Items whose in-game text is still vanilla's, but whose effects Rebirth changed
Rebirth rebalances a lot of vanilla items without rewriting their descriptions, so the tooltip text can be wrong. Food is the biggest example: most cooked and canned food fills less and heals far less than its text suggests, and canned food can now give you dysentery. This page lists every item, status effect and mod where the effect changed but the description didn't.
How this list was made. Every item, mod and status effect in the vanilla 2.6 files was compared with the same entry after Rebirth's own changes are applied (its Core, Utils and Cleanup mods). An entry is listed when its effects changed but its description is still vanilla's. Cosmetic changes (sounds, icons, tags) and developer-only items are left out.
The numbers on the item card are usually right. The stat lines in the tooltip (food, water, health) come from the item's data and update with Rebirth. The description paragraph is the part that goes stale.
"Instead of" always means vanilla. Every comparison is Rebirth against vanilla 7 Days to Die 2.6.
Two Rebirth-wide changes behind many entries: skill magazines are gone from every quest reward bundle, since Rebirth has no magazine perks; and healing items (bandages, aloe cream, first aid, painkillers) are blocked when they would be wasted. If the "Restrictive Healing" game option is on, you also can't stack healing items while a large heal is still running, unless you're bleeding.
Source: the installed Rebirth mod files (Core build 2026.03.30, Utils build 2026.07.02) compared with vanilla 2.6's config, plus Rebirth's own C# code for the healing check. Entries marked untested are read from the files but haven't been checked in game. The comparison is repeatable, so this page can be refreshed when Rebirth updates.