Minecraft chickens (or maybe they’re ducks?) are strange birds. They’re functionally unisex, for one: all adults lay eggs which can hatch into chicks. Oddly, there doesn’t even need to be another chicken present for this to happen, so presumably they’re all clones.
They drop chicken eggs, which can be used for a few things like making cakes. If your gameplay style allows killing passive mobs (I don’t), they can also be a source of chicken meat and feathers, both of which are also useful.
Oh, yeah. And chickens can more or less bring about the end of a Minecraft world.
I saw the idea online somewhere, years ago, that you can make an automatic chicken breeder machine in vanilla Minecraft. It’s even possible to make a version where no chickens are harmed. The idea is, you corral one or more chickens (any chicken will do; they’re all identical) in a small area with a floor made of Hoppers (a single hopper will do.) These hoppers should all feed into a Dispenser powered by a Redstone oscillator and pointed at a wall not far away. When the chicken lays an egg, it is fed into the Dispenser, which shoots it at the wall, breaking it. Some percentage of these become baby chickens.
This is a Really Bad Idea (but it isn’t in my main world, so why not?)
The neat part is, baby chickens pathfind to any adults nearby. Since you have one or more adults in the corral, the baby will try to find its way there. Give it a one-way stairs (with a drop of two or more blocks at the end), and it will end up alongside its parent.
Now, a few minutes later (they grow up so fast!), you’ll have two adults laying eggs. Soon, you’ll have a lot of chickens. And the more you have, the more eggs per hour they lay. The more eggs per hour that they lay, the more egg-laying chickens you have. The process feeds on itself exponentially, and can eventually render a Minecraft world unplayable. And you don’t even kill any chickens (or anything else) to do it.
It should be fun to see it speed up and go wild.
