These methods no longer work as of 01-20-10, you are limited to 1 egg per day now. This is here for archived purposes only.

Note: Original guide by Taka S. (Great Job!) edited and revised by Jakets (Jake Smith).
Note 2: Time of post does not indicate actual time of post or last update, this is due to backdating posts for guides and other information to keep it off the front page.

Update History:
version 1.0 (Nov. 18th): Release
version 2.0 (Dec. 2nd): Major update; added pictures; reorganized sections

———————–[Table of Contents]
I. Introduction — The Allure of Chickens
II. The Coop
III. Types of Chickens and Their Respective Eggs
IV. Obtaining Chickens
V. Harvesting “Mystery Eggs”
VI. Increasing Your Chances of Harvesting
VII. Controlling the Quality of Your “Mystery Eggs”
VIII. Sharing your “Mystery Eggs”
IX. FAQs and Miscellaneous Topics

Each chapter is divided into 2 sections: “Basics” and “Tips and Tricks”. The Basics section is geared toward newer players and will introduce concepts; the Tips and Tricks will contain all sorts of advanced techniques. Sections are designed to be read alone if you wish to stick to a particular skill level.

I. Introduction — The Allure of Chickens

Along with the Land Expansion update on Friday 13th of November, the world was introduced to Chicken Coops and the prospect of finding rare, colored chickens. Similar to dairy barns, Chicken Coops are “buildings with a purpose”; they can store up to 20 chickens and can harvest those chickens instantly with a couple clicks. When (and only when) chickens are harvested in the coop, they provide a small chance to lay a “Mystery Egg”. Each egg has the potential to give your neighbors either a chicken or a rare item.

So you may be asking, What’s so special about these chickens? Why would I want one? First of all, they are among the most revenue-producing objects in the game with 64 coins generated per day by the Gold Chicken (only the Maple tree, Acai tree, Tabby cat, and Donkey produce more daily revenue but all four require Farm Cash to purchase). The “Mystery Eggs” that may be harvested at random can be posted to your wall where they can be hatched by friends for chickens or prized items normally sold only for Farm Cash. A farmer who regularly provides “Mysterious Eggs” is bound to be showered with gifts, fertilizer, and love from neighbors!

So what are you waiting for? Get cracking those eggs!

II. The Coop

———————–[BASICS]
This “building with a purpose” has several key differences that make it unique from its bovine variant. First of all, you can only have one coop on your farm under normal circumstances. Coops can be purchased with 5,000 coins from the market.

Note: If you do NOT have a coop on your farm or in your gift box, you will be guaranteed to hatch a chicken coop from any egg you find from the posts on your news feed.

Limit: 1
Storage: 20 Chickens
Cost: 5,000 coins (or free from hatched egg)
Size: 5×3

Construction of the coop also has its quirks. Once you lay it down on your farm and the contruction animation finishes, a series of pop-up alerts will let you post your very first egg to the news feed. Afterwards, you will be pleasantly surprised to find a chicken already in your coop. If, for some reason, you delete or sell you coop, you can build it again and all these actions can be repeated.

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
This last part has some interesting implications: Because eggs can hatch coops, and coops let you post eggs, one can initiate an endless cycle of construction and egg posts with another player.

To do this, two players need to sell off any coop they already have in their possession. The first player must then obtain a coop in one of the two ways outlined above. He will then construct the coop and post the egg to the feed with the intention of letting the second player hatch the egg immediately after (coordination using the chat function is recommended). The first player will then take the free chicken out of the coop he just built and sell off the coop for a cool 270 coins. The second player will then repeat the process, and it can continue indefinitely, barring any missteps, until the gameplay is interrupted by connection issues or updates. If you are in need of free chickens and some spare coins, try your hand at this method of “infinite coop swapping”.

III. Types of Chickens and Their Respective Eggs

———————–[BASICS]
Because of the novelty and rarity of the colored chickens presently, there is some mystery shrouding them. Hopefully this guide will dispel any lingering misconceptions.

There are 4 grades of chickens, each with a different color — superior chickens are inherently rarer, generate more revenue in coins, and can produce better items than inferior chickens. A chicken can only lay “Mystery Eggs” of the same color as itself.

White Chicken: 8 coins harvested
Brown Chicken: 16 coins harvested
Black Chicken: 32 coins harvested
Gold Chicken: 64 coins harvested

(*The Chicken Coop, is guaranteed to appear 100% of the time if a Chicken Coop is not already on the farm.)

YOU CANNOT HATCH YOUR OWN EGGS. As result, you must obtain all your chickens from your neighbors. This is made simpler if you collaborate with your neighbors to share eggs with each other and gradually raise the quality of the chickens you possess.

IV. Obtaining Chickens

———————–[BASICS]
Because chickens of any color are in GREAT demand (more than any abandoned animal, flower bouquet, or ribbon bonus), the competition is very fierce as there are only 5 eggs available per “Mystery Egg” post. Do not be surprised if eggs are gone in mere seconds!

