Chicken mob in Minecraft

Eggs, the reason to keep chickens

An adult chicken lays an egg on the ground every five to ten minutes, with no help from you. The egg matches the chicken's variant: a temperate chicken lays an egg, a warm one a brown egg and a cold one a blue egg. The variant comes from the biome where the chicken spawned, as with cows and pigs: cold biomes give cold chickens, warm biomes warm ones. All three eggs work the same in recipes such as cake and pumpkin pie.

The classic egg farm keeps a few chickens on top of hoppers that feed a chest. The eggs collect themselves while you are away, as long as you stay close enough for that part of the world to keep running.

Hatching and breeding chicks

Thrown eggs sometimes hatch: roughly one throw in eight gives a chick, and very rarely four at once. A blue or brown egg hatches a chick of the matching variant. To breed chickens directly, feed two adults any seeds: wheat seeds are the easiest since breaking grass drops them, but melon, pumpkin, beetroot and torchflower seeds and pitcher pods work too. Holding seeds makes the flock follow you. A chick grows up in about twenty minutes, faster if you keep feeding it seeds.

Feathers and meat

Feathers are needed for arrows and books and quills, and a fletcher villager buys them. Raw chicken can give you the Hunger effect if you eat it raw, so cook it first; with Fire Aspect it drops already cooked.

Slow falls and chicken jockeys

Chickens flap their wings and fall slowly, and they take no fall damage at all. You can push one off a cliff and find it unharmed below.

At night, a baby zombie sometimes spawns riding a chicken. Kill the rider and the chicken is left behind as an ordinary chicken.

✓ Checked in Java Edition 26.3 · updated 1 November 2026