Well, in his game you can buy some provisions before leaving the city. During the exploration MC hunger is gradually increases, if you won't eat, s/he will die eventually.
You also could eat captures girls there, but that's an overkill in our case, we will have a lot of nonhumanoid mobs if we'll make it anyway. Same could be done for water (not necessarily in the forest, a desert or a sea, for example). Leaving everything else aside, what do you thing about such system?
Besides, since you hated such exploration system, I guess we should use one of BEs as base for EE (exploration engine)?