How to Build an Auto Chicken Farm in Minecraft

Last Updated: August 31, 2021 References

Building an automatic chicken farm in Minecraft gives you a solid, easy food supply of cooked chicken. To start your farm, you'll need one chest, two dispensers, one carpet block, one slab, two hoppers, eight glass blocks, one bucket of lava, two redstone dust, one comparator, two observers, some building blocks (like cobblestone), some breeding seeds, and some chickens. You'll also need an area where you can build your farm, which is 3 blocks wide, 6 blocks deep, and 5 blocks tall. Illuminate the immediate area with torches, glowstone, or other luminescent items to prevent hostile mobs from spawning in or around your farm. Ready to start building? Follow the tutorial below to build your own automatic chicken farm.

Steps

1
Place the chest on the ground. You'll need to be able to access this chest when your automatic farm is complete in order to get your cooked chicken.
2
Place a hopper feeding into the chest. Put the hopper in the space right behind your chest so your inanimate objects can move to it (you may need to press Shift while you click to be able to change the direction the hopper is moving. The Shift + Click command allows you to place blocks on active blocks without opening them).
- The hopper will allow the cooked chicken to automatically drop into the chest.
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3
Place a building block behind the hopper. You now have a 1x3 grid.
4
Place 2 dispensers on top of the building block facing the chest. This layer is 3 blocks deep so far.^{[1]
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5
Place a slab on your hopper. This block is only half the thickness of a normal block so it can collect items on top of the slab.^{[2]
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6
Place a hopper behind the first layer of dispenser. The space below the newly placed hopper is empty for now. ^{[3]
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7
Place a carpet over the hopper. The carpet will prevent the chickens from moving or falling through the hopper.^{[4]
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8
Place a building block behind the hopper, on the first layer. Since the first layer under the hopper is empty, the block will also be on the first layer.
9
Place a comparator on top of the building block you just put down. This doesn't look like it will take up the full block space, but the blank area above it is considered this block. ^{[5]
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10
Place an observer on top of the comparator. You now have an empty block between your comparator and the top dispenser on the other column.^{[6]
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11
Add glass blocks to either side of the carpet. The observer and dispenser blocks are covering the front and back of the carpet, so you need to add two blocks of glass to either side of the carpet.^{[7]
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12
Cover the rest of the area with building blocks. Encase the rest of the building with building blocks, but make sure to leave the center block blank so you can put chickens inside it.
- Start off with two chickens and let them breed until you get 24 chickens.
13
Close the top with another observer block and destroy the top layer of building blocks. Once you have 24 chickens, place an observer block facing your chest and use an axe to destroy your building blocks.^{[8]
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- You should have your 24 chickens in that empty block space with an observer block on top, two glass blocks around the outside, and a dispenser and hopper in front and behind.
14
Place redstone dust on the blocks in front and behind the observer block and destroy the rest of your excess building blocks. This includes the building block next to your dispenser and hopper to the ground level.
15
Add glass blocks two-layers high around the hopper. Make sure you're leaving the area above the hopper empty.
16
Add a lava bucket to the dispenser. Click the dispenser to interact with it and pull up a 3x3 grid. Put the lava in the middle of the grid.^{[9]
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- Any eggs your chickens lay will move into the bottom dispenser, which will move them to the other open space where adult chickens will encounter the lava. Those adult chickens will create cooked meat that will drop onto the slab, which will move into your chest via the lowest hopper.