Rancher

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Welcome to the Ranch! As a Rancher, your job is to look after and breed various animals in the Ranch. Currently, only Chickens are implemented for this; however, others may be developed further down the line. With a little love and attention, the Rancher can harvest produce and items not available otherwise, and also provide an alternate way to producing chemicals and ore.

The main aspect of Ranching is breeding and evolution. With the correct feed, affection and time, your flock can diversify into useful (and cute!) Chicken breeds, that can produce alternate goods or fill an alternate purpose. Chickens are closed source, and as such, their mechanics are still being discovered. Don't be afraid to experiment, and don't discount your own experiences! Information on this page may be outdated, or incorrect, so don't be afraid to discuss your observations.

The Ranch

Your workspace is most of the time located directly attached to Botany, or very, very close. Botanists do not have access to your exclusive Chicken Club, so if you need assistance feeding them, you may have to lock the door open if you plan on leaving for a long time. You do have access to Botany, as you require specific feeds for your Chickens. You can either grow the plants yourself, or plead in despair as all of the trays are claimed for weed.

You have the following equipment available to you within Hydroponics and the ranch:

• Hydroponics Trays with status light meters. Feel free to move them to a more aesthetically pleasing formation, then use a wrench to fix them to the ground.

• A seed fabricator, which can be hacked to provide some especially interesting selections.

• A GardenGear vending machine, containing your standard equipment like produce satchels and [Guide to Botany#Nutrient Formulas|nutrient formulas]].

• A PlantMaster Mk3 machine, which can extract seeds from produce as well as infuse seeds or splice them.

• A Reagent Extractor, which can extract reagents from produce. Also has built-in storage tanks.

• A CheMaster 3000, used to turn extracted reagents into pills or bottles.

• Chicken Enclosures which are constructed out of Reinforced Railings (constructed by using a steel rod on a railing), which prevent Chickens from passing under them. Default Railings are bypassed by Chickens.

• An Egg Incubator in each Enclosure, which after a short time will hatch the egg placed inside. This can be scanned, and constructed by the Mechanics team.

• A Nesting Box in each Enclosure, however unlike the Egg Incubator these can be dragged around, and purchased from a GardenGear.

Chickens

Bawk, bawk! Chickens are feathered friends that, while tangential to your main agriculture duties, provide cluckloads of fun. Chickens provide plenty of eggs, and can also be butchered directly into chicken nuggets, if you're willing to perform such a fowl act. All the Chicken breeds can also provide unique eggs. But, most importantly, they are cute and ex-hens-sively pettable!

Chickens are under what's called "closed source". That means that while you won't find much info about these feathered friends on the public GitHub, you're free to share info about them with others. Because of this there may be information yet undiscovered, or mechanical values that are yet to be determined. Why not experiment?

Getting Started

To start raising Chickens, you first need to put an egg into the Chicken Egg Incubator. Every map either has an incubator lying in Hydroponics somewhere, or a dedicated Ranch department room. As for eggs, one always spawns on each Egg Incubator expressly for Chicken rearing. If you need more, it's usually easiest to ask for some from the Chef or order a Meat, Eggs, and Diary crate from Cargo. It's also possible to start with an egg as a trinket or even grow your own.

After sitting in an incubator, eggs become chicks. Chicks eventually grow up into either a hen or a rooster. Both can eventually die of old age.

Almost all the time, your Chickens will grow up into hens. Hens occasionally lay eggs if there is an available nesting box around; there are some in the GardenGear, and the eggs should be cleared out every so often because hens do not like nesting boxes overcrowded with eggs. Eggs are an important ingredient in many dishes, and given that each egg can become a new hen, they are essentially a renewable, theoretically infinite source of eggs. Hens are quite passive; if you attack them, they tend to just try to run away.

Chicks can also become roosters, if--and only if--the egg in question came from an hen. That means you eggs you start with, eggs you get from the Kitchen, and other places won't give you roosters! Roosters don't lay eggs, but they do sit on eggs in nesting boxes, allowing them to hatch, with a high chance of passing on their genetics to the resulting chick. Roosters are also highly defensive; if you attack a Chicken, all the roosters who witness it will go after you, just like with Monkeys.

Chicken Tending

All the while, chickens need food to eat, specifically feed! To get feed, simply insert some sort of food, such as corn, into the Chicken Feed Grinder. Then put the resulting feed on the floor. Different feeds may result in different chickens.

