Oh wow, thanks for the photopea link!! Gonna try that out!
Okay, tips for players (then chicken facts when I have another minute)!
* Anything you can move to the conveyor belt can be sold -- boxes, feed, half-eaten feed, grape stems, eggs, eggshells, hens, and chicks. Keep your yard and incubator clutter-free to see all your chickens better. :) The low-value items are just one buck apiece, but every little bit's nice.
* Lots and lots of items can fit in a full box, and the hens can't eat items that aren't on the grass. If you have two boxes of corn, move all the corn to one box and sell the other box. I put chick feed box behind the incubator and a corn box at the bottom of the incubator, for easy access, and filled them with several boxes worth of food.
* However, make sure to put things in the TOP of the box where they're visible, not inside out of sight. If you can't see them, there's no way to get them back.
* Don't place an item on the notice board! I had that happen and trying to retrieve it just opened the notices. XD
* Otherwise, if an item is placed where it's not supposed to be, like a single ear of corn on the platform or behind the incubator, it will have a red X on it, but you can retrieve it at any time and it will be fine. If you don't like to see a lot of red Xs, leave eggs anywhere in the yard or on the platform, hens in the incubator or on a nest, and feed boxes on the platform, in the yard, or behind/in front of the incubator. If you don't mind the Xs, you can skip refilling boxes and just stack huge piles of food items somewhere "wrong" where the chickens can't get them.
* Boxes are really useful for eggshells. Put all your eggshells in a box! Drag one thing from the incubator to the conveyor belt instead of a hundred of 'em!
* If you sell a hen you needed for a collect-hens-of-all-types goal, don't worry; eggs for each breed unlock in the Order book as soon as that hen is received, and you can buy and hatch another one.
Egg production and nest management!
* There's a lot of competition for those three nests. To avoid broken eggs without breaking the bank on grapefruit, I've found I can comfortably manage about four or five active chickens at a time. I put any other hens in the incubator, where they fall asleep! (They also sleep when they're in the nests or after they've laid an egg on the ground, and they fall asleep if you put them anywhere they're marked with an X as not supposed to be there; if they're asleep, you can let them snooze and concentrate on the others.) * The hens will not lay until they've eaten. If you want to take that awesome pic of ALL your many, many chickens running around at once without risking broken eggs, move them to the incubator right after they've laid an egg, remove any food from the yard, and then wake them all up. (Edit: I thought their food bar didn't go down, but it does, very slowly! If you have a bunch of chickens asleep somewhere, keep an eye on their nutrition. The lower it goes, the more corn it takes to get it back up again. In light of this, I'll probably reevaluate my program of keeping more hens than I have laying at any one time, except if I'm doing something fun with them.)
* Keep an eye on each hen's broody meter (the pink status bar). If there's even a little pink, get that bird in a nest! The broody meter will continue to climb, the egg will be laid, and you won't be frantically trying to grab a hen from behind all the other hens at the last minute.
* Don't worry if there's no time to remove an egg from a nest before moving the next hen in. Just move the previous hen out. They won't lay in a nest while another hen's still there, but they will lay there even if other hens have left eggs behind.
Goal management and raising chicks!
* The Notice Board shows only three goals at once. Things done before a goal appears on the board don't count toward the goal when it does appear. For example, any eggs sold before the selling-10-eggs goal don't count and you have to sell more in total to get to the goal. To save time, try not to sell or hatch each egg right after weighing it unless you need the money for corn. Collect infertile eggs in one pile and eggs with chicks in another pile, and start selling/hatching when there's a goal for doing that. * Hens only count toward the collect-all-ten-breeds goal when they're in the yard. If your only examples of some breeds are asleep in the incubator or somewhere they shouldn't be, move them back to the yard and then they'll count.
* Eggs are often infertile when the game begins. To get a fertile egg almost every time, use grapes.
* Hens can lay a fertile egg after eating one grape (when their red combs turn purple), but they will happily eat up several grapes at once. Same with grapefruit; only one bite is needed to change comb color, but the hens will try to eat more. Let each hen eat one bite, then move her away (you may have to keep doing this; they are persistent!) or to a sleep area. If all active hens have tried the item, move it back to the box where they can't get at it. Grapes and grapefruit are expensive and they last longer this way.
* If a hen's food meter was already high before eating fruit, only a bite or two might give them enough nutrition to go broody! If a sleeping hen's food meter is near full, keep an eye on the broody meter so you can move her to the nest in time.
* If you build up a pile of fertile eggs, you can incubate them all at once and hatch SO MANY CHICKS. :) However, they grow up more slowly this way because they distract each other and get to the food more slowly. Once they have eaten some chick feed, they grow into hens and doze until you take them out of the incubator. The ones who haven't had enough feed wait till you have more, and you can move in extra hens from the yard too. It can get really festive in there. ;)
* You know where else hens can sleep? IN A BOX. Omg so cute.
* I haven't specifically checked, but my impression is that selling adult hens makes more money than selling eggs. Once you have a routine of rotating a few hens in and out of the nests and stretching out your grape supply so each cluster is good for more fertile eggs, you'll be making more than you spend, and then it's just a matter of saving up for any orders you want.
I'll leave a pic of my chicken yard and come back later with chicken facts.
(Edited several hours later to reflect what I learned from some hatch-lots-of-eggs and hens-in-a-box experiments!)
(one final edit: hahaha, I finally looked in the comments and saw everyone else figured out all the sleeping-chickens and box tricks, yay!)
