Tutorials/Egg farming

Egg farming is the process of collecting a large number of chicken eggs from chickens.

Catching or Hatching a chicken
In the 1.8 and previous releases, capturing chickens is very difficult.

It would be far more effective to collect some chicken eggs, build an area for your chickens, and throw the eggs you have into it. If you didn't have many eggs just go back every now and then collect the chicken eggs and continuously hatch them. Eventually you would have quite the amount of chickens. There is only a 1 in 8 chance of spawning a chicken when you throw a chicken egg, so you might need quite a few.

An alternative way capture chickens is to have a piece of wheat in your hand. The chicken will follow you if you look at it. Right clicking the wheat onto your chickens (at least two minimum) will send hearts in the air and they will, on most occasions, create a baby chick. There is a delay between when you can feed that chicken wheat again however.

Another way to capture chickens is to build a trench that is two blocks deep in an area with at least one chicken. The chicken will wander into the trench and be caught. You can also dig a larger hole two blocks deep, with a staircase that isn't against the wall of the hole, but one block away. This way, if you are in the hole, you can climb the staircase, and jump out of the hole. However, this method is quite time consuming and this is possibly the least effective way to chickens as the trench will collect animals and mobs as well as chicken.

Setting up the farm
NOTE: This technique may not work any more, due to an update. [This does still work, although you do need to collect quite a few eggs from the island.]

You can farm chicken eggs the traditional way, where you have to run around and collect chicken eggs all the time.

Or you can, for example, build an automatic chicken egg-collecting farm by using water to flush the chicken eggs out of the coop.

I tried several designs and one that works great is the one from the second screenshot: Just dig a square hole 11 by 11 blocks and one block deep, then dig one more layer in a circle shape. You'll need an additional one-block-hole in the center where the water (and the eggs) will flush out.

Now you need to build the "isle" to prevent the chicken from also being flushed out and to give them some ground to lay eggs that can hatch on to slowly expand the total population of chicken on your farm.

Connect the center drain hole to your system from below (F3 is your friend here), place water in the corners and you're good to go.

Alternate Method
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 or a chance 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.

Paint's Battery Farm Method
Put a chicken in a two high one block wide hole with a fence on the bottom, put a water source block at its feet. Make the water flow to a collection point. When the chicken lays an egg it will be taken to the collection point. Remember to put a block on top in case the chicken tries to escape. The fence, being 1.5 blocks high, will prevent the chicken from drowning or escaping the cage. Feel free to edit this article if you have found a more efficient method. Also feel free to delete this article if it doesn't work

[]= block C=Chicken W= Water F= Fence []    []C[] W[] []F[]

You could make many of these "Cages" and make a very productive egg farm or use wheat to spawn more chickens in the cage to produce eggs more quickly. You could also make many and then connect them to a single collecting source

Antonok's Highly Efficient Method
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.

The design above can lower the possible production of eggs. It is not known why, but under examination making this design as well as the design re-created by DJCrawf below side by side with equal amounts of chickens. The second design (below) has a 100% collection rate and produces chicken 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

Zero loss mass egg farm
Antonok's method produces some losses because eggs get stuck on the edges of the ladders/signs used to hold the water up.

To get around this, 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)



Egg farm in action
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.

Minecraft - Egg Farm

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: