Hytale’s current early access build lets you capture animals and set up simple farms, but the systems around taming and housing are still in flux. Chicken coops already work well enough to give you a steady trickle of eggs, as long as you respect a few quirks in how chickens behave.
What chicken coops do in Hytale right now
Chicken coops act as small shelters that chickens use at night and as the point where eggs are generated. You do not manually put a chicken “inside” the coop through a menu. Instead, the bird wanders freely during the day and runs into the coop on its own after sunset.
By morning, the chicken leaves the coop, and a small package appears on the coop itself. Interacting with this package once it has spawned gives you at least one egg. The interaction prompt only appears when there is actually an egg package on the coop.
Coops currently support at least one chicken per structure, and players report that multiple chickens can share a single coop, though the exact capacity is not clearly indicated in-game. The core loop is simple: keep chickens near coops, let them sleep there at night, and collect eggs from the coop package during the day.
How to find and capture chickens
Chickens spawn in the main neutral region, often called zone one, in grassy biomes. They can appear across the grasslands, but they are easier to spot in open plains or along the edges of forests rather than deep inside dense woods.
Chickens are skittish and run as soon as you get close. Rather than herding them, you can use capture crates to move them safely to your base. Capture crates are crafted at the farmer’s workbench using wood and essence of life. The crate item description notes that captured chickens can be housed in a chicken coop.
Only small animals and baby creatures fit inside a capture crate. Chickens count as small enough, as do lambs, calves, rabbits, piglets, and many other small critters. Larger adult animals stay where they are; you need fences and lures for them instead.
How to set up a working chicken coop
Step 1: Place at least one chicken coop inside a fenced enclosure near your base. Use fences from the builder’s workbench to surround a small grassy yard so your chickens cannot wander off.
Step 2: Craft a capture crate at the farmer’s workbench, then head into zone one and look for wild chickens in grassy plains or at forest edges. Left-click a chicken while holding the crate to capture it, which turns the bird into a carried item.
Step 3: Return to your fenced enclosure and place the capture crate inside it. Left-click again with the crate equipped to release the chicken. The bird will be nervous at first and try to keep its distance.
Step 4: Wait until sunset. Chickens automatically run into nearby coops at night, even if they still treat you as a threat. If they are not entering, picking up, and replacing the coop can nudge them into using it immediately.
Step 5: In the morning, check the coop. Once the chicken has left for the day, a small package appears on the coop’s model. Walk up and press the interact key (default F) to collect the egg. New packages appear over time as nights pass and the chickens continue to sleep in the coop.
Why you sometimes “can’t use” the chicken coop
Several players run into coops that seem unusable. The key detail is that you can only interact with a coop once an egg package has spawned. If there is no visible package on the coop, pressing the interact key does nothing, even if chickens are walking around it.
Another source of confusion is that chickens do not visibly attach to the coop when you place them. Coops have no dedicated UI and no manual “assign chicken” action. If your birds are fenced near the coop and night falls, they simply vanish into the coop model at bedtime and reappear outside in the morning.
If it is the middle of the night and your chickens are still outside, lifting the coop and placing it again inside their pen can cause them to immediately run into it. If they are not in a fenced area, they may have already wandered away, so always enclose the coop and birds.
Taming chickens, feed bags, and corn
Hytale includes a basic taming system for animals, but it is limited and not fully tied into breeding yet. Chickens treat you as a predator when you first release them near your base. They run when you approach, which can make pens feel empty even if they are technically “stocked.”
A feed bag crafted at the farmer’s workbench (using wheat, vegetables, fruit, and essence of life) can be placed in an enclosure as a passive food source. Over roughly a day of in-game time, animals penned with a feed bag start to display hearts and become less afraid of you. They will no longer panic and flee when you walk into the pen, though they still will not follow you or reproduce.
For more direct interaction, chickens react positively to specific food items. Corn works as a lure for chickens: holding it in your hand causes hearts to appear above nearby birds. After some time, a chicken that has seen corn and has access to food in the pen stops being scared and pecks at the ground around your structures, including coops.
How chicken coops fit into early access farming
Animal breeding is not implemented yet in Hytale’s current build. You cannot pair chickens to produce chicks, and there are no known mechanics that increase egg output through breeding behaviors. Coops are, therefore, a straightforward, low-effort way to convert a small number of captured chickens into a renewable resource: eggs.
Because animals do not reproduce, every chicken you farm comes from the wild. Capture crates are the most reliable way to secure them. Once you have a few birds, coops give you passive income with very little ongoing work beyond collecting the packages each day and keeping the pen safe from hazards.
Other animal structures, such as feeding troughs, appear in the world but are not fully wired into animal behavior yet. Feed bags do help with taming, and coops already generate eggs, but many of the hints in item descriptions suggest that farming will grow more complex in future updates.
Right now, the simplest way to get value from chicken coops is to fence a small yard, capture one or two chickens, give them a coop to sleep in, and visit each morning for eggs. It is a small loop in a much larger survival game, but it already pays off if you are willing to hunt down the birds in zone one and put in a bit of early work at the farmer’s workbench.
