With so many food item options, Minecraft players usually stick to one of them. Most of the time, it’s golden carrots, due to their amazing saturation restoration. Moreover, items that cannot be stacked up to 64 are not really ideal, since you would need a couple of stacks just to sustain yourself, which clogs up your inventory. However, some of these unstackable items have different and unique advantages over the rest. In this guide, we are covering one such special item, suspicious stew. Learn how to make and get suspicious stew and why should you even bother in Minecraft.
What Is Suspicious Stew in Minecraft?
Suspicious stew is a food item that gives players different status effects for a short amount of time. This is a very distinctive item since it behaves differently than other food items.
Furthermore, if you’re wondering why not just use potions in Minecraft, they provide players with status effects too, and last significantly longer. Well, suspicious stew is obtained far more easily, even early in the game and their effects can save you in some cases, like falling in lava. It also allows you to have certain effects potions cannot produce, which makes them the only option to get the “How did we get here” advancement.
How to Make Suspicious Stew in Minecraft
Suspicious stew is a common item in Minecraft. You can get it in several different ways. Let’s go over all our options, so you can choose which one you want to utilize.
Suspicious Stew Crafting Recipe
Suspicious stew can be crafted similarly to a regular mushroom stew. Although there is one additional ingredient that you need, and that’s a flower. Every suspicious stew requires a specific flower to produce a special effect. The base crafting recipe is completely shapeless and you need one bowl, one red mushroom, one brown mushroom, and a flower. Two block tall flowers don’t create a suspicious stew.
Find Suspicious Stew
Besides crafting, you can also find suspicious stew items in a couple of different structures in Minecraft. One of them is shipwrecks, where you will find this item only in the chest in the front part of the ship. In addition, there is more than a 50% chance you will find it.
You can go through our guide on finding the buried treasure in Minecraft to learn how to navigate the shipwreck. On the other hand, you can use your archeology skills in Minecraft to find suspicious stew. When unearthing suspicious sand blocks in Minecraft with your brush, you have about a 12% chance of revealing this food item.
Trading with Villagers
Like various other blocks and items in Minecraft, you can buy suspicious stew from villagers with jobs. Expert-level farmers in Java Edition can offer one or two suspicious stew items for an emerald each. In Bedrock Edition, expert-level farmers sell suspicious stew for an emerald as well, whereas master-level farmers have about a 33% chance of offering the same trade.
Milking Brown Mooshrooms
One of the rarest mobs in Minecraft is mooshrooms. The red variants spawn on an equally rare biome, mushroom fields. However, we are going to focus on an even rarer type of mooshrooms and those are brown mooshrooms. These mobs don’t spawn naturally in the world but can be generated.
Trident enchantment channeling lends you the powers of Zeus in order to control lightning. When a red mooshoorm is struck by lightning, it transforms into a brown variant.
Both variants of mooshrooms can be milked with a bucket to get milk, but you can also “milk” them with a bowl. This produces regular mushroom stew. In order to apply different status effects to the stew, you will need to feed a brown mooshroom a specific flower, the same one used in crafting certain suspicious stew.
After you have fed the brown mooshroom a flower, you can right-click it with a bowl to “milk” it and get appropriate suspicious stew. You will also need to feed the brown mooshroom flowers every time you want suspicious stew, or it will just give regular mushroom stew.
All Types of Suspicious Stews in Minecraft
There are a total of nine different status effects provided by suspicious stews in Minecraft. The following chart from the official Minecraft Wiki shows all suspicious stew effects, what flowers produce them, and how long they last:
Apart from the effects provided by potions and the wither effect, there are blindness and saturation. Blindness creates kind of a dense black fog effect around the player, causing them to not see further than a few blocks. The good thing is that it lasts for only 6 seconds. Suspicious stew with saturation effect is the single food item that provides the most food and saturation. It can replenish at least 6 points of hunger and basically maximizes saturation.
Best Uses of Suspicious Stew in Minecraft
Consuming
As suspicious stews provide useful buffs, players should definitely take advantage of them. They are far cheaper to make than potions and accessible in the early game. Simply hold the right click while the suspicious stew is selected, and you will start to consume it.
Unlike most other food items, you can eat suspicious stew even though your hunger bar is full. It restores three hunger points and 7.2 saturation. Suspicious stews never display the status effect they provide, so be sure you’re not going to consume the one with a negative effect unless you have to.
“How Did We Get Here” Advancement
Possibly the most difficult advancement you can get in Minecraft is the secret one – “How did we get here.” This advancement implies you need to have every single status effect active at once to earn it.
It essentially means you have to do a lot of preparation, because the effects needed also include mining fatigue, dolphin’s grace, bad omen, conduit power, and more. One of the effects required for this advancement is blindness. In Minecraft, it can only be obtained after eating a suspicious stew made out of azure bluets. Therefore, if you want to achieve this insanely tough advancement, you will need this food item.
Ultra Hardcore Mode
If you are an experienced Minecraft player and wish for a greater challenge, ultra hardcore mode might be perfect for you. It is effectively hardcore mode with a twist. Not only do you lose your world when you die, but also you cannot regenerate health naturally through food. This is a step up in difficulty since players have gotten used to this mechanic.
However, there are a few ways in which you can restore health in ultra hardcore mode. The cheapest item you can create that will heal you is the suspicious stew with a regeneration effect. It will not restore as much health as other options will, but it’s simple to make and might just save you in the harsh Minecraft world.
Suspicious stew was first added to the game in the Minecraft 1.14 Village and Pillage update.
Probably the best suspicious stew is the one that provides a blindness effect. Although this effect is not useful to the player, it is the only way to get this status effect and complete the hardest advancement.
