Is there a way to reduce egg spawning other than keeping only a small chicken population?
Aside from uncontrolled spawning of golems, eggs have become the bane of my Minecraft existence. I can't even walk past my chicken coop without having my inventory filling up with eggs, and I have two chests full of eggs next to the coop. On slaughter day, instead of feeding my chickens seeds to make them breed (which would give me XP), I've been throwing hundreds of eggs into the coop to restock the chicken population. It is very time-consuming and annoying.
According to the Wiki, eggs are supposed to deal no damage, but yesterday I was shocked to see an on-screen message saying I had killed my cat which had been in the coop with me while I was throwing eggs. If I didn't kill it with eggs by mistake, I have no idea how it died.
Use hoppers to pick up the eggs and feed the excess into lava?
Chickens are noisy enough that adding a minecart track underneath shouldn't add much to the racket.
If nothing else you could save time by using dispensers to throw the eggs directly from the chests rather than doing it yourself.
My experience with chickens is VERY outdated but I can definitely remember killing chickens with tossed eggs if I was in too much of a hurry.
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I learned to aim the eggs a few blocks up a wall but I still got the occasional squawk when a newly hatched chick got hit before they had dropped out of the firing zone.
If (by default; /gamerule maxEntityCramming) 24 or more entities that can push each other are touching each other in the same spot, they will take "squishing" damage. If your chicken coop was small enough, it's possible that, as more and more chickens popped out of eggs, enough chickens touched your cat at the same time to "squish" it enough for it to die from it.
But as for your question... No, you can't really change or lower the chicken chance of thrown eggs.
Exactly what do you hope to gain by lowering the chicken chance, though? Just not having to "deal" with quite as many eggs (or rather, quite as many chickens due to eggs)? If so, you may want to look into something like an automatic cooked chicken farm or such to get rid of that manual process entirely. I can confirm that the following one works in Minecraft 1.14(.2 pre-release 2):
Note that the above one stops working if the bottom dispenser gets way too full, but you can fix that by putting an extra repeater to the side of the repeater in the middle, facing the redstone dust right beside the comparator in order to power it fully. Also, feel free to replace the single chest with a double chest (or with lots of hoppers leading into arrays of chests or such).
(There are other more modern designs available (for example, the description of the above video has a link to a newer chicken cooker design), but the one above is fairly nice and simple in my opinion.)
You could run a looping hopper minecart under the farm to pick the eggs up and use an unloader to unload them, then just connect the unloader to a dispenser that throws the eggs into a cactus whenever there are items inside of it. Or you could just store them if you want.
If you want to do this and accomplish a sort of 'famine' challenge, execute '/gamerule randomTickSpeed (0-3)'. This will make things progress much lsower in the gzme. Not a direct answer, but a fun suggestion, if you will.
Thank you everyone for the replies. I am not really interested in an automated chicken farm, but I might fix up a little manual garbage disposal unit that feeds the eggs into a small pool of lava. I haven't done that yet because when tossing eggs into lava, some hatch and the baby chicks die a horrible burning death and I didn't like the thought of that. The suggested solution of changing the tick speed seems to be the only way to directly influence the egg spawn rate, but since everything else would grow more slowly, it doesn't seem to be worth it. I think I should reduce the overall number of chickens I regularly keep on hand and only breed more when I find I am running out of food. I currently have too much food.
If (by default; /gamerule maxEntityCramming) 24 or more entities that can push each other are touching each other in the same spot, they will take "squishing" damage. If your chicken coop was small enough, it's possible that, as more and more chickens popped out of eggs, enough chickens touched your cat at the same time to "squish" it enough for it to die from it.
I agree that death by squishing is a definite danger but I assume that the message would be something like "Cat was squished" instead of "Toadrunner killed cat". Today another of my cats died in my absence. I got a message saying "Cat suffocated in wall". I have no idea how or which one of my cats suffocated.
If you used a larger lava pool and made yourself a raised walkway that you couldn't walk off of, surround it with blocks at head height (slabs would work as long as you don't crouch) you could drop a whole stack at once rather than tossing them 1 by 1, it's hard to tell exactly where they'll go but if they land on the walkway so you pick them back up just try again.
But to be safe it's better not to toss stuff directly into lava in case you happen to toss the wrong thing, better to fill a chest and then activate a hopper feeding a dropper over the lava, I haven't tested but I think a dropper wouldn't hatch the eggs.
- I might fix up a little manual garbage disposal unit that feeds the eggs into a small pool of lava. I haven't done that yet because when tossing eggs into lava, some hatch and the baby chicks die a horrible burning death and I didn't like the thought of that. -
A dispenser will "shoot" eggs (which are able to hatch; same as (by default) right-clicking with an egg). A dropper will "drop" eggs (which are not able to hatch; same as pressing (by default) Q with an egg or such to drop it as a pick-up-able item).
Depending on what you think of an egg item, you could use a dropper (not dispenser) to "drop" eggs into lava, without any chickens hatching and burning in the process.
If you want to do this and accomplish a sort of 'famine' challenge, execute '/gamerule randomTickSpeed (0-3)'. This will make things progress much lsower in the gzme. Not a direct answer, but a fun suggestion, if you will.
