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, 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 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 chicken 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. If the inventory is at maximum capacity (including shulker boxes, which means 15,984 eggs), then a player 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 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.