Taking Inventory: Rotten Flesh

There are about 40 different things you can eat in Minecraft, and some of them are kinda icky. Spider eyes, poisonous potatoes, suspicious stew, or any of the raw meats all fall into that category for me. But the ickiest of all is our item of the week – rotten flesh.

Rotten flesh was added to Minecraft in beta version 1.8, which also added melons, steak, ender pearls, experience orbs, and Endermen. This patch resolved a weird situation that had existed previously, where zombies dropped feathers, because feathers were needed to make arrows.

Chickens were added to drop feathers, and for a while zombies still dropped them too. But eventually zombies were given something else to drop instead. “What should they drop?” the team asked themselves. “Well, what are zombies even made of?” That’s right – rotten flesh.

Getting your hands on some of that sweet, sweet rotten flesh usually means defeating zombies. But it’s also dropped by drowned, husks, zombie horses, zombie villagers, Zoglins and Zombified Piglins. Basically everything in the zombie family tree. You can also obtain rotten flesh through fishing, in chests, and from tamed cats that sometimes will bring it to you. Lovely.

If you’re a committed zombie-slayer, then you’ll eventually start building up a backlog of rotten flesh in your chests and might start to wonder what you should do with it. 

For starters, you might consider eating it – but this is probably a bad idea. While it does restore two chunks of hunger, it has a large chance of giving you the hunger debuff which causes the hunger bar to drop rapidly. On the other hand, you can only get the hunger debuff once, so if you repeatedly cram rotten flesh into your mouth then you can sometimes outpace the hunger drain. Don’t try this at home, kids.

Wolves have much stronger stomachs than humans do, so they can eat rotten flesh just fine. In fact they love it so much that it can be used to breed tamed wolves, heal their wounds, and even make baby wolves grow up faster.

Finally, if all else fails then novice-level cleric villagers will sometimes buy 32 rotten flesh for one emerald. It’s not entirely clear why they want it. Maybe they have a pack of wolves to feed? Or maybe something more sinister is going on...

Alright, let’s talk about rotten flesh in the real world – and specifically zombies. The first and most important thing you need to know is that zombies don’t exist in the real world. The word comes from Haitian folklore that was most likely imported from Western Africa – probably a combination of the Kongo words nzambi (meaning god) and zumbi (meaning an object imbued with supernatural powers). 

The last decade or two has seen zombies appear in films, movies and games that are portrayed as more human – retaining characteristics of the living and even in some cases becoming friends with humans.

Minecraft’s zombies are more the classic kind – a groaning slob who never helps out with the dishes. You probably wouldn’t consider one your friend, would you? But a golden apple later and who knows?