Chicken

Chickens can not be found in the wild; they must be bought from a merchant or join the colony in a self-taming event. Males of the species are referred to as Roosters and can be distinguished by their ruddy brown coloration, while females are referred to as Hens and are white. Babies of either gender are bright yellow and referred to as Chicks.

Summary

Chickens are pen animals. Once tamed, pen animals cannot and do not need to be trained any further. But if left outside of a pen or caravan hitching spot, pen animals will eventually roam outside your colony. Making a caravan is not required to tie animals to a caravan hitching spot.

A female chicken produces 1 egg every 1 day. Chickens can lay both unfertilized and fertilized eggs, depending on if it has mated with a rooster.

Analysis

Chickens grow very quickly, taking only 12 days to mature, placing them among the fastest-growing animals. Combined with their incredibly fast reproduction rate of 1 offspring per day, a population of chickens can rapidly explode from a single rooster and hen, theoretically increasing to a population of 1200 adults within the span of just a year. Once the population explosion gets going, the population will double every approximately 5.7 days.

Chickens are nearly identical to ducks. Ducks provide the same yield in both meat and eggs, but as they consume 20% more nutrition, ducks are inferior as livestock.

Nutrition

When slaughtered, a chicken yields 12 meat as a chick; 26 as a juvenile; or 42 as an adult. No leather is yielded.

Eggs

An adult hen consumes 0.22 nutrition per day, and produces 0.25 nutrition of eggs each day, resulting in a nutrition efficiency of 111.6% when unfertilized eggs are eaten. This means that hens can theoretically create nutrition out of nothing. However, chickens tend to overeat and waste nutrition; see Overeating for more detail. Plus, roosters consume nutrition too.

Note that slaughtering chicks gives more nutrition than eating unhatched eggs (0.6 from meat rather than 0.25 from 1 egg). However, a handler has to actually slaughter each chicken, and a butcher's yields are multiplied by Butchery Efficiency. So if you don't a skilled cook, eggs may be better for nutrition. Also, eggs are vegetarian.

Slaughtering

When chicks are slaughtered, an always-fertilized hen produces 0.6 nutrition per day, resulting in a nutrition efficiency of 2.679 for the hen alone, or 1.786 when accounting for the 2:1 hen:rooster ratio needed to achieve a good fertilization rate.

As a chick grows into adulthood it will consume 1.45 nutrition in total, and will yield 1.5 more nutrition when slaughtered than it would as a baby. This means that the nutrition efficiency of a growing chick is 1.033. As the nutrition efficiency of growing chicks is so close to that of a population of a 2:1 hen:rooster population of adult chickens, it is probably preferable to allow them to grow to adulthood in order to save on slaughtering and butchering labor.

Kill-focused

Chicken's rapid reproduction makes them good fodder for the Kill-focused persona trait. This persona trait grants +20% psyfocus whenever its wielder kills any animal, even when slaughtering chickens or chicks. A coup can lead to rapid use of psycasts, such as word of inspiration, which would otherwise be limited by psyfocus.

Training

Chickens lack the intelligence for training.

This animal can be trained as follows:

Guard:
Attack:
Rescue:
Haul:

*As of version 1.1.2610, all animals can be tamed. The percentage of likelihood of success depends on factors such as the Animals Wildness Percentage, Pawn Handling Skill, and others. More information can be found on the animals page.

Health

Body part	Health
Head	9
Skull	9
Brain	4
Nose	4
Neck	9
Jaw	7
Eye ^[1] (left, right)	4
Ear (left, right)	4
Body	14
Kidney^[2] (left, right)	5
Lung^[2] (left, right)	5
Liver^[2]	7
Heart^[2]	5
Spine^[2]	9
Stomach^[2]	7
Limbs (left, right, fore, hind)	11
Appendage (left, right, fore, hind)	7

↑ Located inside of Head.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

Gallery

Hen facing east
Hen facing north
Hen facing south
Chicken decaying

Rooster facing east
Rooster facing north
Rooster facing south

Chick facing east
Chick facing north
Chick facing south

Version history

0.12.906 - Added
Alpha 17 - Prior to Alpha 17, chickens were one of the fastest reproducing animals in the game. However, they were nerfed in Alpha 17 in both body size and breeding rate, making them significantly less efficient than they used to be. In fact, after Alpha 17, it was much more nutrition-efficient to farm snowhares for meat and cows for milk.
1.3:
- Egg interval: 2 -> 1
- Base hunger rate: 0.35 -> 0.14
- Maturity age: 0.3 -> 0.2