The mod adds over 50 chicken breeds that drop ores, metals and modded items. Loose chickens cause lag and scatter their drops, so the efficient approach is to breed them for good stats and then move them into Roost blocks.
Planning your breeding
1. Open Not Enough Items (NEI) and look up the chicken breed you want. The breeding tree shows which parent breeds produce it.
2. Work up the tree step by step. Breed the parent pairs NEI shows until you get the target breed.
3. Pay attention to the three stats:
- Growth affects how fast the chicken produces.
- Gain affects how much it drops.
- Strength affects how well its stats hold up when you breed it again.
4. Keep your best offspring and breed them together over several generations to push their stats higher.
Moving chickens into Roosts
1. Look up the Roost recipe in NEI and craft as many Roosts as you have chicken lines.
2. Place the Roosts and put your bred chickens inside.
3. The Roost collects the chicken's drops automatically, so no loose mobs wander your base.
4. Check each Roost regularly and empty it. You can also pipe its output into storage if your pack has item transport.
A note on traits
Some chickens can carry optional traits that give your character helpful buffs or harmful debuffs. Learn what a breed does before you rely on it near your base. If the mod's config offers a way to turn traits off, you can disable them there if you prefer.