Chicken

Chicken is the small flightless bird that supplies feathers for arrows and eggs for baking, and one of the simplest farm animals to keep. Chickens follow any player holding seeds — wheat, beetroot, melon, pumpkin, and torchflower seeds all work — so you can walk a flock home without a lead. They flap instead of falling and take no damage from a drop of any height, which is why a chicken coop can be stacked vertically or built straight over a shaft without hurting the birds.

Eggs are the reason a chicken farm feeds itself. Chickens lay them at random intervals wherever they happen to be standing, and throwing an egg has a small chance of hatching a chick where it lands, occasionally several at once. A hopper under the floor gathers the eggs into a chest and a dispenser aimed back into the pen throws them again, so the flock grows from its own output without another seed spent after the founding pair.

That loop is the whole of an automatic chicken farm. Chicks hatched inside a closed pen grow up in it, and adults killed by fire or lava drop cooked chicken directly, skipping the furnace and the fuel it would need. Feeding a chick more seeds shortens its wait to adulthood, which is how you keep the population under control rather than letting it run.

A chicken jockey is what happens when a baby zombie spawns riding one. The rider steers, the mount keeps its immunity to fall damage, and the pair crosses drops that would stop a zombie on foot — rare, but the reason a chicken pen built next to an unlit cave mouth occasionally turns hostile.