taking damage.

Absorption hearts also regenerate when respawning after death.

Completion details

Due to rounding, the last 2 hearts require 6 foods, not 4.

Performance

No noticeable impact on performance. All tracking happens through achievements, just like in the vanilla game. Only a few simple functions are executed on each tick.

Limitations

• If added to an existing world, the mod won't recognize foods eaten before installation
• Absorption can only be given in 2-heart increments. When only 1 heart is needed, 1 damage is automatically dealt for balance. Checks ensure damage isn't dealt when unnecessary
• The player will constantly be under the absorption effect. Although particles are disabled, the effect is still visible in the inventory

Uninstallation

To remove the mod and all its traces, execute the command:

/function balanced_diet:uninstall

After this, a notification will appear about the need to execute the /datapack disable command. The mod cannot perform this final step itself due to potential errors when renaming the package (which happens automatically on some sites).