There's more to hunger than simply keeping your flock of fowl alive; keeping your Chickens happy and well-fed has many benefits. Behaviour such as egg-laying and hatching can be accelerated by keeping your Chickens happy! To see the effects, every time you pet a Chicken it will either ignore you or cluck. If it clucks happily, it would have laid an egg, or hatched an egg when it reaches that part of it's routine. In other words, if your Chicken is clucking constantly when you pet it, it will lay a lot more eggs than a Chicken that barely clucks at all!

Name	Generation	Chicken Sprite	Egg & Chick Sprite	Evolutionary path	Favourite Food	Prerequisites	Description	Cuteness
White Chicken	0			Brown, Glass, Henk, Silkie, Ixworth	Rice	Hatch white eggs, from White Hens, the Kitchen, or a Meat, Eggs, and Dairy crate from Cargo	White Chickens lay White Eggs, however, if they are happy they will lay Brown Eggs instead.	5
Henk and Henkster	1st			Balloon, Huoenks	Bananas	Feed White Roosters Banana feed, and let the rooster hatch eggs in a nesting box.	Henks and Henksters honk occasionally, and produce Egg?s which are actually water balloons, which are not treated like eggs at all.	8
Silkie Chicken	1st			Cotton Candy Chickens, Carrier Pigeon	Synthmeat	Hatch Silkie eggs, obtained by feeding White Hens Apple feed.	Silkie hens lay Silkie Eggs, but otherwise behave as White Chickens do.	8
Black Silkie Chicken	1st			Dream, Ghost	Delicious-looking Apples	Hatch Black Silkie eggs, obtained by feeding White Hens Delicious-looking Apple feed.	Black Silkie Hens lay Black Silkie Eggs, and outside of being criminally cute are unremarkable. An apple a day keeps Head Surgeon away!	8
White Silkie Chicken	1st			Selkie, Snow, Coral	Synthmeat	Hatch White Silkie Eggs, obtained by feeding White Hens Apple feed made from Apples infused with meth.	White Silkie Hens lay White Silkie Eggs, and outside of their very existence being a terrible pun, are unknown to have any exceptional properties. Who needs doctors when you can doctor food instead?	9
Void Chicken?	1st			N/A	Unknown	Hatch Void Eggs, obtained by making White Hens vomit. Chicken feed is one way of doing so.	Void Hens lay Void Eggs, which have two very interesting effects. Consuming a Void Egg will shrink you in size for 10 seconds, causing you to take double BRUTE and BURN damage during this time. This is for a very good reason, because you can run through doors like a Critter during this time. An incredibly accessible and potent egg, just don't get caught or you'll be in for a world of pain!	1
Brown Chicken	1st			Gold, Spicy, Raptor, Synth	Chili	Hatch Brown Eggs, obtained from happy White Hens.	Brown Chickens lay Brown Eggs by default, and behave much like White Chickens.	6
Ixworth Chicken	1st			N/A	Unknown	Grind tomatoes into feed and feed them to basic hens.	The stylish and elegant Ixworth hen lays pink eggs, which can be made into feed that stops the aging of the chickens that consume it. They still eventually stop laying eggs, and continue to die of old age if taken off the feed, but otherwise should give you a lifelong chicken buddy that you could sell as a pet or keep around for other purposes. Their eggs can also be hatched into cute pink chicks!	7
Glass Chicken	1st			Glass BEAKer, Stone Witchen and Wizter	Rice	Hatch glass eggs, obtained by feeding White Hens Clear Corn feed. (Clear corn is a mutation of Corn)	Glass Chickens lay Glass Eggs as well, which can be injected with chemicals and hatched to become a Chemical-Filled Glass Chicken, or thrown and shattered which creates glass shards. (You monster.) Any Glass Chicken or Chick shatters when grabbed, so DO NOT under ANY circumstances Grab them if you don't intend to destroy them.	7
Glass BEAKer Chicken	1st+			N/A	Unknown	Hatch a Chemical-Filled Glass Egg, obtained by gathering a Glass Egg from a Glass Chicken, and injecting it with 5 units of a pure chemical.	Glass BEAKer Chickens are incredibly interesting and useful. Their blood is a pure chemical, and gradually regenerates over time up to 50 units. They, however, are affected by this chemical as it's in their bloodstream. This can lead to some amusing, useful, or downright deadly and foolish applications. Extracting their blood will give you a 60/40% mix of blood and the chemical. Glass BEAKer Hens will lay Chemical-Filled Glass Eggs containing their respective chemical.	4
Synth Chicken	2nd			Robot	Unknown	Hatch Synth Eggs, obtained by feeding Brown Chickens Synthmeat feed.	Synth Chickens lay Synth Eggs, which can be eaten for an energy boost!	6
Stone Chicken	2nd			Ore, Cockatrice, Coral	Unknown	Hatch Stone Eggs, obtained by feeding Glass Chickens any feed that contains THC. (Injecting food with THC before inserting into the feed grinder works, as does splicing Cannabis into other edible plants.)	Stone Chickens... ugly on the outside, pretty on the inside. They can be smashed open with an attack that deals 10 or more damage to harvest their geode interior, yielding Plasma Glass. Of course, don't let the other Chickens see... they'll be awfully upset.	2
Witchens and Wizters	2nd			N/A	Magic Fungus	Feed a Magic Fungus to a Glass Chicken.	Poultry farming, courtesy of the Wizard Federation. They're not as powerful as the average wizard, but they have access to a weaker version of Magic Missile that targets only one person. Eat one of their eggs and they'll share the magic! If you wait for one to die they'll drop their hat, allowing you to take their magic by force or just mass produce hats for stylish space-protectant headgear.	6
