Chickens Nearly Broke Minecraft | The Story Of The Chicken

Chickens. They’re a bit like dolphins, except they have feathers, lay eggs, and are nothing like dolphins. But what is a chicken? It’s just a chicken, nothing else. Is it a chicken or is it a duck? However, I think it really looks like a duck.

But it’s obviously a chicken. I don’t understand the discussion. We’d show you all the footage of them debating this, but then this episode would be 16 hours long. This feathery friend was introduced in 2010 in one of Minecraft’s infamous secret Friday updates.

These updates were so secret that I’m to be arrested after the recording of this episode for telling you about them. First time we encountered chickens. Look at them. I picked up all the eggs and it felt like gold

Or like a diamond of value because I hadn’t seen it before. Eggs, feathers, and meat. I can only provide two of those, and you don’t want to know which ones. This resource rich mob is one of Minecraft’s most magnificent creatures. The chicken is one of the most common animals

That you encounter in Minecraft. …Oh! We often talk about mobs being a bit ugly cute in Minecraft, and I think the chicken is sort of the epitome. Yes, well, as my mother always said to me, looks aren’t everything. I’m sure it has lots of beautiful characteristics. Naive and clumsy. …Oh!

It looks so friendly. This cute little derpy one that makes my world messy. So I need to clean, but I still love it. And messy they are indeed. Chickens lay an egg every five to ten minutes and will follow you if you’re holding seeds,

Which means that unless you contain them. I returned to my house and it was filled with chicken. Majestical chicken egg-plop sound. Luckily, there are ways to prevent this. You can have a nice coop, or you can have one of these automatic chicken machines that just generate more and more chickens.

Free range, of course. Sure. It is. On the topic of egg hatching, baby chickens were introduced in the second part of the adventure update in the year 2011. Its design would influence every baby mob in Minecraft going forward.

I think the baby chicken is so adorable because of its big head. Baby animals generally have a larger head in proportion to their bodies. If you look in the code, we scale down the body, but not the head. It’s funny. And when it comes to breeding

We are inspired by the real world. Sure we are.. But the truth is Minecraft does what Minecraft does. There we go The Minecraft chicken is really absurd. You throw an egg on grass, it hatches a chicken, but you can also breed them with seeds. And you also get a baby chicken, right?

In the code, a chicken is a breedable animal, so therefore it automatically gets that behavior. What a rare, slip in scientific realism for our game. Anyways, chickens spawn in grassy areas like jungles, which is a tad inconvenient because ocelots, also known as the chicken’s number one predator,

Do love their chicken nuggets. We want their world to feel alive. And when you see that mobs interact with each other in different ways, even in the more sad ways of getting killed by each other, then you get this feeling of, yes, this is an alive world.

You feel more immersed. Well, I’m sure that’s a comforting thought in the chicken’s final moments. Ah, but they do have one ace up their feathery sleeves. For most of the mobs in Minecraft, they have one characteristic that identifies that mob.

For the chickens, it’s simply that they fall very slowly when they drop and they don’t take fall damage. Could someone put that in a simpler way? They flap. Let’s talk design. The chicken is one block tall and has gone through very little changes since its creation,

Except for their texture update in 2019, which made them go from gray to white and briefly, bright orange. But that was just because we pressed the wrong button. I think my favorite part of the chicken is its feet. It’s just one block with planes on the sides.

This inspired a lot of other mob designs. For example, the axolotl. The texture is like on the inside of an invisible cube, which gives it the impression of being really eh thin. And how about its sounds? You better not say chickeny… Majestical chicken egg-plop sound.

Yep, we covered that earlier. A mix between a realism and a little bit cartoonial. Old chicken sounds have lots of background noise, so we have cleaned them up, but I don’t want to you know, overly clean them either, because then we’ll lose some of the soul from the sounds.

For example, the chicken’s footsteps These kind of things on a table. Click click click click. Eggxellant! So, to summarize, the chicken is an ugly, cute, passive mob that happily tippy taps over the overworld, flapping its wings when it falls off cliffs, fills your base with enormous amounts of eggs,

And hopes to not get eaten by ocelots or players. Players like you, you monster. Yeah I mean, that’s the whole point of the chicken, just to kill it. I’m sorry. Poor chicken. I really needed your meat. Don’t worry, Jasper. In 2013, chickens found a way

To defend themselves through an unexpected alliance. The Chicken Jockey, essentially a baby zombie riding an adult chicken. This is another example of someone, in this case Nathan, known as ‘dinnerbone’. Just having a fun idea and just adding it to the game.

Typical Minecraft. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. You don’t say. Whatever happened to… [DISTORTED VOICE] We are inspired by the real world. I have always felt that both the chicken and the zombie both are happy at least. In Minecraft dungeons, they’ve actually put it to the extreme

And had a chicken jockey with a baby zombie. And on top of that, another baby zombie. As cute or scary as they look, chicken jockeys are rare. The chances of this mob spawning in your world are only about 0.25%. And there’s a reason for that. We did have a problem.

They were spawning as hostile mobs in dark areas and in caves. The chicken jockeys that got spawned in the caves just dropped a lot of eggs, which caused a lot of performance issues. Chickens nearly broke Minecraft. Well, I suppose we better forgive them. After all,

This iconic mob is considered by many to be the heart and soul of the game. Larger than life. That is the expression. Precisely. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a delicious chicken dinn… eh I mean a delicious nothing at all dinner. See you next time.

The chicken! Where does it come from? What does it dream of? And what came first – the chicken or the egg? In this episode, we go to great lengths to learn everything there is to know about our feathered friend by putting four Minecraft developers on the spot. What they told us will blow your mind (not really), so buckle up and enjoy the story of the chicken!

More about Minecraft: https://minecraft.net