Gathering Chickens

All chicken empires start from humble beginnings. To get started, first craft yourself a Chicken Net. This net will allow you to pick up chickens and put them in your pocket by right clicking on a chicken.
You may re-release your Pocket Chicken by right clicking it on a block.

Gathering chickens and moving them around is nice, but it doesn't compare to having a seemingly endless supply of Netherite. The next step towards that goal is to craft a Genetic Sequencer. This machine takes a Pocket Chicken, analyzes its DNA, and reports it to you by marking the chicken.
When in Pocket Chicken form, the chicken's DNA and resource type will be visible in the item's lore.

Chickens caught in the overworld will always be feather chickens. To make a chicken that can produce resources, you will have to find certain chickens and selectively breed them together. But before we get to that...

An Aside on Genetics

Although a deep knowledge of genetics is not required to play with GCE, having an understanding of some basic concepts will help ease the frustration.

Very broadly, DNA is a string of genes put together in a specific order. Genes are structures made up of two alleles, and typically relate to one specific trait. Alleles come in two varieties: dominant and recessive. Depending on which alleles make up a gene, the gene can also be dominant or recessive. If both alleles are recessive, then the gene is recessive, however if a gene has at least one dominant allele, then the gene will be dominant. Lastly, the terms homozygous and heterozygous are used to define genes. Homozygous genes have two of the same alleles, either both dominant or both recessive. Heterozygous genes have one dominant and one recessive allele each.

When writing DNA in text form, all alleles of interest are written out. Each gene is assigned a unique letter to represent it, and dominant and recessive alleles are differentited by case (dominant alleles are upper case, recesive are lower).

Tying it in to this Plugin

That is a lot of jargon to process, so let's look at some examples of these concepts at work in GCE.

In GCE, there are 6 genes in each strand of DNA: B, C, D, F, S, and W. These correlate to the types of resources that a chicken can make if it has two recessive alleles in that gene:

• B -> Bone
• C -> Cobblestone
• D -> Dirt
• F -> Flint
• S -> Sand
• W -> Water

So, if you have a chicken that has the DNA bbCCDDFFSSWW, it will be a bone chicken. However, that is not the only possibility for obtaining a bone chicken. Since there are two ways an allele can be dominant (homozygous dominant or heterozygous dominant), any of the C, D, F, S, or W genes can have up to one recessive allele and the chicken will still be a bone chicken:

• bbCCDDFFSSWW -> Bone chicken
• bbCcDDFFSSWW -> Bone chicken
• bbCCDDFFSsWW -> Bone chicken
• bbCcDdFfSsWw -> Bone chicken
• etc.

Having more than one pair of recessive alleles will make a different chicken type. For example, bbCcDDFFSSWW will be a bone chicken, but bbccDDFFSSWW will be a coal chicken. See the sequence table for the full list of available chickens.

Back to Gameplay

As mentioned before, all chickens caught in the overworld will be feather chickens. This is the resource that a chicken with 6 dominant genes will produce. To start producing more valuable resources, find at least one chicken with a heterozygous gene for each of the 6 genes. When you have two chickens that share at least one heterozygous gene with each other, it is time to move on to selective breeding.