Chicken automation / Swimming vs nesting chickens

[Kazuya Mishima]

The last time i had chicken automation i had 4 of them crammed into a 1x1x1 containment system all of them standing on a hopper. I realize now that this is exploitational and also deletarious to performance of the computer.

Prior to this i use to have small chambers with water flow where the chickens were perpetually struggling against the current. They would release eggs and those would flow down the channel.

With hardcore chickens my past designs are obsolete and i've been trying to figure out ways to get seeds to chickens. My nesting system wouldn't work because the seed would just get taken up by the hopper and the chickens would never get fed. Another exploitation is chickens being able to eat through blocks. Considering this i don't see a nesting system working under any circumstance ?

Am i correct in assuming the optimal or most effective chicken farm involves swimming chickens?

[Sarudak]

I still want to hear from FC if chickens being able to eat through blocks is considered an exploit.

[LaserCooled]

He did in fact say that chickens eating through blocks was an exploit just before he added the nether chickens feature.

Right, if I was using that in a sorting system.

No, you're using it to avoid item filtration, which is definitely an exploit, as is the chickens eating through blocks.

Enjoy your vacation.

It was in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5768&start=25

[Kazuya Mishima]

I still want to hear from FC if chickens being able to eat through blocks is considered an exploit.

I recall some conflict on this board about it but it was a while ago and i can't find the thread anymore, my search terms don't help.

If eating through a block is permissible then the nesting model is easily doable as you could feed 4 chickens with one seed transport channel.

[embirrim]

I think it partially comes down to what you think is an exploit, but as FC is designing the mod the final decision is his, I suppose.
My setup has them eating through trapdoors. I really don't consider that an exploit. I just see it as them having their heads stuck in a little hole and all they do is lay eggs and eat. Kinda like foie-gras, from what I've heard.

[heyz]

What I did in my last world was to flood the chickens on a timer, so most of the time they were dry, but got a bath every 60 seconds.

I posted this in the builds thread, but here is a link to my early attempt. http://imgur.com/a/oDHQV

[DaveYanakov]

I still use the same chicken farm I always did. Push chickens into a village well, dig down the outside a few meters and install hoppers underneath. Seeds float to the top to be eaten, raw eggs sink to be collected by the hoppers. Add dispensers on a timer to toss in seeds and crack the occasional egg and you're golden.

[nmarshall23]

I still use the same chicken farm I always did. Push chickens into a village well, dig down the outside a few meters and install hoppers underneath. Seeds float to the top to be eaten, raw eggs sink to be collected by the hoppers. Add dispensers on a timer to toss in seeds and crack the occasional egg and you're golden.

Nice, that's really simple..

[Ribky]

I still use the same chicken farm I always did. Push chickens into a village well, dig down the outside a few meters and install hoppers underneath. Seeds float to the top to be eaten, raw eggs sink to be collected by the hoppers. Add dispensers on a timer to toss in seeds and crack the occasional egg and you're golden.

The minimalist approach you take to almost every automation design challenge really is ingenious man. I just wanted to let you know that. I always tend to overthink things like this too much... I mean crap... I have little chicken pods over hoppers that launch eggs at a wall over a water stream, while the chickens that get to live are fed by runoff from my wheat farm... takes up a lot of space. (to avoid exploitiness there are about 20 'pods' with one chicken each, so yeah... it's big).

[TaterBoy]

As many of you know by now, I'm pretty much the opposite of minimalism. I love the complex, Goldbergesque machines. So here is my offering, a fully automated and self sustaining chicken factory. It produces hemp fibers, cooked chicken, and feathers, all with no additional resources; so once you make the initial investment of building it, there is no further cost to reap the rewards of the system.

Hemp Farm

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Hemp is produced, harvested by a reed timer and detector block, the seeds are divided from the hemp which is ground into string.

Chicken Feeder

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Hemp seeds from above are placed in a timed dispenser to be fed at regular intervals. The flood gate opens and shuts on a timer that is separate from the dispenser timer, and set up so that it floods a short time after the seeds have been dispensed, so the chickens will eat, and the eggs will be washed to the end of the room into hoppers. You can also see the string splitter which automatically sorts my fibers into four separate double chests for much storage.

Egg Hatchery

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Hoppers feed eggs into block dispensers which fire them against the back wall. Chickens are trapped in the room til they grow up, at which point they'll hop onto the vine traps and meet their fate in the saws.

Feather Sorter

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I use block dispenser flood gates which trigger each other using two detector blocks, while one is open, the other is always shut, the top one is on its own timer so that every so often it will open and drop anything that has gathered, the bottom block dispenser though is only opened when it detects feathers being collected. Meanwhile the chicken and exp is diverted, chicken cooked, exp filtered...It's all very efficient and streamlined. :D

[brab]

I still use the same chicken farm I always did. Push chickens into a village well, dig down the outside a few meters and install hoppers underneath. Seeds float to the top to be eaten, raw eggs sink to be collected by the hoppers. Add dispensers on a timer to toss in seeds and crack the occasional egg and you're golden.

This is a great suggestion and it works quite well. I found out I need at least a depth of 3 blocks of water in order to avoid the seeds being thrown in the water to end up in the hoppers.

[Kazuya Mishima]

Cool thanks for the reply guys. I find building systems where the chickens are not constantly swimming just more fun and rewarding though more difficult. Nice to know that nesting and even constrained free-range solutions are still viable. I like heyz's hemp seed system. I hadn't thought of just generating seeds on sight, I was always of the mindset of trying to get the hemp seeds i normally destroyed for hemp production to the correct location for chicken breeding.

Interesting thing i found when testing Hardcore chickens and it maybe obvious to many of you but i wasn't aware the seeds can be delivered to a chicken standing on a hopper and the chicken will eat it before the hopper accepts it however the seeds have to sit for a while like any item and then fall toward the chicken standing on the hopper. There is that short phase of time where steve cannot pick up an item that enters the simulation and then after a moment you can pick it up. The same principle seems to work for chickens and i believe with this you can create vertical arrays of chicken containment systems and as long as you stop the seeds before they reach the chicken and let them sit , maybe with a hatch cover or a sticky piston you might be able to cycle large volumes of seeds without the need for any seed source yourself. Not sure why you would do this though but it at least appears you can vertically transmit food to chickens which is my favorite method.

[Six]

Interesting thing i found when testing Hardcore chickens and it maybe obvious to many of you but i wasn't aware the seeds can be delivered to a chicken standing on a hopper and the chicken will eat it before the hopper accepts it...

Yeah, I've never quite seen the need people seem to have of dropping seeds on a block next to the chicken, I've never had problems with chickens catching the seeds before they go in the hopper. One such setup is below, which works good if you want individual chickens all laid out in a barn:

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You can also put a water stream where the bottom hoppers are too, to carry the eggs off to be processed somewhere else.