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.

The 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. The alternative option is to collect Eggs and throw the eggs into your closed pen. There 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). They 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.

Note that Chickens are currently (1.5.2) very buggy. They clip into walls and then proceed to suffocate (opaque blocks) or escape (transparent blocks, fences, glass panes). Chicks can also drown in water within minutes of being born.

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.

One or more hoppers can be placed to collect the items (though not the orbs) and channel them to a chest, and the collection chest can even be hooked up to a dispenser to automatically hatch the chickens. However, note that leaving a such a full-automatic system running for too long will produce "Chickmageddon" -- in sufficient numbers, the chickens will overflow any enclosure, and huge numbers will cause the game to lag badly.

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.

The 14 Second Compact Egg Farm is a farm designed by Minecraftmaximizer for the Minecraft 1.5 release which takes only 14 seconds to build. It costs 8 logs of wood, 10 ingots of iron, two arbitrary blocks, and an optional ladder.

This farm is begun by digging a hole 3 deep, by 4 long, by one wide hole. The chests and hoppers are placed on the bottom (a double chest on one side, two hoppers feeding into it on the other.) The ladder can go over the chests. Two blocks then go over the hopper next to the chest, to keep the chickens in place. Then you can hatch chickens over the exposed hopper, and eventually collect eggs from the chest.

Because it has a volume of only twelve blocks, this farm is one of the most compact farms possible, especially with the inclusion of hoppers. A video demonstrating it and a schematic:

Water Egg farms
Most current egg farms have the chickens supported by water, with their eggs falling through the water into a collection area below. The water can be supported by signs or ladders, which will keep it from flowing into the collection area.

For a fairly space efficient design: Build walls around a 2x2x2 column. The bottom two spaces are the collection area (make sure to leave a door), and the upper of those has 4 signs to support the water. The next two layers are a water pool with no flow, especially not downwards. It's probably best to make the whole pool of source blocks. The chickens will go in and above the water -- there should be a 1 or 2 tall gap above the water for the chickens to breathe in. The walls around and above the water should be glass blocks, to keep the chickens from suffocating each other against the walls.

After this is constructed, eggs can be thrown directly up from the collection area. The chickens will float on the water and their eggs will drop to the floor for easy collection, where they can be thrown back to hatch more chickens. When meat or feathers are needed, a sword can be used to pick off chickens from below. A water flow can be placed in the collection area to bring the eggs to one block, but this makes throwing eggs and collecting meat or feathers more difficult.

Note: Currently, this design is afflicted by game bugs:  there will be escapees, and some chicks will manage to fall through the water into the collection area.



The static water of the design above lets some eggs get stuck on signs. Expanding the pool area (the "Flowing Egg Farm") allows a water current to gather eggs to the center, and the inward flowing current helps prevent chickens from "phasing" through the walls, allowing far more chickens to be kept. Variations: This design can be "squared off", flowing to a central 2x2 hole, or it can simply be extended horizontally, perhaps with another water current carrying eggs down the "collection corridor". It need not be the full 18 blocks wide, either, as long as the collection area is under where the currents meet.

11x11x6 Automatic farm
This farm will be surrounded on the surface by an 11&times;11 fence or wall (put doors or gates at the middle of a side). There is a pillar and partial roof in the center, and the "egg room" dug 3 blocks deep beneath that. 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. The chickens are contained primarily by water, so the farm partly resists the current problems with chickens walking through walls and fences.

Making the base from scratch, with wooden fences, but cobble pillar and roof) will cost a minimum of 38 cobblestone (and a slab), 3 smooth stone, 15 iron, 13 logs of wood or so, and 12 redstone dust. A fence will cost another 15 blocks of wood or so.

Variation: The problem with fences is that any chickens that do get out of the water 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 reduce the wood cost, but of course it will cost most of 80 blocks of stone or glass. (If you use planks, that will cost more like 20 logs, but beware lightning.)

Once the fences are set up, it is easiest to build the egg room from above. This mechanism of the base can be adapted to other farm layouts. When orienting the room, think about where you want the access tunnel to go, and make sure to light the egg room properly! As shown, the access corridor allows getting at all the containers and both switches. The lever lets you disable the hatcher completely. However, normally it is kept disabled by the inactive despawn timer. The button will let the clock run for 5 minutes from the last button press. The downward-facing dropper in the despawn timer can be loaded with any disposable item, such as surplus eggs. The 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, and two blocks above that. (You may want to make one of them a jack-o-lantern). 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.

Place buckets of water in each corner; they will flow to the central pillar. Load up your chest with eggs (or lead in some chickens), and set it running until you have enough chickens for your taste (or they overflow into the landscape). Then turn it off and let the eggs accumulate. For a longer run, you may wish to disable the despawn timer by temporarily removing its torch, but see the warnings below.

Note that the dispenser is purposely separated from the collection hopper/central pillar, to allow for the dispenser's variable aim. The top slab (or other transparent block) is only needed if you add the optional chest, but if you do, an opaque block there will prevent the chest from being opened, which also prevents the hoppers from adding or removing eggs from it.

Turning on the lever disables the clock. With the clock disabled, incoming eggs etc. will fill first the bottom dropper, then the bottom hoppers, then the chest, and finally the intake hopper. This gives a total of 52 stacks storage, or 79 with the optional second (large) chest. (A lever on or next to any of the hoppers, will let you turn off the flow there, if you want.)

Note that 79 stacks of eggs will produce an average of 163 chickens, which may be enough to seriously lag the game when you are nearby. Worse, they will take over 15 minutes to feed through (because the hoppers are slower than the clock). And if you leave the hatcher running much longer than that, the first chickens will grow up and start laying eggs. At that point, you'll be facing exponential growth, limited only by the limited speed of the hoppers. If the hatcher is left running after the first generation grows up, the system will be producing "only" 2.6 chickens a minute at first, but if the game doesn't crash, it will eventually peak at 18 per minute, 363 per game day. If you don't mind risking this, you can skip the despawn timer forming the right-hand two rows of the egg room.

This simple despawn timer and inverter will let you hatch 500 eggs at a time (about 31 stacks, producing an average of 64 chickens), which will be less troublesome. The redstone torch normally keeps the clock inactive. When triggered, the downward-facing dropper will place an item onto the pressure plate, turning the torch off for 5 minutes (until the item despawns). The blocks surrounding the pressure plate help 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.

Since the clock has a period of .6 seconds, 300 seconds gets get you 500 cycles. Note that while the clock is faster than the hoppers feeding toward the dispenser, the eggs in the bottom dropper give just enough of a head start to cover a batch of 500. (This ignores a couple of eggs caught in transit.) With that dropper empty, just under 375 eggs would reach the dispenser.

For first time builders, the automation in the design below consists of two droppers facing up, with a dispenser facing up on top of them. The despawn timer is a dropper facing down over pressure plate.

Anleitungen/Eierfabrik