Egg

An egg is an item that is dropped by chickens and can be used to craft food items, such as cake, and can be thrown for a chance to spawn baby chickens on impact. They have three variants based on the variant of the corresponding chicken: the standard egg for temperate chickens, brown egg for warm chickens, and blue egg for cold chickens.

Mob loot

Every adult chicken lays an egg item every 5–10 minutes, except for those that are or were part of chicken jockeys. The theoretical average would be expected at 1 egg every 7.5 minutes (9000 game ticks). The type of egg being laid depends on the chicken variant; temperate chickens lay normal eggs, cold chickens lay blue eggs, and warm chickens lay brown eggs. A fox has a 3% chance of spawning with a normal egg in its mouth, which it drops upon death. Alternatively, a player dropping a food item causes the fox to drop the egg.

Combat

Players are able to throw eggs and deal knockback to mobs (but not other players), but no damage is dealt, similar to a snowball. Likewise, throwing eggs at neutral mobs provokes them. Eggs can also be fired from dispensers and are affected by gravity. Eggs thrown through fire or lava catch fire, and set fire to entities they hit.

Spawning chickens

When thrown by a dispenser or by pressing the button, an egg has a (12.5%) chance of spawning a chick. If this occurs, there is a (3.125%) chance of spawning three additional chicks (on average, 1 out of every 256 eggs spawns 4 chicks). In other words, whenever an egg is thrown, there is a chance of spawning 1 chick and a chance of spawning four chicks. The chick variant depends on which egg variant was thrown; regular eggs hatch temperate chicks, blue eggs hatch cold chicks, while brown eggs hatch warm chicks. The expected value of the number of chicks an egg produces is or 13.7%. This means that on average, a chick is spawned every 7.3 eggs, a stack of 16 eggs spawns 2.188 chicks, and a full inventory including the hotbar and off-hand (37 × 16 = 592 eggs) is expected to spawn approximately 81 chicks.

Entity data

Thrown eggs have entity data that define various properties of the entity. :

: See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.

In other media

File:Egg (inventory) MCE.png|An as seen in File:AMCM Chicken Egg.jpg|An as it appears in

Trivia

Eggs break mid-fall if hit by another projectile; the chance of spawning a chick is not affected. A thrown egg faces toward the player in first-person view, while it appears rotated horizontally in third-person view. This is the case for all throwable items such as ender pearls, snowballs, and all throwable potions.