Chickens of all colors are obtained by accessing a friend’s “Mystery Egg” post. These can be found in your Facebook feed. Clicking “Hatch an egg!” will open up a new window that reveals whether you received a chicken, an item, or nothing at all if you’re too slow.

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
Facebook allows you to filter your news feed to only show Farmville related news. This is done by clicking the Farmville icon on the left-hand toolbar of your Facebook “Home” page. By clicking this icon, you also refresh the feed instantly without having to reload the entire page. You will find this a lot quicker than hitting refresh or F5. Although taxing on the Facebook servers, one could sit there and continually refresh the page for a better chance at hatching eggs.

Setting up your Farmville wall post filter.

This benefit of “camping” the newsfeed is compounded if you have more friends that play Farmville and post eggs. You can be sure to see more frequent “Mystery Egg” posts if you have 300 friends as opposed to 10 friends.

One tried and true method is to collaborate with a friend, just as Zynga likely intended. Using methods that are detailed later in this guide, find a friend who is willing to “trade” eggs with you (see section on “Sharing”). Doing just that, my small circle of friends were able to produce Gold Chickens and Gold Eggs for me in record time.

V. Harvesting “Mystery Eggs”

Let me take the mystery out of “Mystery Eggs” and show you how easy it can be to harvest them.

———————–[BASICS]
First of all, the coop requires at least one chicken inside to operate; up to 20 chickens can fit inside. Your coop is ready to be harvested when it has matured enough (normally a day) and has a pink arrow hovering above it to indicate that it is ready. Clicking the coop reveals a drop down menu with the option “Collect” at the top; clicking it will harvest all of the chickens within.

After collection, a message may pop-up revealing that you have harvested a rare “Mystery Egg” (just like the one you received when you built your Coop). Hitting “Accept” will display another window asking for permission to publish a post to your wall regarding the egg. Clicking “Publish” will allow the whole world to see. Don’t be discouraged if the “Mystery Eggs are initially hard to come by as the odds are extremely low.

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
Chickens can be harvested more than once a day if you use this particular trick. A very popular method going by multiple names (“The Formula”, “The Method”, “Coop Stuffing”), it very well might be a glitch that Zynga simply overlooked. It requires 2 things: an empty Chicken Coop and a Chicken that is already at 100% (any color). Simply place the Chicken into the Coop, et VOILA! The Coop is also at 100% and can be harvested. Any other chickens you put into the Coop afterwords can also be harvested and at any percentage.

The implication of this is that you can harvest a number of chickens as many times as you like — you won’t have to wait a full day before harvesting again. It is only limited by the number of “seed” chickens (at 100%) you have to ready the Coop. This makes it advantageous to collect as many chickens as the number of times you wish to harvest. (I myself have about 200 chickens because I often do more than 150 harvests in a day; any more that that will result in unused chickens and will slow the game.)

In conjunction with this trick, you will find it desirable to only use your best chickens to “stuff” your coop after the seed chicken, giving you the best possible chance to lay superior Mystery Eggs (see section on “Quality”). The seed chickens need not be of a high-grade; in fact, after a second chicken is placed into the Coop, you can take the seed chicken out of the Coop and it will remain at 100%.

VI. Increasing Your Chance of Harvesting

Although the chance of harvesting a Mystery Egg is random, you can definitely improve your odds. You will never reach a point of absolute certitude, but a maximum egg drop chance of 30% is readily achievable.

Each chicken in the coop adds 1.5% chance per harvest* to lay a Mystery Egg. Here are some basic calculations:

2 Chickens x 1.5% = 3% chance
6 Chickens x 1.5% = 9% chance
10 Chickens x 1.5% = 15% chance
20 Chickens x 1.5% = 30% chance

(*This has been verified by people taking a peek at the coding of the game files and empirical testing by multiple individuals. This number is current as of Dec. 4, 2009)

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
There is no way to increase your chance of individual harvests beyond what the programmers have assigned, but what you can do is speed up your harvests so that you will have more chances.

This set of tips requires the use of at least 2 Coops. Yes, you are normally only allowed 1 Coop but under special circumstances, the game will glitch and allow you to have more than 1. Unfortunately, I will not detail how you should go about getting 2 Coops because Zynga views this as an exploit. If you choose to get 2 Coops on your farm, it is at your own risk. While there are numerous sources out there detailing how (just Google/YouTube it), it is very probable to stumble upon it accidentally like my brother.

If you do have 2 Coops, what you should be doing is transferring the chickens you just harvested directly into a Coop that is already at 100% (using the trick mentioned above). What this does is eliminates the need to unload onto the ground and into the Coop again, turning it into one elegant motion. Fairly intuitive, right?

You can further streamline this process by lining up the “Use” button over the bottom half of the Coop you plan to place it in. Because of a slight delay in animation, you can actually place the chicken into the Coop by clicking successively twice on the “Use” button. If you’ve got fast hands, you can even move the cursor over, click the Coop you are emptying, then hit “Look inside” before the Coop window fully closes (basically meaning you won’t see what you are clicking at all). If you can do this repeatedly, you will consistently be able to load and harvest under 30 seconds.

