Beginner’s Guide to an im-peck-able Chicken Coop

Your cottage lifestyle isn’t complete without some animals wandering around in your garden. What do you think of adopting a cow or some chickens? Luckily with The Sims 4 Cottage Living you can keep both! Domesticate up to eight chickens per coop and reap the benefits. They will lay eggs you’ll be able to use for your cooking or to compete at the Finchwick Fair. Chickens can even become your best friends if you treat them right.

Where to Buy Chickens

Firstly, make sure to place a coop on your lot, this will take up 4×3 squares. You can use the coop to purchase hens, roosters and chicks. There are three different colors to choose from: black, brown or white. The cost per chicken will vary between 75 up to 200 Simoleons, depending on the kind you want to buy. Each coop can only hold up to eight chickens, so if you want more you’ll have to place more coops on the lot. You can name each coop to keep better track of your chickens. 

Tip: To keep your chickens from wandering around too far, you can fence them in and then lock the gate with the new ‘lock door for all chickens’ locking option. 

Keep your Chickens Happy & Healthy

It’s important to invest time in your chickens; happier chickens produce better eggs! Keep the coop clean, feed the chickens when they’re hungry and spend time with them. If your chickens become too unhappy there’s a chance they might run away.

Tip: Chickens will not be affected by weather conditions if you have The Sims 4 Seasons installed. However, they will prefer to stay inside under heavy weather such as rain and snow. Click on their coop to call them over.

Feeding your Chickens

Simply click on the chicken itself to feed them or use the Scatter Feed Nearby interaction on a chicken coop. You can also upgrade the coop with the handiness skill to feed the chickens automatically. Pick the Coop Auto Feeder upgrade to achieve this.

Become Friends with your Chickens

If you treat your chickens right, they can become best friends with your Sim. To befriend them you can do social interactions with the chickens or give them special treats. While interacting with one chicken will give attention to all the chickens nearby, it will only increase your friendship with the one you’re socializing with.

Sims with the Animal Enthusiast Trait have an easier time befriending the chickens and will unlock more intense interactions with them, such as showing off a dance move, petting the chicken enthusiastically and smothering them with love. Using an instrument in your Sims’ inventory, you could even play them a song. However, if your Sim isn’t very skilled at it, it will decrease the relationship with the chicken. 

Lost your chickens? They can wander off and make it hard for you to find them. Click on your Sim and an interaction will pop-up to gather roaming chickens. 

Treating your chickens badly or neglecting them might not be the best idea…They can really become your worst enemy if you don’t watch out. Chickens you haven’t bonded with will have the urge to attack if your Sim gets near, which might end up very badly for your Sim! 

Tip: Hover your cursor over a chicken to see their stats. This way you can check your friendship level with them, their needs and their age.

Change the Appearance or Mood of your Chickens with Treats

This is a really fun way to spice things up in your chicken coop. There are a lot of different treats you can give your chickens and each will have a different outcome. 

To make animal treats click on the coop or fridge and choose the interaction; create animal treats at the fridge. You can also get treats from doing errands or buying them at the store. Your Sim can unlock more treat recipes by buying them and giving it to your animal. This will result in your Sim learning the recipe of this treat.

	Friendly Treat Increases relationship with the animal and this will remove the side effects from other treats.
	Animal Party Treat Socializing with an animal has a stronger impact on their happiness.
	Fishy Protein Treat You can harvest one extra egg on the next harvest.
	Healthy Treat Increase the animals lifespan.
	Chocolatey Treat The chicken will lay a chocolate egg.
	Flirty Treat This will increase the chance for Hatchable Eggs.
	Fruity Treat This will produce blue eggs.
	Golden Treat Turns the chicken into a Golden Chicken. This effect is permanent and can only be undone with a Friendly Treat. If you are good friends with the Golden Chicken you will now have the option to ask about their magic pulse powers.
	Midnight Treat Turn your chicken into an Evil Chicken. This effect is permanent and can only be undone with a Friendly Treat. Don’t start fights with this chicken, because the chances are higher they’ll kill your Sim. Evil chickens will lay a special obsidian egg.
	Pumpkin Treat Chicken will lay orange eggs.
	Rainbow Treat Your Chicken will now lay Rainbow eggs.
	Spicy Treat This will produce obsidian eggs.
	Veggie Treat Your Chickens will lay green eggs.

The special effects wear off after they lay the special egg.

How to Hatch Baby Chicks

You can get baby chicks when you put a Rooster and a Hen in the same coop. They have to be inside the coop to make a baby chick. After you’ve successfully collected the eggs you can place the hatchable eggs back into the chicken coop. After around two days when a baby chick is ready to hatch, you will get a pop-up on your screen saying the egg is ready! Click on the coop and help hatch the egg. If Sims doesn’t hatch the egg, the egg will hatch on its own. Nesting hens will speed up the process but also Golden Chicken who used a Golden Pulse on the egg. This will increase the quality of the egg and it makes the chick happier when they hatch. Chicks take about 3 to 4 days to age up to a young adult stage. 

If one of your happy hens laid a golden egg, there’s a chance that it will hatch a Golden Chick! How cute is that?