Ore Chicken	2nd+			N/A	Rice	Hatch an Electroplated Stone Egg, obtained by retrieving a Stone Egg and taking it to the Arc Electroplater (often found next to the Arc Smelter) and plating it in a material. To use, insert one refined material Block/Ingot into the plater, and then insert the egg.	Arguably one of the most interesting and harder to obtain Chickens, these Chickens inherit the properties of the material, and will hatch eggs that inherit this material. This can be used to obtain ores without mining, or create concerningly deadly Chickens. Erebite and Cerenkite are examples of this, as the Chickens will inherit the radioactive and explosive properties of their parent material. Again, if you do this with dangerous materials and you're not an antagonist, exercise caution.	3
Golden Chicken	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Hatch Brown Eggs with an impossibly happy Brown Rooster.	Golden Hens lay Golden Eggs! These do not hatch but can be sold for a lucrative profit. Also they're pretty, and a sign of a professional Rancher.	9
Spicy Chicken	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Hatch Spicy Eggs, obtained by feeding Brown Chickens chili feed.	Spicy Chickens are capable of breathing fire and suffer no harm from being lit up themselves, so be careful not to provoke them. They lay Spicy Eggs and can be butchered for Spicy Nuggets. Also they're very cute, and definitely not a Pokémon, and should not be used to set up a private gym in the Hellburn. Bok?	9
Raptor Hen & Tiercel	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Hatch Raptor Eggs, obtained by feeding Brown Chickens meat feed. (Synthmeat DOES NOT work!)	Raptor Hens lay Raptor Eggs, and are INCREDIBLY CUTE. This is a ploy however, because Raptor Males are called Tiercels instead of Roosters, and for good reason. They will attack anything and everything that is not a Raptor nearby. Yes, this includes you. Yes, this will kill you, and the rest of your non-raptor Chickens. They are exceedingly deadly, fairly resilient, and can put people in critical in 5-10 seconds. If you're breeding these and you're not an antagonist, be very careful. It is possible to tame raptors to ignore you, if you pet them while they are babies!	10
Selkie Chicken	2nd			N/A	Fish Fillet	Feed a White Selkie feed made from fish fillets and hatch the resulting egg in an underwater enclosure.	Ah, tuna, the Chicken of the sea. These Chickens can only breathe underwater, so be sure to fully flood their pen before hatching an egg. Their eggs can be eaten for the Aquatic Biology buff, which heals OXY damage in water but deals it on land. Perfect for making it to the shuttle on a hellish Oshan Laboratory round.	7.7
Snow Chicken	2nd			N/A	Chilly Chili	Feed a White Selkie Chili with the Chilly mutation.	These chickens are very cute, which makes it all the worse that raising them in a conventional pen will quickly melt and kill them. To successfully raise a population of one of these hens, you need to build a pen in a subzero environment - This is most easily achieved by building a pen in the vacuum of space. Just be careful to properly floor the pen or the chickens will be burnt by solar rays instead! Eating one of their cute little snowball eggs temporarily freezes you so that you leave a trail of ice in your wake, although doing so at room temperature will inflict enough burn damage to drive you into crit. Try pairing it with cryostylane or ice cream for safer use!	9°F
Dream Chicken	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Wait patiently for a Black Silkie to die of old age.	A mystical chicken borne from the dreams of death. Consuming a Dream Egg gives a 60 second stasis effect that mimics the Changeling's Regenerative stasis ability that heals all wounds at the expense of knocking you out for a full minute.	9
Ghost Chicken	2nd	File:GhostHen.png File:GhostRooster.png	File:GhostEgg.png File:GhostChick.png	N/A	Unknown	Make a Black Silkie unhappy and wait for it to die of old age.	For Ghost Chickens, death is a restless, fitful sleep. Consuming a ghost egg grants the Haunted debuff, which summons hostile spirits to come and attack you. These spirits are relentless hunters and will persist even after the egg buff runs out! These ghosts drop ectoplasm on death, so if you're a Matsci nerd you might have cause to intentionally induce the curse.	5
Cotton Candy Chicken	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Feed a basic cream-colored Silkie food that's been injected with sugar first. Cream and sugar, heh.	Cotton Candy Chickens are energetic birds. They'll occasionally wander into and bounce violently off objects, often running into other hens or roosters. This can lead to some amusing albeit undesirable situations where hens are cowering in fear of a hen that just ricocheted around your pen while roosters attempt to hunt it down. Their chocolate caramel eggs allow you to bounce off walls too in exchange for a little bit of BRUTE damage. Just don't eat too many, or you'll go into hyperglycemic shock!	8
