Minecraft developers share how chickens nearly broke the game

Chicken jockeys are extremely rare hostile Minecraft mobs that are essentially a combination of a baby zombie variant and a chicken. However, they caused a lot of hiccups back when they were not polished for the game. Mojang Studios developer Jeb recently revealed how chicken jockeys once broke the game and created lots of performance issues.

Here is everything you need to know about why chicken jockeys broke Minecraft.

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How chicken jockeys broke Minecraft: Mojang Studios developer explains

Minecraft's official YouTube channel recently released a video in which game developers talked about chickens, sharing their thoughts on the cute farm mob and its features.

In the latter half of the video, Mojang Studios' head, Jens Bergensten (also known as Jeb), spoke about chicken jockeys and how they caused several issues in the game. He explained how the jockeys once spawned as common hostile mobs. Since many jockeys were spawning in dark areas and caves, chickens laid heaps of eggs, causing the game to nearly break.

"We did have a problem. They were spawning as hostile mobs in dark areas and in caves. The chicken jockeys that got spawned in the caves just dropped a lot of eggs, which caused a lot of performance issues," he said.

To resolve the issue, chicken jockeys' rarity was increased, and the chickens that were combined with jockeys no longer laid eggs. These chickens will not lay eggs even if the baby zombie jockey is killed. The change was made in the snapshot 14w02a when Mojang Studios was bringing Minecraft 1.8 Bountiful Update.

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Spawning rate and behavior of chicken jockeys in Minecraft?

Chicken jockeys were made rare after causing performance issues (Image via Mojang Studios)

After the hilarious game-breaking issue mentioned by Jeb, Mojang Studios made chicken jockeys extremely rare.

As of now, a chicken jockey has 0.25% spawn rate in the world. When a baby zombie, baby husk, baby zombie villager, baby zombified piglin, or a baby drowned spawns in a world, it has a 5% chance to check for an existing chicken and ride it to create a chicken jockey. The rarity of the jockey also depends on the number of chickens present in a dark area, where zombies would spawn.

On the other hand, a priorly combined chicken jockey could spawn in the world.

When it comes to the behavior of a chicken jockey, they are always hostile, as long as a baby zombie is alive. After it is killed, the chicken returns to its passive state. Baby zombies riding a chicken can pick up and equip items dropped on the floor. When falling from a high place, they will fall slowly thanks to the chicken.