New cave food & New cave mob & New mechanics

Every Minecraft dimension has its own food source: the Nether has pork and mushrooms, while the End has chorus plants. Caves, however, have very little food of their own. Glow berries are rare, and rotten flesh is unreliable and comes with a negative effect.

The Cave Worm is a unique underground creature that lives inside stone and feeds on ores. It creates 1-block-wide tunnels through suitable blocks while making a distinctive, fairly loud sound, allowing players to track it through walls. After a while, it restores the blocks it tunneled through. Rather than a normal mob, it behaves more like a living block: it cannot be killed with weapons and can only be mined with a pickaxe under certain conditions.

New food

Feeding the worm raw ore makes it produce dry mineral mass. Combining it with a water bottle creates edible food. This mirrors cooking in the Overworld with an opposite mechanic: instead of frying food, players moisten a dry product. Different ores produce different foods with varying hunger and saturation values. The goal is not to replace existing food, but to let players explore caves for longer without returning to the surface.