Egg

Eggs are items that can be used to craft food items, or used as a throwable entity to spawn chickens.

Mob
Chickens drop an egg item every 5–10 minutes.

Foxes that are holding eggs also have a chance of 8.5%‌/100%‌ to drop the egg they are holding upon death. Alternatively, player can drop a food item, which will cause the fox to drop the egg.

Combat
Players are able to throw eggs and deal knockback to mobs and other players, but no damage will be dealt, similar to a snowball. Throwing eggs at neutral mobs will provoke them. Eggs can also be fired from dispensers and are affected by gravity.

Spawning chickens
When thrown by pressing the button, an egg has a $1⁄8$ chance of spawning a chick. If this occurs, there is a $1⁄32$ chance of spawning three additional chicks (on average, 1 out of every 256 eggs will spawn 4 chicks). In other words, whenever an egg is thrown, there is a $31⁄256$ chance of spawning 1 chick and a $1⁄256$ chance of spawning four chicks.

The expected value of the number of chicks an egg produces is $35⁄256$ or 0.137. This means that on average, spawning a single chicken requires 7.3 eggs, a stack of 16 eggs will spawn 2.192 chicks, and a full inventory including the hotbar and off-hand ( eggs) will spawn approximately 81 chicks. If the inventory is at maximum capacity (including shulker boxes, which means 15,984 eggs), then you could expect to get about 2,190 chicks.

Trading
Expert-level farmer villagers buy 16 eggs for an emerald as part of their trade.

Data values
Thrown eggs have entity data which define various properties of the entity.

Trivia

 * Eggs will break midfall if hit by another projectile; the chance of spawning a baby chicken is not affected.
 * Throwing an egg at a nether portal will break the egg when it hits the portal.