A Working Chicken Coop

Tutorial Difficulty: 3/10

Right, I need to tell you a story for this one. I have a few Minecraft servers that I play on, and one of them is just me and my partner. We have a few houses, because we move to a new biome every time we get bored, and one of them is a large treehouse with a bunch of farms below it. I fancied dabbling in automation and redstone and all that, so I wanted to learn a couple of simple redstone projects.

I found a tutorial for an automatic chicken farm, and I thought my redstone prayers were answered: It was a small, relatively easy project! However, it also involved a bit less space and a bit more lava than I would have liked. I know Minecraft chickens aren't real, but I also don't want to put them in a tiny, sad chicken prison, either!

The chickens in my current server are free-range chickens. They live in a lovely little pen, with all the seeds they could ever want, and I come in every now and again to collect up all the eggs to make pumpkin pie with. Or more chickens. They seem very happy, and I'm much happier too.

But I'm not often home in Minecraft – I'm usually off adventuring or diamond-mining – so I still need a little more automation to get the most out of my happy free-range chickies. InfiniteDrift's lovely semi-automatic chicken coop keeps it simple, making it a perfect starter farm project. It's a small hut for your chickies to safely lay their eggs in, where they will be taken to a chest with the use of a few hoppers. It's not rocket science, this one – in fact, it's pretty low-tech, and it's basically the same as battery farms (but way less depressing). But it's such a lovely little build that we wanted to feature it all the same!