VII. Controlling the Quality of Your “Mystery Eggs”

———————–[BASICS]
The chance that a Mystery Egg will be a particular color is directly proportionate to what you put in. Suppose you put in 1 White Chicken and 3 Black Chickens into the Coop. There is a total of 4 chickens: the chance that a Mystery Egg is white is 25% (1 out of 4 eggs); the chance that a Mystery Egg is black is 75% (3 out of 4 eggs).

If all the chickens you put in are the same, you can only output that one color of egg; 10 Brown Chickens by themselves will always produce only Brown Eggs. 20 Brown Chickens will also only produce Brown Eggs, but the difference is that they will drop eggs more frequently.

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
There is no one right answer for what you should put into your Coop. However, as a general rule, you should put in as many of your best chickens or of the kind of eggs you desire to share. What ratio or combination you ultimately use might be different because everyone has their preferences, time constraints, and different types of chickens available.

For example, you might only have 1 Gold Chicken and 9 Brown Chickens. Following the general rule, you might be tempted to only use the Gold Chicken albeit at a 1.5% chance for a guaranteed Gold Egg. If you include the 9 Brown Chickens for a total of 10 chickens in the Coop, you have a 15% chance to lay an egg but it will in all likeliness be a Brown Egg. In the time you spent to load 10 chickens, you might have been able to harvest from the 1 Gold Chicken 3 times.

The absolute best possible combination is to harvest 20 Gold Chickens at once but this is not always desirable or even realistic for most people. Do some planning and calculations to find out what combination is best for you.

VIII. Sharing your “Mystery Eggs”

———————–[BASICS]
This is my favorite part! The easiest way to share your eggs is by posting them on to your wall. From there, anyone who is a friend of yours can hatch the egg. Generally, this does not discriminate: the people who invest the most time and effort will get the eggs. Friends will have an equal opportunity to get them.

However, you may want to share them with certain individuals before others — a girlfriend, dad, a beloved nephew. If you and your designated recipient happen to be online, it’s easy! Let’s assume you have a egg that is ready to post. Let the window idle on the “Publish” window. For the next step, any instant messaging system works (AIM, MSN, texting) but Facebook already has a functional chat system. So head on over there and give him/her a heads-up. When the other party is reached and is looking at the Farmville newsfeed (make sure it’s a live feed!), give a 10 second warning then hit “Publish”. If all goes well, your recipient should see the post in time to stake a claim in 1 of 5 eggs.

———————–[TIPS and TRICKS]
The basic way of sharing eggs is functional but isn’t without faults. Some people do have legitimate problems with their internet connections and browsers that make it hard to receive eggs. Some people have dozens of neighbors camping the feed and will compete over the eggs in a frenzy, making it difficult for designated recipients to hatch one.

Another way to share eggs is by hot-linking your recipient to the egg post directly. Simply put, everytime the “Publish” window appears, a page is already created on the Farmville servers, even before you hit “Publish”. By obtaining the link to that page, you effectively create a key — only people with the link can enter and take an egg.

To do this, simply right-click the egg icon of the “Publish” window and save the URL address embedded in it. The process is slightly different for Internet Explorer vs. Chrome and Firefox:

– In Firefox and Google Chrome, simply right-click and “Copy link address”.
– In Internet Explorer, I found it easiest to right-click and “open in new tab” then copy the URL address from there.

Where you go from there is up to you. You can hit “Skip” to have complete control over who gets an egg. Egg posts that aren’t published will last for some time (see below) so the link can be sent as a “gift” through the inbox for your recipients to accept at their leisure. They can also be copy-pasted into the chat text for immediate retrieval.

On the other hand, you may still want to post the egg on your wall after your friend has gotten his or her egg. Once it has been retrieved by your friend, you can still hit “Publish” for 4 other neighbors to collect because only 1 of the 5 eggs has been claimed.

There are things to consider:

- It would be a waste if you sent a link to a friend’s inbox, only to be used once and discarded; send it to at least 5 people or kindly remind the a single recipient to pass it on to 4 other people.

- Unpublished egg posts are not permanent like published posts; they are automatically discarded after a day or so. If you decide to “gift” to some friends, they will need to access it in a timely fashion. (Further testing needs to be done, admittedly.)

- Please don’t be a jerk by sharing all 5 eggs before publishing the egg post; people already waste enough time and agonize over eggs they couldn’t get.

IX. FAQs and Miscellaneous Topics

“Leave your eggs in the Gift Box! Up to 8 people can get an egg if you wait for about a day before placing your hatched egg on your farm. So don’t be greedy peoplezz!!!”

This is wrong on 2 counts:

1.) Leaving items and abandoned animals in your gift box to increase the number of people who obtain them is a myth. That is the official statement by Zynga and has been tested and proven false by many players. But it doesn’t hurt to stockpile them anyway in your gift box; it improves workflow by placing/selling them all at the same time, versus the minuscule amount of coins you would accrue in the meantime.

2.) The eggs are more akin to ribbon bonuses and flower bouquets on your feed: they are limited but with a pre-defined quantity available. In fact, even the load screens are not the same as the Abandoned Animals. Up to 5 people can hatch an egg per post and this has been tested.