Valheim has its fair share of farm animals, and if you’ve made it all the way to the Mistlands biome, you have the opportunity to raise one of the most iconic farm animals of all time: the beloved Chicken.
Hens and Chickens in the game work in much the same way they do in real life: They produce some of the best food around through both their eggs and their meat. However, their breeding and taming process are vastly different from any other animal in Valheim. Here’s how you can find and hatch your own flock of Chickens.
How To Find Chickens
Hens are the most interesting tameable animal in Valheim because of one key difference: You won’t find them wandering the wilds. You’ll never have to convince a wild chicken to stay put and feed it till it loves you. Instead, you’ll have to find an Egg and figure out how to hatch it.
You can find these Eggs in the Trader’s shop after beating Yagluth, the boss of the Plains. However, they don’t come cheap. Weighing in at a whopping 1,500 gold per, Eggs are easily the most expensive item the Trader sells, and you’ll need at least two to start making your own.
How To Hatch Eggs
Once you’ve bought your precious Eggs, you’ll need to make them hatch, which is, thankfully, simple. You’ll need to drop an Egg near a heat source, which is indicated by the “Fire Source” buff you receive when near Campfires, Hearths, Stone Ovens, and more. If the Egg is properly heated by the fire, it should say “Warm” when you look at it.
The warmed Egg will gradually grow closer to hatching over the course of 30 minutes or a few in-game days as long as it stays warm. At the end of this time, it will hatch into a Chicken, which will take even more time to finally grow into the Hen, the adult version of the Chicken. This adult Hen will be automatically tamed, so you’ll never have to worry about getting them to like you.
Be careful when you place your Egg down near a fire. The hatched Chickens could easily burn themselves if they have an open path to the fire, so place it behind some Iron Bars or a few wooden posts to keep your baby chicks safe.
How To Get More Eggs
Hens are great for a number of reasons, but you’ll want a lot of them, which means you need more Eggs. Hens breed in the same way all other tameable animals do. If two well-fed and un-alerted Hens are next to each other for long enough, one will lay an Egg. As a general rule, you can feed Hens with seeds and a few other items like Barley and Dandelions.
Hens also won’t lay eggs if there are more than 14 Hens, Chickens, or Eggs within 12 in-game units. While this is a higher number than most tameable animals, it can be a bit misleading since it includes Eggs. You’ll want to keep the number of Hens in one pen well below 14 to ensure they lay Eggs consistently.
The Eggs laid by Hens can be warmed by a nearby fire, so if you leave a fire going in your coop and drop some food nearby, your Hens will multiply without you having to do anything. Keep this in mind as well if you want to collect Eggs and use them in cooking recipes. If you don’t put out the fire sources near your Hens, you might not have any Eggs when you get back.
Defending Your Hens
If you’ve made it to the point in the game where you can buy Eggs from Haldor, you’ve also enabled some nasty raids that can quite easily kill your entire flock of Hens. Make sure you build your coop out of extremely solid materials and don’t leave any gaps in the walls or the roof where a stray Bat or two could get in.
In the worst-case scenario, a single raid could decimate your Hens and leave you without any Eggs, forcing you to buy more and start from scratch. This could happen no matter how prepared you are as Troll attacks can go through walls, and even stone structures don’t last long against Seekers. To help counteract this, keep a handful of Eggs in a chest at all times. You can use them to restart your coop if a raid goes terribly wrong.
Why You Want Hens
Hens are one of the best tameable animals in the game. They produce three key items that you’ll rely on throughout the end-game of Valheim: Eggs, Chicken Meat, and Feathers.
Eggs are one of the best food ingredients in the game. They can be cooked in the Cauldron by themselves to produce cheap food that is great to eat while doing basic chores, and if you combine them with Jotun Puffs, you can create one of the best stamina food in the game: Mushroom Omelettes.
Chicken Mean is similarly a dual-use, end-game food. It can be cooked on its own to create a decent health food, Cooked Chicken Meat, or combined with Honey, Jotun Puffs, and a Stone Oven to create Honey Glazed Chicken, which is one of the best health foods in the game.
Between these two foods, Hens can already produce most of the food you’ll need to explore the Mistlands comfortably, but that’s not where their usefulness ends. Hens also drop Feathers when killed. Feathers are used in nearly every arrow recipe in the game, and no matter how good you get at shooting unsuspecting birds, they are an absolute pain to farm. Hens turn that painstaking process into a thoughtless one. Simply grow and slaughter them, and you’ll naturally build up a stockpile of Feathers.
