Egg

An Egg is a food item added in the 7 Seecret Friday Update. Chickens lay eggs on every 5-10 minutes (it takes 40 minutes for 9 chickens to lay 50 eggs, so 7.2 minutes/egg). They can be stacked together in groups of up to 16, unlike most items.

During the Beta update (20 of December, 2010), eggs were made throwable at the request of a fan as a result of this Twitter conversation.

When thrown, eggs have the same on-hit effect as snowballs and additionally have a 1/8 chance of spawning a chicken. There's an additional 1/32 chance of spawning four instead of one chicken. This also works in The Nether or any other dimension.

Eggs are a component of Cake - a single egg is required to craft each one.

Farming
Since eggs can be made into cake, and are probably the rarest item in the cake recipe to acquire through normal activities, it can be useful to try and stock up on as many as you can. An easy way to accumulate eggs (without inventory hacking) is to dig a deep pit (preferably at least 3x3, 32 tiles deep). If your pit is deep enough, all non-chicken mobs will die when they stumble into it, thus protecting you from aggressive mobs. If you wait long enough, eventually chickens will fall in of their own accord and start laying eggs. It helps to periodically return to the surface to see if a chicken flock has spawned around your pit - you can (carefully) push them in yourself or hit them with snowballs until they fall in.(Snowballs do not deal damage to mobs)

If the player has already collected several stacks of eggs they can be thrown to manually spawn chickens in a confined area where the player can collect the eggs the flock produces. While a virtually limitless number of chickens can be forced anywhere, the benefit of relatively quick production of a large number of eggs is offset by the number of eggs required to prime such a system due to the low probability of a thrown egg spawning a chicken.

As of 1.9, it is rather easy to start a farm with as much as two or even one chickens, as they can reproduce both by breeding and (albeit unreliably) with eggs.

Bugs

 * When an egg lands, the impact releases the snowball's particles. This is most easily seen with a texture pack.

Trivia

 * If too many chickens are in a small area they will start clipping into walls, suffocating and dying. This can be alleviated by using glass walls for a chicken coop, as clear blocks do not cause suffocation.
 * Like arrows and snowballs, when placed into a dispenser and then activated, eggs are fired from the dispenser and have the same effects as a thrown Snowball. Eggs fired in this manner have the same chance of spawning chickens when breaking on the ground.
 * If an egg is thrown through lava, it will catch on fire.
 * If an egg is thrown through water, it will leave a trail of bubbles, much like snowballs and arrows.
 * Eggs push mobs back, although they do not deal damage.
 * If the player is standing near a chicken when it lays an egg, a "pop" can be heard, but not in multiplayer.
 * Every once in a while eggs can spawn 4 chickens at once.
 * Throwing eggs on neutral enemies will provoke them.

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