Egg

An Egg is a food item added in the 7 Seecret Friday Update. Chickens lay eggs every 4–5 minutes. They can be stacked together in groups of up to 16.

During the Beta update (20 of December, 2010), eggs were made throwable at the request of a fan as a result of this Twitter conversation. When thrown, eggs have the same on-hit effect as snowballs and have a 1/8 chance of spawning one to four chickens, with a 1/32 chance of four chickens appearing from a single egg.

Eggs are a critical component of Cake - a single egg is required to craft each one.

Farming
Since eggs can be made into cake, and are probably the rarest item in the cake recipe to acquire through normal activities, it can be useful to try and stock up on as many as you can. An easy way to accumulate eggs (without inventory hacking) is to dig a deep pit (preferably at least 3x3, 32 tiles deep). If your pit is deep enough, all non-chicken mobs will die when they stumble into it, thus protecting you from aggressive mobs. If you wait long enough, eventually chickens will fall in of their own accord and start laying eggs. It helps to periodically return to the surface to see if a chicken flock has spawned around your pit - you can (carefully) push them in yourself.

If the player has already collected several stacks of eggs they can be thrown to manually spawn chickens in a confined area where the player can collect the eggs the flock produces. While a virtually limitless number of chickens can be forced into a small area, the benefit of relatively quick production of a large number of eggs is offset by the number of eggs required to prime such a system due to the low probability of a thrown egg spawning a chicken. Additionally the player must remain nearby to prevent the chickens from despawning.

Trivia

 * Like arrows and snowballs, when placed into a dispenser and then activated, eggs are fired from the dispenser and have the same effects as a thrown Snowball. Eggs fired in this manner have the same chance of spawning chickens when breaking on the ground.


 * There is a glitch where it will sometimes spawn five chickens. It may spawn more, though there have been no reports of more than five chickens coming from one egg.


 * If an egg is thrown through lava, it will catch on fire.


 * If an egg is thrown through water, it will leave a trail of bubbles, much like snowballs and arrows.


 * Although eggs hurt mobs when hit, if the player throws them straight up, they will not hurt the player if they come back down and hit them.


 * If the player is standing near a chicken when it lays an egg, a "pop" can be heard.


 * Since the 1.5_01 update chickens lays eggs much more often, which make this crucial cake ingredient easier to obtain. (They seem to spawn especially often during dawns and dusks, but this is not confirmed)


 * chickens will not spawn from eggs in the nether

Ei Jajko