Collecting Eggs

You can collect eggs from the chicken coop to use in different recipes. If you want to see if hens laid eggs, hover over the chicken coop. You’ll see if eggs are ready to collect. Chickens will lay eggs every day. If you’ve collected all the eggs, come back the next day. Don’t leave them in the coop for a long time or else they will spoil. 

Special Eggs

If you give them a special treat or if they’re really happy, the chickens will sometimes lay special eggs. You can actually see what different eggs you are going to collect from the chickens the next day, by hovering over the chicken. 

• Hatchable Egg
  This will result in a baby Chick! Put it back in the Chicken Coop and wait until it’s ready to hatch. You can also get a rare hatchable golden egg or a hatchable obsidian egg. 
• Golden Egg
  Increase your chances of getting a Golden Egg by giving a Golden Treat to a Chicken. There’s also a guaranteed chance to get a Golden Egg from really happy chickens. If it’s a hatchable golden egg, you’ll get a golden chick. If Sims eat a golden egg that was used in a recipe, they will make the Sim golden and your Sim will have the special power; Golden Pulse. They will shoot a Golden Pulse at another Sim that will also make them sparkly. 
• Obsidian Egg
  This is a black egg. If it’s a hatchable egg, you’ll get a chick that is evil. If this egg is used in cooking recipes it will turn the Sim who ate it evil with red glowing eyes. There’s even a chance that your Sim starts a fire using their new (temporary) Evil Glare ability.

Golden Chickens

Golden Chickens aren’t just for show, they will also help out around your lot when you’re good friends with the chicken. They can ‘bless’ an egg with a Golden Pulse. This will give a boost to the quality of the egg. They can also improve the quality of harvestables, crops, food and drinks if they are close enough. 

Evil Chickens

Evil chickens are made by giving a chicken the Midnight Treat or hatching an obsidian egg. The chickens will be completely black with fiery eyes. If the relationship with an evil chicken isn’t very good, they can start fires at your house, or when entering a fight, it can kill your Sim. You don’t want those running around your entire lot so I advise you to place a fence around the chicken coop with the Evil Chickens inside. 

When you have a good relationship with an evil chicken, they can defend your honor even against the grim reaper.

Upgrade the Coop

You can add three different upgrades on the coop: Fox-Be-Gone Alarm, ComfortCare Life Extender and the Coop Auto Feeder.

• Fox-Be-Gone Alarm
  Powered by machine learning algorithms, trained on literally trillions of fox images, this alarm will ward off even the most elaborately disguised foxes.
• ComfortCare Life Extender
  The ComfortCare system is like aromatherapy, art therapy, and music therapy, except it’s none of those things. But it does keep livestock relaxed, leading to increased lifespan!
• Coop Auto Feeder
  This battery-powered device keeps the coops feed supply topped off, always and forever. Sims need never refill it. Ever!

You’ll need Livestock Upgrade Parts in order to perform the upgrades, which you can get as a reward for doing errands for your neighbors.

Dress your Chickens

One of the greatest perks of owning a chicken or a rooster is… you’ll get to dress it! Give them a nice sweater or make them extra fancy with a tophat. Go to the Creature Keeper in the Bramblewood to buy animal clothing. The available animal clothings will change each day. You can also get this as a reward for doing errands for neighbors.

Compete with your Chickens or Eggs in the Finchwick Fair

Did you breed the perfect chicken? Or did the perfect chicken create a perfect egg? Take them to the Finchwick Fair and earn prizes for your accomplishment, or well… your chicken’s accomplishment. 

Stop Foxes Stealing Chicken Eggs

Those Foxes in the area are pretty hungry. They will sometimes pay a visit to your chicken coop to steal some eggs. If you want to prevent foxes from coming in the coop and take your eggs, you can install the Fox-Be-Gone. This is an upgrade that triggers an alarm whenever a fox tries to steal your eggs. But a more hilarious way to prevent eggs from being stolen, get a Llama! They will spit on the fox that is trying to be mean. Your Sim can also befriend the fox. A friendly fox is also more likely to be more friendly to your animals and crops. Roosters will also try and stop the fox from stealing the hens eggs. 

Tip: The easiest way to prevent foxes is to turn off the Lot Challenge ‘Wild fox’. This option is automatically enabled in the new world Henford-on-Bagley.

Naming your Chickens

When you click on the chicken, you’ll get an option to name that particular chicken. We made a list with fun names to give to your lovely hens and roosters. 

Trade your Chickens

If you can’t take care of the Chickens anymore, you can trade them for Simoleons, Animal Treats, Ingredients and Produce or in the worst case scenario… meat. Poor chickens.

Life Expectancy of the Chickens

Chickens have 4 life stages; chick, young adult, adult and elder. Chickens can only die of old age and they will be collected by the Grim Reaper. They will live around 20 days. You can prolong their lives by:

• Giving them healthy treats.
• Complete the Country Caretaker aspiration for a reward trait.
• Upgrade the coop with the ComfortCare Life Extender.
• Turn off the Animal Aging setting in the pack settings menu.