When will my chickens be ready to produce eggs?
Both hens and roosters come to adulthood at 4%. From hatching to 4%, this is roughly 14 days. So once you’ve hatched a chick out of an egg, pay attention to the age meter you will be displayed on touching them, because once they hit 4% they will start laying eggs, provided the right factors (see below) are met.
New eggs can be stopped from hatching until you can get them boxed up into an progeggtor, via the use of another sionChicken tool, the sionChicken Radi-O-Static. Placing this within 10 metres of your egg gathering place will stop newly laid eggs from hatching.
Mating Between the Races
All races can breed with each other. However, if you breed an original and a new wave together, the result will always be a new wave – you won’t get an original. This is a quick way of getting to wanted colours however. If you happen to get a rare egg (see tip below) from a new wave coupling, this will be a new wave rare.
All pairings can result in a rare. The two rare races are scarces (the blacks) and ancients. Statistically, depending on how many mating pairs you have, you are likely to receive a scarce every 1 in 10 eggs. Ancients are thought to arrive 1 in every 100. However, the odds are better if you manage to mate two scarces together, that you will get a scarce egg.
My Scarces Won't Mate. How can I get them to produce eggs?
Scarces are very angry by nature. To quiet this down in the male scarce roosters, you simply need to put a chicken toy into the pen. This should be named sionChicken toy (note that the word 'toy' is not capped) to work.
A tip used by large breeders is to re-name the coop to this sionChicken toy name, if you are having problems with anger. And to add further toys inside - one person swears by needing 9 of them, but with the coop renamed, I have managed with only seven (lol)
Some large breeders also swear by having more than one 'sionChicken toy' in a coop when keeping scarces.
I Have a Killer Black, and He Won't Mate. Why Not?
Killer blacks, either V10s or V11s, are sterile and can not mate.
You can tell them by their colour vectors – <0.0, 0.0, 0.0>. These are pure black roosters.
However, although they can't breed, they make good pets, as the V11 food keeps them content, and the now misnamed killer blacks have been found to live well with other chickens.
How Many Roosters Do I Need with the Hens?
Remembering that you can not have two roosters together or else they will fight, you can keep one fertile rooster with multiple hens.
How Many Eggs Should I Expect from each breeding set?
Put a hen and rooster together so they can touch each other and they will make one egg a day, if you give the rooster a second hen, he will mate a second time and make 2 eggs a day.
(Note: day = second life day or roughly 4 hours).
With previous releases, a breeding couple were good to produce 2-3 eggs a normal (human) day. However later versions have cut down in the amount of eggs produced due to over-saturation, and you may find 1-2 eggs per (human) day per breeding hen to be a good average.
What conditions do I need for eggs?
Mating is controlled by the roosters and anger has nothing to do with it. (ie. a rooster may have an anger meter at only 10% yet still can touch a ready hen to drop the egg).
Roosters usually look to mate not long after they wake.
The hen does need to be at 100% egg to produce an egg.
How do I Know my Hen is ready to lay an egg?
The hen must be at 100% Egg on her statistics meter (you can see this if you touch her). At this point she will hunch down in the one spot, and start making a different noise. This laying cycle can take up to half an hour, while she awaits the rooster to come up and bump her to lay the egg.
My hen is at 100% but she still never lays an egg! What's going on?
A hen not laying may be due to a few problems, or a combination of these -
The region is lagging
You have too many chickens kept in the same small space.
Your rooster has not been angry enough to go over and bump / touch the hen at the crucial time.
You can try to force the egg lay yourself with this tip which has worked for me – if the hen is at 100% and hunched down ready to lay, get into the coop yourself (if you can) and bump her yourself. You may find the egg is laid immediately on your manual bump from your avatar.
Can I mate my hen with a rooster belonging to somebody else (or vice versa)? Can two farmers / neighbours breed from their chickens together?
Chickens with different owners can be successfully mated, provided they are both set to the same group.
Where eggs are produced with this mating, the ownership of the egg will go to the owner of the hen, not the rooster.
There are cases out there where some roosters have been rented out to produce different matings. The hen owner has paid for the rental of the rooster, and profits by ending up with some eggs out of the pairing, which can be sold or hatched.