Carrier Pigeon	2nd			N/A	Peas	Feed peas to a Silkie.	Sit down, because this is going to be a long one. When on the ground, the eggs they lay act like a limited Station bounced radio, picking up everything heard around them and transmitting that information to a specific radio frequency with a neat little egg icon attached to it to let you know it's from one of your eggs. You can only hear back from these eggs when standing on the same tile as one that's sitting on the ground, or by eating it which will allow you to listen and communicate over this network. When a pigeon dies, they drop an inedible version of this egg labeled as a "station-bounced radio" that can be heard from any spot in your inventory or around you. You can speak into this radio but unless another person is standing atop an egg, has the egg's buff or holding an inedible eggradio themselves, they will not hear you. Pigeons hit by radstorms will often scream profanites into their own laid eggs which is very amusing.	10
huOnkHoNkHoeNKs	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Make Henks extremely unhappy.	Oh god, what have you done. You spent all that time getting Henks and this is what you do to them? I don't even know what eating one of their eggs does to you but you absolutely deserve it.	0
Balloon Chicken	2nd			N/A	Unknown	Feed Henks Balloon Melons spliced with some other edible food.	Eerie animate chicken balloon animals that come in two variants and lay different colours depending on whether the feed contained hydrogen or helium. Helium balloon hens are completely inert and lay red eggs, while Hydrogen balloon hens lay red and blue eggs and explode if you set them on fire.	1
Cockatrice	3rd			N/A	Unknown	Grind a lizard tail into feed and feed it to Stone Hens.	An hideous adorable hybrid of a lizard, chicken, and bat. Eating one of their eggs will temporarily grant you the ability to paralyze other spacemen, similar to other creatures that you may have encountered aboard the station. But be wary around their aggressive male counterparts, as they possess a petrifying venom that will turn inattentive ranchers into statues!	10
Coral Chicken	3rd	File:CoralHen.Png		N/A	Unknown	Get a Selkie rooster to hatch a stone egg.	The royal protectors of the ocean, Coral Chickens are the only chicken obtained through crossbreeding. Eating one of their eggs gives you the Selkie's Underwater Biology buff with a bonus: While the egg's effect is active you can also summon a flood of water and two Coral Knights. The water is useful for flooding smaller rooms to the point where you can safely breathe in them, however the knights you spawn will attack every living creature besides you until the buff runs out. If you aren't an antagonist make absolutely sure that your surroundings are locked down and free of civilians before you use this to flood an area!	8
Robot Chicken	3rd			N/A	Synthmeat	Hatch Robot Eggs, obtained by feeding Synth Chickens feed with Nanomachines as an additive.	Robot Chickens are a breed you don't want to create comPULSively, as they have a couple of interesting effects. Their eggs cause MASSIVE EMP pulses that will destroy lights, interfere with firelocks, cyberhearts, equipment batteries, headsets... even Cyborgs! These are not eggs you want to take a bite of lightly! If you're not an antagonist and you take a bite, do so with great caution. The roosters themselves are an angry bunch, and if provoked will cause EMP pulses when they attack. A great breed to consider if you're having a problem with aggressive Cyborgs. Also the first 3rd generation Chicken to be discovered.	2
Space Chicken	N/A			[Secret!]	Unknown	It's not gonna be easy to find this bird; you might even need to go find some things from space.	The first of the four secret Chickens. Killing this Chicken will cause it to rip through dimensions to return to it's place of birth. This will cause a similar effect to a flashbang to anyone near its death, and it will reset its anger and happiness. This is the same for all four of the secret Chickens. They're all unique, and only one can ever exist at a time. If another egg is hatched it will be unviable and empty. Additionally, if the Space Chicken is a hen, the Time Chicken will always be a rooster and vice-versa. The Space Egg itself if eaten gives you 10 seconds of rapid teleportation, like Port but much faster, an incredible speed boost, and a silhouette trail as you run around. While this is VERY fun, it does cause sparks as you teleport! Be mindful of welding tanks and fire alarms!	9000
Time Chicken	N/A			[Secret!]	Unknown	Time is really just a twist on space.	Follows the same behaviour as the Space Chicken. The Time Egg gives you 10 seconds of the same speed boost and the same silhouette trail, but instead of teleportation, you return to where you ate the Time Egg when the buff expires. You are stunned briefly when this happens, and this does cause a spark, so don't eat it next to a welding tank or it will explode when you travel through time! Eating cumulative eggs refreshes this buff, which can lead to some very amusing shenanigans...	9001
Spacetime Chicken and Timespace Chicken	N/A			[Secret!]	Unknown	It's all in the name.	These chickens are CUTIES. They follow the same behaviour to the Space and Time Chickens. The egg effect is determined by the name of the hen. The egg effect gives you 1 minute of EGG POWER. This gives you rapid regeneration of BRUTE, BURN and TOX health points, to the point that it can outpace one person beating you with a fire extinguisher. It also gives you X-Ray Vision; Additionally, if it's an egg from a Spacetime Hen, it will give 10 seconds of the Space Egg effect, and if it's an egg from the Timespace Hen, it'll grant 10 seconds of the Time Egg effect. These eggs are incredibly good, and a great get-out-of-jail free card if you're critically wounded.	9999...

