Farmer’s Delight 1.3.2 landed on 13 May 2026, and the headline is a nerf. Fried Rice and Chicken Soup have been moved down to the three-minute tier of meals, on the grounds that both were too easy to cook for what they gave back. That is a small number in a config file and a real change to how the mod’s early game plays.
What changed
- Fried Rice and Chicken Soup dropped to the three-minute meal tier, because of how cheap they are to make.
- Rice Bag was removed from the
straw_blockstag – it is not actually made of straw – and added directly tomineable/knife. - Straw Bale gained a fuel value, smelting five items.
The tag change is the one that will quietly break things. Anything that referenced straw_blocks expecting Rice Bag to be in it now needs updating, which in practice means a handful of kitchen-themed datapacks.
Why nerf the easy meals?
Farmer’s Delight’s whole design rests on a trade: better food costs more preparation. When one recipe gives long-duration saturation for a handful of rice, the rest of the cookbook stops mattering. Players find the cheapest good meal within an hour and never open the pot again.
Moving those two to a shorter tier does not make them bad. It makes them the convenience option rather than the correct option, which is where they should have been.
Does this change whether the mod is worth installing?
No. Everything that makes it the standard farming companion is untouched – the cooking pot, the knives, the crate storage, the way it turns a wheat field into something you actually visit. Our full review of Farmer’s Delight goes into why it works where most food mods do not.
The straw bale fuel note
Five items per bale puts straw roughly where dried kelp blocks sit, which is fine for a farm-adjacent fuel and not something you would build a smelter array around. It matters most for players running a farm-only start, where coal is a trip and wheat is not.
If you are already running a production chain on the mod, this slots in beside honey and other renewable outputs. The bee and honey production chain is the other half of that setup for most players, and the mistakes there are more expensive than a meal tier.
Updating
- 1.3.2 is available for 1.20.1 and 1.21.1.
- No world-breaking changes; existing meals in chests keep working at the new tier.
- Check any datapack referencing
straw_blocks.
Two further releases followed – 1.3.3 on 17 August, mostly rope and sign fixes, and 1.3.4 on 29 August, which fixed piston interaction with Feasts. If you are updating now, go straight to 1.3.4.
The wider point
Balance patches to content mods get almost no coverage, and they are where a mod either stays interesting for a whole playthrough or collapses into one optimal recipe. A mod that nerfs its own convenience options is a mod being maintained by someone who still plays it, which is worth more than a feature list.
How the meal tiers work
Farmer’s Delight food is sorted by how long its effect lasts rather than by how much hunger it restores. A three-minute meal and a six-minute meal can fill the same bar; the six-minute one keeps you fed while you do something else, which is the whole point in a game where eating interrupts what you were doing.
That is why a tier change reads as a nerf even though no number about hunger moved. The meal is as filling as it was. It just stops covering a whole mining trip.
What to cook instead
- Anything requiring a cutting board step, which is where the mod’s longer effects live.
- Stews built on multiple crops rather than one – the cost is the balance mechanism.
- Feasts, if you are playing with other people. They serve several players from one cook.
The mod rewards a kitchen with more than one station in it, and the meals that were nerfed were exactly the ones that let you skip building the rest of the kitchen.
Does it change a modpack?
In a pack with a hunger overhaul, marginally – those packs usually rebalance food themselves and this change lands underneath their adjustments. In vanilla-plus packs, it is noticeable in the first few hours and irrelevant after that, because by then you have a farm and a full cookbook.
Pack authors who pinned 1.3.1 for balance reasons have one more reason to check before updating, which is the normal cost of a balance patch.
Timeline for the 1.3.x line
- 13 May 2026 – 1.3.2, meal tier changes, rice bag tag fix, straw bale fuel.
- 17 August 2026 – 1.3.3, rope and canvas sign fixes, cooking pot data component comparison.
- 29 August 2026 – 1.3.4, piston interaction with feasts, chest loot config fix.
All three ship for 1.20.1 and 1.21.1 in parallel, which is where the mod’s audience actually is. There is no 26.x build in this line, and for a mod this deeply embedded in modpacks, that is a deliberate choice rather than neglect.
Images: Farmer’s Delight project gallery on Modrinth.