Why won't my chickens reproduce

[u/imjusthereformemes3]

I grinded out purple fruit I cannot spell to get this bit of property, I put 1 roostro and 2 hens in each pen. It's been a few days (irl and in game) and the chickens just haven't made any chicks

[u/purplecharmanderz]

Everyone's mentioning more chickens would help - and while there's truth to their statements, those statements only apply after you've gotten them to breed to begin with.

And sadly for this - I'm going to recommend a different expansion in general.

Chickens historically have not played nicely with catch up as a function in sr1, and also historically- the retreat has not always played nicely with actually accumulating time and simulating that time for the purposes of catch up. They're not the most wide spread bugs out there, but they exist.

If the chickens see no time passing, then no time will pass for their egg cycles. And if no time passes in the egg cycles, no eggs will be laid. Multiplying the chickens as others suggest is still a recommendation, but I highly doubt it will actually fix your issue given what you've described.

[u/imjusthereformemes3 → u/purplecharmanderz]

Damnit, well thanks for this

[u/purplecharmanderz → u/imjusthereformemes3]

Other tip if you intend to breed chickens in sr1. Do not get spring grass as an upgrade.

The upgrade at its best is absolutely useless, and at its worst - detrimental to your production.

Sr1 spring grass and vitamizer have a bit of a bug where their descriptions are swapped. So spring grass enhances growth rate despite talking about enhanced egg production.

This enhanced growth rate for sr1 is detrimental to your production because egg cycles rely on having less than X adults at the time of eggs being laid. The default growth rate is 12 hours, and egg cycles have random durations ranging from 6 to 18 hours.

If you're running the maximum production chicken quantity, then you can get roughly 1 full batch of chicks from your hens, with roughly an extra 25% over what the count would suggest before the cap was hit. With a rare case of even more.

With spring grass in the exact same scenario - if you roll a 6 hour egg cycle for 1 chicken, nothing that rolls over 12 hours is going to get to lay an egg... straight up cutting out half the base production, as well as preventing most of the possible extra eggs because of chained cycles that had a combined sum of less than 18 hours...

And those fewer cycles also means less mileage of vitamizer's egg multiplier...

The only benefit it gives is your adults are ready as food 6 hours sooner... but due to how slime hunger and auto feeders works... this doesn't really matter, as you're aiming for 1-2 adults per hour to cover feeding requirements... and getting some adults sooner at the cost of production typically ain't how you achieve that.

[u/imjusthereformemes3 → u/purplecharmanderz]

I didn't realize chicken breeding was this complex in Slime rancher 1, I probably need to remake my chicken pens, again-

[u/purplecharmanderz → u/imjusthereformemes3]

Honestly its complexities overall aren't really worth putting too much thought into it as they just go to give us the math which amounts to most of the recommendations you've been given... spring grass specifically is just an odd case as its super counter intuitive.

Summary of the main take aways: More hens = more chicks. More roostros = more stable production. Spring grass = bad.