Tutorials/Egg farming

Egg farming is the process of collecting a large number of chicken eggs from chickens.

Catching or Hatching a chicken
In general, you'll want to first build a pen to hold them. Single-height wooden fences (or a small cave) will suffice, but either way it's best to add an "entry lock": a fenced space with gates leading both to the pen and to outside. This will help prevent escapees—besides the obvious, if one of the gates is always closed, the chicken's pathfinding will never see an escape route to the outside.

<!-- usual way to capture chickens is to hold seeds in your hand. Once the chickens notice you, they will follow you, and you can easily lead them into your pen. With care, chickens can even be led across water, as they will follow your boat. <!-- alternative option is to collect Eggs and throw the eggs into your closed pen. <!--re is only a 1 in 8 chance of spawning a chicken when you throw an Egg, so you should try to collect at least one stack (of 16). <!--y will take some time to grow to adulthood, but once you have at least one adult chicken, it will start producing eggs... and with two or more adults, you can breed them with seeds.

Setting up the farm
You can farm chicken eggs the traditional way, where you have to run around and collect chicken eggs all the time.

Alternatively you can follow one of the tutorials below, to create a farm that channels eggs to a single point. Most such will do the same for chicken meat, feathers, and even experience orbs as well.

11x11x6 Automatic farm
<!-- hopper egg farm is a simple contraption with chickens resting on a hopper and the eggs flowing down into a chest.

This farm will be surrounded on the surface by an 11&times;11 fence or (better) wall (put doors or gates at the middle of a side). <!--re is a pillar and partial roof in the center, and the "egg room" dug 3 blocks deep beneath that. (<!-- egg room and its pillar can be adapted to other farm layouts.) You will also want a tunnel leading to the egg room, with space to get at the chest and other devices (you will at least need to retrieve meat and feathers), and the switch to turn it on or off. <!-- chickens are contained primarily by water, so the farm partly resists the current problems with chickens walking through walls and fences. <!-- schematics are below; mostly they should be obvious, but the "help" link gives a key. <!-- least obvious bit is that the gold and stone-brick blocks represent "any full block", but the blocks shown as gold must also be opaque, while stone-brick blocks can be opaque, transparent, or in some cases air.

Materials
<!-- base machinery includes three droppers, a dispenser, three hoppers, a chest, and a couple of switches. Redstone costs include two redstone repeaters, two redstone torches, and six redstone dust. Making the works from scratch, will cost a minimum of 6 smooth stone, 15 iron, 29 cobblestone, 10 logs of wood (with some bits left over), 18 redstone dust, 3 string, and  a slab. Also needed are 7 solid opaque blocks, and several that can be opaque or transparent. You may well want to add an extra chest in the egg room for ordinary storage.

<!-- 9&times;9 floor inside the room will need 78 additional blocks or slabs (plus any you put under the walls). <!-- pillar and roof will need at least two blocks (one can be a jack-o-lantern), and 11 more blocks or slabs. Optional extra: A trapdoor from the chicken floor to the egg room. (<!-- water not only won't flow through the trapdoor, but will generally prevent chickens from slipping down there too.)

A fence would cost another 15 blocks of wood or so, but then any chickens that do get out of the water (and some will) can sit next to them and be stuck on the edge. Glass panes have the same issue, so the "upgrade" has to be to a 2-high wall of blocks. This will cost most of 80 blocks of stone and/or glass (or 20 logs for planks). Given creepers, it's much safer to make at least the floor and the bottom row of the wall out of blast resistant blocks: Any stone (sandstone should be converted to double-slabs) will do, as will brick or hardened clay, or even obsidian. This will minimize the mess if it does get blasted, and make it much easier to fix up. Making the top row out of glass blocks lets you see in and out of the farm, which helps avoid creeper blasts in the first place. You can also surround it with other protections such as a moat (which prevents creepers from damaging the blocks even if they do explode).

Once at least the floor and above-ground parts are built, you can put in the four water source blocks.

Building it
Once the walls are set up, it is easiest to build the egg room from above. Make sure to offset the room so the input hopper is in the center of the floor, and light the egg room properly! When orienting the room, think about where you want the access tunnel to go. As shown, an access corridor leading to the lower left of the diagram allows getting at all the containers and both switches.

For first time builders, the hatcher proper consists of two droppers facing up, with a dispenser facing up on top of them. <!--se are fed by the hoppers, with the chest providing extra storage, and driven by a 3-clock. <!-- clock is on the right edge of the diagram, from the block with the lever southwards and downwards. That lever lets you disable the hatcher completely—place it and turn it on as soon as the clock is built, so you can build the rest without annoying clicking.

<!-- despawn timer (upper edge of diagram) is a dropper facing down over pressure plate. It works by dropping an item onto the pressure plate, which will turn off the torch and enable the clock until the item despawns. <!-- block in front of the pressure plate helps avoid accidentally picking up the item as you pass near, but if you go close enough you can still pick it up and cut off the timer.Once you've built and connected the despawn timer, you can turn the lever back off, as the inactive timer will keep the clock disabled. <!-- despawn timer's dropper can be loaded with any disposable item, such as surplus seeds or eggs. <!-- block in front of the pressure plate is just to make it a little harder to accidentally pick up the item—glass will let you see if the item is on target, or has fallen off the pressure plate.

Once the egg room is built and closed over, continue with the central pillar: Above the hopper, place a top slab (you'll need a temporary block to one side), then two blocks above that. (You can make the lower one a jack-o-lantern, for simple lighting.) From the top block of the pillar, extend a roof out over the dispenser and at least one square around it in every direction. Put a torch on the roof to avoid unfortunate monster spawns. Note that if you use slabs, you may get chicks on top of the roof. If you just have the minimum roof, they'll just fall into the water, but if you want to extend the roof to the edges, use non-transparent blocks to avoid escapees.

Note that the dispenser is purposely separated from the collection hopper/central pillar, to allow for the dispenser's variable aim.

Trench Farm
Note: As of 1.5.1, this design will cause the majority of chickens in the pit to clip into the wall and die. It's retained because once certain bugs in the game are fixed, the design may work again.



Viehzucht/Hühnerfarm