Mob Menagerie: Chicken

These feathery cluckers have been roaming the Overworld for a very long time – since July 2010 to be exact, when the seventh Seecret Update added them to the game. That makes them as old as jukeboxes and music discs. And they nearly broke the game! They’re found in most grassy biomes, including most forests. You won’t tend to find them on mountains, in deserts, or in the snow.

Chickens are simple creatures – they spend most of their time pecking around in search of seeds, and if you come along holding seeds then they’ll happily follow you around instead. You can feed them those seeds to breed them.  They can’t fly exactly, but they can flap their wings in midair so that they fall slow enough to avoid fall damage. Adult chickens will lay an egg every five to ten minutes, which can be thrown to (sometimes) hatch a new chicken.

There’s something else I need to make you aware of. Minecraft’s baby zombie population has somehow figured out a way to ride chickens, and zombified piglins have taken this trick to the Nether, too. These terrifying cavalry can run like the wind, fit through tiny gaps, and don’t take fall damage. If you hear a late-night cluck then be on your guard.

Did you know that chickens exist in the real world too? Madness, I know! They were domesticated about 8,000 years ago from a species of tropical fowl living in Southeast Asia. They made it to India about 7,000 years ago, the Middle East about 4,000 years ago, and Europe about 2,700 years ago. They didn’t arrive in North America until about 500 years ago, though.

Today, chickens are the most common bird on the planet – there are about 26.5 billion of them, meaning that there are more than three times as many chickens as people. They’re mostly kept for food purposes – eggs and meat. A hen bred for laying can produce more than 300 eggs per year, and if they’re not slaughtered then they tend to live between five and ten years.

Chickens are also found widely in folklore, religion and literature. They’re one of the twelve creatures of the Chinese zodiac. They’re associated with the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu, and the Hindu war god Kartikeya. They feature in the Yoruba creation story, and foretell Ragnarök in Norse mythology. They’re a “symbol of light” for Zoroastrians, and they pop up plenty of times in the Bible.

We’ve not seen Minecraft’s chickens pop up yet in the writings of the villagers or the illagers. But if the evidence of the real world is anything to go by, then surely it’s only a matter of time!