How to get eggs in Minecraft: one per chicken every 5 to 10 minutes
Nearly every egg comes from a chicken, on a timer in the 26.3 code: the three egg colours and their biomes, the odds of hatching a chick, and what eggs are for.
Nearly every egg in Minecraft comes from an adult chicken, laying on a timer. The Java 26.3 loot tables have only two other sources, and neither is one to farm: a village fletcher's chest (1–3 white eggs, in about 23% of those chests) and the dispensers in trial chambers, which are loaded with 4–8 eggs about 7% of the time and fire them when triggered. No villager trade sells eggs. Getting eggs in quantity is therefore about chickens.
The laying timer
Every adult chicken carries a countdown. When it reaches zero the chicken lays, and the timer resets to a random value:
| ticks | real time | |
|---|---|---|
| shortest wait | 6,000 | 5 minutes |
| longest wait | 11,999 | just under 10 minutes |
| average | 9,000 | 7.5 minutes |
That averages 8 eggs per chicken per hour. Nothing speeds it up — not food, not light, not other chickens. More eggs means more chickens.
Two kinds of chicken never lay: babies, and the chickens ridden by baby zombies as chicken jockeys.
Three colours of egg
Since chickens got variants, what a chicken lays depends on which one it is. In 26.3 laying is a loot table, gameplay/chicken_lay, which checks the chicken's variant:
| chicken | lays | spawns in |
|---|---|---|
| temperate | minecraft:egg (white) | everywhere not listed below |
| warm | minecraft:brown_egg | deserts, jungles, savannas, badlands, mangrove swamps, warm oceans, the Nether |
| cold | minecraft:blue_egg | snowy and frozen biomes, cold oceans, taigas, windswept hills and forests, groves, stony peaks, the new dappled forest |
All three stack to 16, and all three work in recipes: both recipes that use an egg ask for the tag #minecraft:eggs, which holds all three.
A baby from breeding takes the variant of one parent or the other, at even odds, so a cold chicken farm keeps producing blue eggs wherever you move it.
Hatching chicks by throwing eggs
Throw an egg and it breaks on impact. The code then rolls:
- 1 in 8 eggs hatch
- of those, 1 in 32 hatch four chicks instead of one — 1 in 256 of all eggs thrown
On average that is 35 chicks per 256 eggs, or about 7.3 eggs per chick. The chick takes the variant stored on the egg, so a brown egg thrown in a snowy biome still hatches a warm chicken.
A dispenser throws eggs too, which is how automatic chicken farms hatch their own replacements.
Breeding chickens instead
Breeding is faster than throwing eggs for growing a flock. Chickens accept six seeds, the tag #minecraft:chicken_food: wheat, melon, pumpkin, beetroot and torchflower seeds, and pitcher pods. A baby takes 20 minutes to grow up and start laying.
Collecting them
A laid egg is an ordinary item on the ground, so it despawns after 5 minutes like any other. A hopper under the chickens collects them before that.
What eggs are for
Only two recipes use an egg: cake (1 egg, with milk, sugar and wheat) and pumpkin pie (1 egg, a pumpkin and sugar). Beyond that, an egg is a throwable that hatches chicks.
The Farm & Breeding Planner sizes a chicken coop by the seeds it eats and the breeding cooldown, which is the number that decides how many chickens — and so how many eggs an hour — you end up with.