Legacy:Chicken Coop

Build a Chicken Coop in order to breed hens and cocks. Each hen will take around 1 real life day to lay an egg. Be sure to leave a space below the hen or it will not give an egg; chickens are stored in an 8x8 grid. Hens will lay eggs without a cock in the Chicken Coop, but they will not be fertilized. (Fertilized eggs have a white pie fraction overlayed on them indicating when they will hatch into chicks.) Fertilized eggs can still be turned into food. Note that Hens must have a space directly below them to lay eggs and chicks must have a 4x4 tile space to mature into chickens.

Essentially, chicken quality is directly based on seed quality. Higher quality fodder from higher quality seeds will allow your chicks to grow into higher quality hens and cocks; Higher quality cocks and hens will produce higher quality eggs, which will hatch into higher quality chicks than the previous generation, and thus the cycle repeats. Feeding them lower quality seed may lower their quality (needs verification.)

When a new chick hatches, it's quality is based on the average of it's parents' quality +/-5. When chick grows into cock/hen, it's quality seems to be hardcapped by fodder quality (needs verification).

Chickens require feeding. To do this, pick up fodder material (as listed below) up with a left-click and right-click on the coop. This will fill the fodder bar a bit. You will not be able to recover any seed/plants used in this manner. Fodder fills up a meter inside the coop; the amount removed is proportionate to the amount of chickens contained therein.

Plants that could be used as fodder:

• Beetroot Leaves
• Blueberries
• Carrot
• Chantrelles
• Giant Pumpkin
• Milk
• Poppy Flower
• Pumpkin Flesh
• Straw
• Warning: Candleberry too, be careful when shift-right clicking.

How to Acquire

A chicken coop can be built generally on a 3x3 paved area.

Build > Construction > Chicken Coop [Verify] The quality of the Chicken Coop has no effect on the eggs and chicks produced.

Quoting Jorb

Decay: "Constructions (Kilns, Ovens, Smelters, and houses [when decay is implemented for them] etc.) should now be built on paved stone tiles. You can still build them on open ground, but they suffer 4x the normal rate of decay if you do. Also, objects decay 2.5 times as fast in Mordor as they do at the RoB, or equivalent."

Above statement is outdated, currently (Feb 2011) Chicken Coop, as well as other buildings, can only be built on paved tiles.