Farming is one of the least exciting things to do in Minecraft when doing it by hand. Most players would much rather spend their time mining, exploring, fighting, and creating than mindlessly breeding animals and cultivating wheat. And making cooked chicken? Why not just farm it automatically?
Though farming is a necessary part of Minecraft since it supplies you with the food needed to survive, wouldn’t it be nice if you could farm without all the wasted effort? With this automatic cooked chicken farm, you can do exactly that.
How to Build an Automatic Cooked Chicken Farm in Minecraft
The rate at which this automatic farm produces cooked chicken is 1.64 pieces per chicken per hour on average. With 100 chickens in the machine, you should never have to worry about food again. The machine is fairly cheap, requiring the following items:
- One chest
- Two hoppers
- One dispenser
- One redstone comparator
- One piece of redstone dust
- 14 glass blocks
- Three solid building blocks
- One slab
- Chickens
To begin, create the base of the farm as pictured below. The chest will be the collection point of the food, so start with that.
You’re going to want a hopper behind the chest, leading into it, with a half-slab above it. Make sure this slab is not made of flammable material, as you will be adding lava shortly. Items that fall onto this slab will get sucked through it into the hopper, collecting the chicken.
Next, place the dispenser facing toward the slab, with a hopper above it, and three blocks behind it in a chevron shape.
Place your comparator so it leads out of the hopper into the solid block. Then place your lone redstone dust on the lower solid block. Any time a chicken lays an egg in the hopper up top, the comparator will carry a pulse to the dispenser and fire the egg (it actually fires the previous egg, but same difference).
There is a 1/8 chance that a baby chicken will hatch and appear on top of the slab, and adult chickens lay eggs once every five minutes on average. You’re also going to want to surround the upper hopper with glass, so the chickens can’t escape.
Similarly, encase the slab with two-high glass walls as well, but place a lava block on the block above the slab. It should float in place with a half-block of air beneath it. Because you are using glass, a transparent block, the chest should still be able to be opened.
Baby chickens are only 0.4 blocks tall, so they can safely stand on the slab without being burned, but after 20 minutes, they will grow into an adult chicken (0.7 blocks tall) and will get instantly killed by the lava. When an adult chicken is incinerated, they will drop a single piece of already-cooked chicken.
Finally, it’s time to load your machine up with chickens. The best way to go about this would be to drag two chickens straight up into the upper compartment with leads and start breeding.
This is a bit tedious, as chickens can only breed once every five minutes, but the rate of breeding will increase exponentially as the chicken count goes up. Alternatively, you can chuck all your spare eggs directly into the machine and hope you get lucky with some spawns.
Another way to build up your chicken total is to set the machine to “egg mode.” This can be done by sticking a lever on the side of the block next to the display and flicking it down. This will stop the dispenser from firing any more eggs, thus they will pile up in the dispenser.
You can then use these eggs to populate the upper compartment by throwing them, though you should also breed when you can. Either way, you should be able to build your chicken population up into the dozens in no time.
Once you are happy with the number of chickens you have in your machine, you can leave it to run on its own and collect the stash from the chest as you please. You don’t need to tend to your chickens, nor do you need to breed them, unless you want to increase your production rate. Breeding them all will always result in a 50% increase in chickens, which means 50% more cooked chicken, so do keep that in mind.
Now you know how to build a Minecraft automatic cooked chicken farm! This machine is one of the most practical contraptions you can build, and you’ll be set for life with food. For more on Minecraft, consider heading over to our huge Minecraft guides list, which includes everything from breeding Llamas to building things like a castle portcullis.
