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 very buggy (1.5.1). They clip into walls and then proceed to suffocate. Chicks drown in water within minutes of being born. One must remember these while building the pen. -[May 3, 2013]

Chickens can also clip through fences and glass panes and escape the pen in Minecraft 1.5.1. -[May 4, 2013]

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.

Design 1
You can build an automatic chicken egg-collecting farm by using water to flush the chicken eggs out of the coop. Dig a 3x2 hole, then place signs and water.

Design 3
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. This farm is possible to make using a 3 deep by 4 wide hole, two hoppers, one chest, two arbitrary building blocks, and an optional ladder. 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. The following video demonstrates the building of the described egg farm.

Note that this design (as of May 28th in 1.5.1) causes the majority of chickens in the pit to clip into the wall and die.

Essentially you start with a three deep by four wide hole. You then place a chest covering two of the bottom blocks. Then you connect a hopper to that chest and another hopper to the first. Finally, you cover the hopper connected to the chest with two blocks of any kind to keep the chickens in place. Chickens should be hatched on top of the exposed hopper and eggs will collect in the chest if the farm is constructed correctly.

Design 4
An easy way to go AFK, and still receive a great amount of chicken eggs, is to make a farming method in which allows chickens to flow through the water and allow the eggs to fall down a small hole to a collection point.

Dig a 5x7 hole, 1 block deep. add a fence on the outer rim of the hole. Leave one spot open in case you may need to grab equipment. Now, dig 2 blocks down in the remaining hole (5x3x2), and one of the 3 block sides, dig down 4 blocks.

Now, dig a room 4 blocks long and 3 blocks high. At the end of the room, dig a hole up in the center. Put some ladders so you can get back up to the surface.

Now, cover up that spot you might have left open with fence. Get some glass, because if there are too many chickens in a confined space, they'll start to suffocate each other. To avoid that, place glass under all the fence. Now, get 3 buckets of water, and place it opposite of the collection room. Now when a chicken is in, eggs will flow in the water and into the collection room.

IF you want to start your new farm, you'll want to either throw some eggs into the farm for a chance that a chicken might pop out, or chase a chicken into your new farm. Both ways are possible. Once you have a chicken in there, simply wait at the collection point for it to spawn eggs. You can attempt to get as many chickens in your farm as you like, just beware that too many chickens could lag your game.

Another method is to set up a long coop against a wall (cross-section, you can make it as long as you want). Key 1 layer C chicken t fence A any block

1 AAAA 2 A 3 AA 4 AC 5 AA t A Keeps chickens in but you can walk on fence and get eggs

Design 6
More space efficient design: put a 2x2x2 water pool, with no downward flow, and have a 2x2x2 collection area under the water. Use signs to keep the water from entering the collection area. Put glass around the water and above it, to keep the chickens from suffocating each other in large quantities. There should be a 1 or 2 tall gap above the water for the chickens to breathe in. 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. An almost infinite amount of chickens can be contained in the farm with a 100% drop rate. When meat or feathers are needed, a sword can be used to pick off chickens from below.

A cross section side view of each segment:

[ ] = glass [x] = any block S = sign on the wall [W] = water CCC = lots of chickens [G] = Grass

[ ][ ] [ ]     [ ]      [ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ]CCCCCC[ ]      [ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][W][W][ ]     [ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ][W][W][ ]     [ ][ ][ ][ ] [x]S   S[x]      [x]      [x] [x]     [x]      [x]      [x] [x][x][x][x]     [x][x][x][x] Center two rows  Front and back

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. Another advantage of this method is that the bottom layer of water can be used as an infinite water source.

Design 7
The second design (below) has a 100% collection rate and produces Eggs far faster than the first design. The first design also causes some eggs to get stuck above the signs causing them to stay there rather than meet at a collection point.

[ ]     [ ] [ ][ ][ ][ ]      [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ] [ ]                                                [ ]       [ ]        [CCC]                       [CCC]       [ ] [ ][W]                                         [W][ ] [ ][G][G][G][G][G][G][G]S   S[G][G][G][G][G][G][G][ ] [x]     [x] [x][x][x][x] Center two rows

Note that after a while, the game will get very laggy after use of these 2 variations of chicken egg farms. Therefore, it is necessary to occasionally harvest meat and feathers. For a simple tutorial of this, click here

Design 8
Begin with a 4x4 chicken pit with water sources in all the corners. This will create flow towards the square formed by the middle four blocks. See figure one. Knock out these middle blocks to let the items fall.


 * NOTE!** You will need to build the sides of the 4x4 higher than shown or the chickens will escape. Also if you plan to have very high density of chickens, use glass for the walls of the enclosure, to prevent suffocation.

If you would like to funnel the eggs/chicken meat to a single collection point instead of to a 2x2 square, place ladders under the 2x2 hole to stop the water from falling. Enclose the 2x2 below the collection hole and knock a hole down through one corner. This will lead to your collection point. In the corner diagonally opposite the hole, place a water block or let the water fall from above. (fig 2 and 3)



Design 9
This is a video of an egg farm made in 1.8. It uses glass blocks, glass panes, and water. The eggs go to a collection point for easy grabbing.

Concept: The chickens swim in the water in the 3rd level. When they drop eggs (or you need meat and decide to annihilate the chickens), they will fall through the glass panes into the bottom layer with the help of the flowing water. The water in the bottom layer will now push the items to the collection point.

Layout:

Automatic Collection
Putting a hopper below the output of an egg farm automatically collects the eggs for you. Add a chest below that to store the eggs, or, if you are feeling creative, add an automatic dispenser below to turn the eggs back into chickens. Then you can wait for the chickens to age and then kill them, automatically or manually.

Quick-EZ Egg Collecting farm
This type of farm is a bit complicated to make one but it saves quite a space,blocks and easy collection by using hoppers. Required Items: 1.Any kind of block 2.Hopper 3.Chests

-Construction-

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. Th chickens are contained primarily by water, so the farm partly resists the current problems with chickens walking through walls and fences.

Making this plan from scratch, with wooden fences, but cobble pillar and roof) will cost a minimum of 31 cobblestone (and a slab), 3 smooth stone, 15 iron, 26 logs of wood, and 8 redstone dust.

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 to 12 logs or so (3 hoppers, 1 chest, 2 doors, and some sticks), but of course it will cost most of 80 blocks of stone or glass.

Once the fences are set up, it is easiest to build the egg room from above. This 3&times;4&times;3 mechanism of the base can be adapted to other farm layouts.

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.

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 the dispenser is purposely separated from the collection hopper/central pillar, to allow for the dispenser's variable aim.

Anleitungen/Eierfabrik