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. Hens will happily lay unfertilized eggs without a rooster or they can be bred to start chicken farming. Chickens grow very quickly, taking just over one quadrum from being laid to full maturity - only being surpassed by the iguana in this aspect.

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, it's much more nutrition-efficient to farm snowhares for meat and cows for milk.

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.

Livestock

A chicken takes 7.2 days to become a juvenile, and a total of 18 days to reach adulthood.

Chickens will regularly lay eggs if female. Each egg has enough nutrition to make one fine meal, replacing the meat component. If you also have a rooster, he may fertilize eggs before a hen lays them. These eggs will then hatch into a chick, so long as it is left alone and does not experience extreme temperatures (Frozen eggs are immediately ruined). Unfertilized eggs will never hatch. There is no difference between a fertilized and an unfertilized egg for the purpose of cooking.

When slaughtered, a chicken yields 5 meat as a chick; 16 as a juvenile; or 22 as an adult. No leather is yielded. It's worth noting that allowing an egg to hatch and immediately slaughtering it for meat provides the exact same amount of nutrition as simply eating the egg. As a general rule this would mean that its still better to eat the egg as you don't need to wait until its hatched, the egg will last slightly longer in storage (important if you live somewhere with regular heat waves) and you don't need to generate a butchering job, unless you plan on making pemmican which requires meat exclusively.

Feeding

A chicken consumes 0.56 nutrition per day, or roughly 12 hay.

The following is a list of how much haygrass it takes to sustain a mature chicken. Bracketed values are actual values rounded up to 2 decimal places:

Gravel: 8 (7.18)
Soil: 6 (5.89)
Rich Soil: 5 (4.75)

Therefore, when slaughtered as juveniles, chickens have a nutrition efficiency (nutrition out for nutrition in) of 28.1%. This makes them the 10th most efficient animal to farm for meat; more efficient than capybaras, but less efficient than pigs and wild boars.

Animals