This only affects random block updates, like crops growing, not entities (including tile entities) or scheduled block updates (redstone and flowing liquids); the only way to directly change the rate at which chickens lay eggs is to mod the game:
However, you might be able to do something with commands to alter the "EggLayTime" NBT tag, such as checking if it is less than or equal to, say, 1000 (not 0 so the code above never runs, this also ensures that you don't need to run the command every tick) and dropping an egg at the location of the chicken and resetting it to some higher value (e.g. 7000-13000 will replicate the default timings, 13000-25000 will be half as fast, and so on):
EggLayTime: Number of ticks until the chicken lays its egg. Laying occurs at 0 and this timer gets reset to a new random value between 6000 and 12000.
Aside from uncontrolled spawning of golems, eggs have become the bane of my Minecraft existence. I can't even walk past my chicken coop without having my inventory filling up with eggs, and I have two chests full of eggs next to the coop. On slaughter day, instead of feeding my chickens seeds to make them breed (which would give me XP), I've been throwing hundreds of eggs into the coop to restock the chicken population. It is very time-consuming and annoying.
According to the Wiki, eggs are supposed to deal no damage, but yesterday I was shocked to see an on-screen message saying I had killed my cat which had been in the coop with me while I was throwing eggs. If I didn't kill it with eggs by mistake, I have no idea how it died.
Use hoppers to pick up the eggs and feed the excess into lava?
Chickens are noisy enough that adding a minecart track underneath shouldn't add much to the racket.
If nothing else you could save time by using dispensers to throw the eggs directly from the chests rather than doing it yourself.
My experience with chickens is VERY outdated but I can definitely remember killing chickens with tossed eggs if I was in too much of a hurry.
--
I learned to aim the eggs a few blocks up a wall but I still got the occasional squawk when a newly hatched chick got hit before they had dropped out of the firing zone.
Just testing.
If (by default; /gamerule maxEntityCramming) 24 or more entities that can push each other are touching each other in the same spot, they will take "squishing" damage. If your chicken coop was small enough, it's possible that, as more and more chickens popped out of eggs, enough chickens touched your cat at the same time to "squish" it enough for it to die from it.
But as for your question... No, you can't really change or lower the chicken chance of thrown eggs.
Exactly what do you hope to gain by lowering the chicken chance, though? Just not having to "deal" with quite as many eggs (or rather, quite as many chickens due to eggs)? If so, you may want to look into something like an automatic cooked chicken farm or such to get rid of that manual process entirely. I can confirm that the following one works in Minecraft 1.14(.2 pre-release 2):
Note that the above one stops working if the bottom dispenser gets way too full, but you can fix that by putting an extra repeater to the side of the repeater in the middle, facing the redstone dust right beside the comparator in order to power it fully. Also, feel free to replace the single chest with a double chest (or with lots of hoppers leading into arrays of chests or such).
(There are other more modern designs available (for example, the description of the above video has a link to a newer chicken cooker design), but the one above is fairly nice and simple in my opinion.)
You could run a looping hopper minecart under the farm to pick the eggs up and use an unloader to unload them, then just connect the unloader to a dispenser that throws the eggs into a cactus whenever there are items inside of it. Or you could just store them if you want.
If you want to do this and accomplish a sort of 'famine' challenge, execute '/gamerule randomTickSpeed (0-3)'. This will make things progress much lsower in the gzme. Not a direct answer, but a fun suggestion, if you will.
Thank you everyone for the replies. I am not really interested in an automated chicken farm, but I might fix up a little manual garbage disposal unit that feeds the eggs into a small pool of lava. I haven't done that yet because when tossing eggs into lava, some hatch and the baby chicks die a horrible burning death and I didn't like the thought of that. The suggested solution of changing the tick speed seems to be the only way to directly influence the egg spawn rate, but since everything else would grow more slowly, it doesn't seem to be worth it. I think I should reduce the overall number of chickens I regularly keep on hand and only breed more when I find I am running out of food. I currently have too much food.
I agree that death by squishing is a definite danger but I assume that the message would be something like "Cat was squished" instead of "Toadrunner killed cat". Today another of my cats died in my absence. I got a message saying "Cat suffocated in wall". I have no idea how or which one of my cats suffocated.
If you used a larger lava pool and made yourself a raised walkway that you couldn't walk off of, surround it with blocks at head height (slabs would work as long as you don't crouch) you could drop a whole stack at once rather than tossing them 1 by 1, it's hard to tell exactly where they'll go but if they land on the walkway so you pick them back up just try again.
But to be safe it's better not to toss stuff directly into lava in case you happen to toss the wrong thing, better to fill a chest and then activate a hopper feeding a dropper over the lava, I haven't tested but I think a dropper wouldn't hatch the eggs.
Just testing.
A dispenser will "shoot" eggs (which are able to hatch; same as (by default) right-clicking with an egg). A dropper will "drop" eggs (which are not able to hatch; same as pressing (by default) Q with an egg or such to drop it as a pick-up-able item).
Depending on what you think of an egg item, you could use a dropper (not dispenser) to "drop" eggs into lava, without any chickens hatching and burning in the process.
This only affects random block updates, like crops growing, not entities (including tile entities) or scheduled block updates (redstone and flowing liquids); the only way to directly change the rate at which chickens lay eggs is to mod the game:
However, you might be able to do something with commands to alter the "EggLayTime" NBT tag, such as checking if it is less than or equal to, say, 1000 (not 0 so the code above never runs, this also ensures that you don't need to run the command every tick) and dropping an egg at the location of the chicken and resetting it to some higher value (e.g. 7000-13000 will replicate the default timings, 13000-25000 will be half as fast, and so on):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?