Don't be afraid to experiment. Please report any interesting findings for experimentation!

Fishing

You also spawn with a fishing rod in your backpack. It is very easy to use! Simply click on a suitable tile directly next to you with the fishing rod in your active hand and sit still and wait. After some few seconds, something should appear at your feet, depending on where exactly you're fishing.

What counts as suitable tile for fishing? As you might expect, you can click on Seafloor tiles with a fishing rod to start fishing. These will yield adorable fish. These specifically are the item kind of fish often found in freezer rather than the alive, mobile fish inhabiting aquariums and the seas of Oshan Laboratory and the Trench. You can perhaps use your catch as feed or hand it to the Chef so they can make delicious seafood dishes. But both would deny you the ability to slap people with it.

But did you know you can also use the fishing rod on spatial tear tiles? They will give you space things. Literally, a space thing. Perhaps you will find them useful for your poultry endeavors.

The deep fryer works too--when there's something inside frying. If you try to fish on it while it's empty you'll fry it instead and then you'll really have egg on your face because that thing can't be replaced.

Get Clucked: Rancher Antagonist

You're a Rancher, and you're an antagonist; what can you do?

Want to infest the station with raptors and make Jurassic Park? Plant some rice, get some monkey meat from the Chef, and make the rice and meat into feed. To get Raptor Eggs, you need to get a White Chicken to lay a Brown Egg, hatch that Brown Egg, and get the resulting Brown Chickens to eat feed made from meat. Receiving rice feed and petting increase chance of a White Chicken giving a Brown Egg, so pet them lots and don't skimp on putting down rice feed. Once you've got a Brown Chicken, let it eat all the rice feed, and then cover the Ranch with meat feed. Pet the shit outta the Brown Chicken too, because that also increases the chance of getting a Raptor Egg. Make sure there is meat feed on all the tiles on the pen. You should get Raptor Eggs soon.

You might also consider putting your favorite destructive chemical mixes inside fragile Glass Chickens that can release those chemistry abominations upon their demise. Or, perhaps you'd be interested in unleashing an erebite-riddled flock of explosive Chickens on the station.