How to Build an Automatic Chicken Farm

An automatic chicken farm is the classic self-sustaining food machine. Chickens lay eggs, the eggs hatch into more chickens, and the farm cooks them for you. Once built it needs no input at all — not even feeding.

The loop

This is what makes chicken farms different from every other animal farm:

1. 1.Adult chickens lay eggs periodically, on their own, with no feeding required.
2. 2.A hopper collects the eggs.
3. 3.A dispenser throws the eggs.
4. 4.Thrown eggs have a chance to hatch into chicks.
5. 5.Chicks grow into adults.
6. 6.Adults are killed for cooked chicken and feathers.

Nothing enters the system. Chickens produce the eggs that produce the chickens. That closed loop is why this farm is a staple.

The two-layer design

The standard build stacks two compartments:

Top layer — the breeders. A small sealed space holding a handful of adult chickens. They lay eggs, which fall through into a hopper beneath them. The hopper feeds a dispenser.

Bottom layer — the growth and kill chamber. The dispenser fires eggs into this space. Chicks hatch, wander, and grow. When they become adults, they are killed and the drops fall into hoppers below.

The key detail is that the breeders never leave the top layer. They are your permanent egg supply. Everything that hatches below is what you harvest.

Killing them for cooked chicken

Use lava or fire and the drops come out pre-cooked. This is the elegant part — you get cooked chicken directly with no smelting and no fuel.

The usual arrangement is a lava blade positioned so that adults are killed but chicks are not, since chicks are shorter. A common approach is placing the lava so it only reaches the height an adult occupies. Hoppers underneath collect the cooked chicken and feathers.

If you prefer the XP, kill them manually instead and smelt the raw chicken afterwards — but most players take the automatic version.

Step by step

1. 1.Build the lower chamber with a hopper floor feeding a chest.
2. 2.Position the kill mechanism — lava at adult height, or a piston-based crusher if you prefer.
3. 3.Build the upper breeder box directly above, with its own floor of hoppers.
4. 4.Put 4 to 8 adult chickens in the breeder box. Get them there by breeding with seeds, or by luring them with seeds in hand.
5. 5.Run the breeder hopper into a dispenser aimed into the lower chamber.
6. 6.Add a slow clock to fire the dispenser. A hopper clock is the right tool — our redstone clocks guide explains why a slow, cheap clock beats a fast one here.
7. 7.Seal and light everything so hostile mobs cannot spawn inside.

What you get

• Cooked chicken in quantity. It is not the best food in the game — see our food guide, where golden carrots and steak rank higher — but it is completely free and endless.
• Feathers, which are the limiting ingredient for arrows. One feather, one flint, one stick makes four arrows. If you use a bow seriously, this farm solves your arrow supply.
• Eggs if you tap the breeder layer, for cakes and pumpkin pie.

Feathers and arrows

This is often the real reason to build it. Arrows are otherwise gathered from skeletons via a mob grinder, which is slower and less predictable. A chicken farm plus a gravel supply for flint gives you unlimited arrows, which matters for the Ender Dragon fight and for any ranged combat.

Common problems

No eggs. You need adult chickens, and they need to be alive and loaded. Check the breeder box is within your loaded chunks when you are nearby.

Chicks not hatching. Thrown eggs only hatch sometimes — most eggs produce nothing. This is normal. More breeders means more eggs means more chicks.

Chicks dying in the lava. The kill mechanism is positioned too low. It should only reach adult height.

Population growing out of control. The kill mechanism is not keeping up. Speed up the clock slightly or widen the kill area.

Lag. Too many entities. Reduce the number of breeders, or increase the kill rate.

A good early farm

This is one of the cheapest farms on this site — a few hoppers, a dispenser, a bucket of lava and some chickens. It needs no rare materials, no structure, and no dangerous location, which makes it a sensible build long before you attempt a guardian farm or a gold farm. Combined with an automatic crop farm, food stops being something you think about.