Forum: gaming.stackexchange.com
Tags: <minecraft-java-edition>
Title: What's the fastest way to find melons?
Question: I'm frequently finding myself in situations where I am barely hungry with 9\10 Drumsticks filled, but also with low health. I don't want to waste cooked meat on filling that last Drumstick to start my health regen.  Melon slices, which fill 1 slot of the hunger bar (or one Drumstick), would be perfect for keeping me full.  What's the fastest way to find melons?

Answers:
sents: text: There are three ways to obtain melon slices: Grow and harvest a melon block.
text: Locate an abandoned mineshaft, they commonly intersect with a ravine, so ravines are a good place to look for them.
text: Look for chest within an abandoned mineshaft.
text: According to the wiki, the chests there have 13% chance to contain 2-4 melon seeds.
text: Grow melon on farmland using melon seeds.
text: Harvesting the fully grown melon block yields 3-7 Melon Slices.
text: Trade with farmer villager.
text: Find an NPC village.
text: They can only be found in desert or plains biome.
text: Obtain emeralds by trading with villagers or from mining
text: (Emerald Ore is very, very rare).
text: Look for the 1 emerald for 5-8 melon slices deals offered by farmer villagers.
text: They are the ones dressed in brown robes.
text: If no villagers offer that deal, you can grow more villagers by building more houses (doors).
text: Alternatively, you can kill villagers to make room for new villagers to spawn.
text: Find a jungle biome.
text: If you explore a jungle biome enough you could find melon blocks.
text: Break these and get 5-8 melon slices per block.
text: From there you could craft the slices into seeds and start a farm.
text: It depends on your situation to determine which way is faster.
text: Finding and exploring abandoned mineshafts will be more fun but does not guarantee you will find melon seeds.
text: Discovering an NPC village guarantees that you will eventually have a villager that will trade melon slices.
text: As a surplus some villagers might have some really nice trades, but it gets really, really annoying when you have a lot of villagers.
text: Either way, to sustain a constant supply of melon slices, the best way is to have a melon farm.
text: As mentioned above, melon seeds can be found in abandoned mineshaft chests.
text: They can also be crafted, 1 melon seed from 1 melon slice.
text: Additional Note:
text: The 13% chance to find 2-4 melon seeds in an abandoned mineshaft chest sounds very slim, but there is a high chance that there will be more than one chest in an abandoned mineshaft.
text: They are big places after all.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/17801/w1nger1
score: 16
sents: text: Well, the only way to find Melons would be to stumble upon an Abandoned Mineshaft, and hope some of the chests have Melon Seeds.
text: From there, Melons are extremely easy to farm:
text: like Pumpkins, when you plant the seeds, the stalks that grow will not disappear after harvesting the melon they grow, so assuming you make a large enough farm, you will have a fairly constant supply of melons.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/18/Kevin Yap
score: 7
sents: text: As of version 1.4.2, there are quite a few ways to acquire melon seeds.
text: As listed by the Minecraft Wiki , you can find Mellon seeds by either finding one in an abandoned mineshaft chest, trading with a villager, or 'crafting' a melon slice you already have.
text: Note that the Minecraft Wiki is outdated most of the time, but from my experiences, these are currently the only way to acquire melon seeds as of version 1.4.2.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/None/
score: 3
sents: text: Melons could be challenging to find, depending on your world's seed and your luck.
text: If you do find one, you can start a melon farm by planting seeds and harvest your own melon.
text: Usually, people use melon mainly for brewing purposes.
text: It is rarely that a player would eat a melon slice to fill its hunger.
text: This is because the hunger bar has another "hidden" bar, so even if you are only "slightly hungry" and eat a big steak, the steak will not go waste.
text: Here's why:
text: There are four fields in level.dat which are related to hunger: foodLevel ranges from 0 to 20 and is represented by the player's Food Bar.
text: foodSaturationLevel is an invisible additional hunger variable that is depleted before main foodLevel value.
text: Eating any food will also add some to this variable.
text: Note that this cannot exceed foodLevel.
text: The Food Bar jitters when this equals 0.
text: foodTickTimer increases with every tick when foodLevel is either greater than 17 or equals zero.
text: When foodTickTimer reaches 80, it resets to zero and then heals or deals one point of damage to the Health Bar, respectively.
text: foodExhaustionLevel ranges from 0.0 to 4.0 and increases with every action the player takes.
text: When the exhaustion level reaches above 4.0, it will be subtracted by 4.0 and subtracts 1 point either from foodSaturationLevel or, if foodSaturationLevel equals zero, from foodLevel. As you can see, if your foodLevel just went down from full (20) to "slightly hungry (19)"
text: , it implies that your foodSaturationLevel has went down to 0.
text: Now suppose you eat a slice of melon, you'll restore food points plus a mere 1.2 foodSaturationLevel .
text: When you eat a steak, however, you'll restore 12.8 foodSaturationLevel , which means you will get hungry again much later.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/35931/user1032613
score: 3
sents: text: I think you can find melons in jungles and of course mine shafts
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/58884/user58884
score: 3
sents: text: You can only find melon seeds in abandoned mine shaft chests and dungeon chests.
answer_details: author: gaming.stackexchange.com/users/23428/unknown
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
You can find melon seeds in an abandoned mineshaft, trading with a villager or crafting a melon you already have. You can then grow and harvest a melon block. 
Finding and producing melons can be done mainly by stumbling uppon a mineshaft, where the player will find melons or melon seeds.