Egg

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

Mob loot
Chickens drop an egg item every 5–10 minutes. The theoretical average would be expected at 0.1333 eggs per minute or 1 egg every 7.5 minutes.

Experiments suggest an average of 0.1317 eggs per minute. (992 Eggs by 400 chickens over 18:50 minutes.) This deviation is statistically insignificant (P(n<=992) = 33.49%) and the theoretical average can be safely assumed.

A fox sometimes spawns holding an egg, which always drops upon death. Alternatively, a player dropping a food item causes the fox to drop the egg.

Combat
Players are able to throw eggs and deal knockback to mobs, but no damage is dealt, similar to a snowball. Likewise, throwing eggs at neutral mobs provokes them. Eggs can also be fired from dispensers and are affected by gravity.

Spawning chickens
When thrown by a dispenser or 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 spawns 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 chick requires 7.3 eggs, a stack of 16 eggs spawn 2.192 chicks, and a full inventory including the hotbar and off-hand ( eggs) can spawn approximately 81 chicks.

ID




Entity Data
Thrown eggs have entity data that define various properties of the entity.

Trivia

 * Eggs break mid-fall if hit by another projectile; the chance of spawning a baby chicken is not affected.
 * Throwing an egg at a nether portal breaks the egg when it hits the portal.
 * A thrown egg faces toward the player in first-person view while it appears rotated horizontally in third-person view. This is the case for all throwable items (ender pearls, eggs, snowballs, and all type of throwable potions).
 * the achievement "The Lie" is a reference to the portal franchise