Chicken Coop
The Chicken Coop is a deployable player-crafted construction in RUST and is the literal housing of the Chicken Husbandry system. Facepunch added this system and item grouping with the Crafting Update in March 2025.
As any good chicken farmer will tell you, egg production will only ever be as good as the preparation and time you put into the Coop. To keep the metaphorical Wolves at the door, we must first construct that door. Enter the Chicken Coop.
The coop itself uses a typical box construction, with an 8-post fencing system that uses horizontal slats and any other wood that could be scavenged from the world of Rust. It is roughly the size of 1 square foundational block with a little extra girth but is very likely to block the construction of walls around it if they aren’t placed and upgraded first. No, the chicken coop will not perfectly fit neatly in one square, so plan to provide a bit more space.
At the center of the fencing is the raised coop, complete with a miniature ramp. While the chickens don’t have the capacity to enter and exit this building, one can understand how they would. It has a slightly pitched roof to shed rainwater or snow and adequate thatch inside for roosting.
At the moment, chicken coops are a default blueprint and do not require a workbench of any kind to craft. They may be placed on flat surfaces, including the ground and player-crafted foundations.
All of this information is highly subject to change, as this is a new system, and the details are being ironed out.
Once crafted and placed, the chicken coop may be accessed by anyone regardless of building privilege. To access and interact with the chicken coop, players must press E while staring at the housing portion.
A square box at the topmost portion of the interface may display vital information about 4 chickens, to which a single coop is currently capped at this amount. Once chickens are hatched, gone over a bit later in this guide, a generic picture of a chicken will appear for each, along with a customizable nameplate, vital statistics below the name, and the current demeanor of that particular chicken on the left-hand side in the form of a Face.
Beneath the Chicken info is Food & Water; The left box accepts stacks of food, the Give / Take buttons allow the transference of water from any receptacle into the coop itself (maximum 1000ml), and the right box represents the current water stores.
Controls are beneath the food section, with a large Hatch button that will become usable if an Egg is placed inside. Once placed and pressed, if a slot is available for another chicken, a countdown box will appear in the top box. It currently takes 120 seconds to hatch a chicken born with diminished food and water stats and with a default random British name.
At the bottom most box, we come to Production, or the reason for having a chicken coop. This is the output box for the eggs your chickens produce, with a maximum stacking up to 20. This means that you are required to tend to this coop quite frequently, otherwise production will halt. Yes… Facepunch is literally turning their players into… chicken tenders. Pass the Honey Mustard.
For information regarding chicken status, production tips, and all of the advanced stuff you’re curious about, check out our Chicken Husbandry guide. As a quick amendment to answer the obvious questions:
Chickens will go to bed, IE, lay down where they were standing before and go motionless at roughly 8:30 pm (env.time 20.5).
They will wake up or resume regular motion just before 7:00 am (env.time 7).
After a 24-hour period, there was a marked drop in the Sunlight statistic of Chicken Coops placed in caves. In the short term, it is a very hard metric to measure and decreases over time. Likewise, chickens with fresh air and sunlight constantly have their baseline Sunlight statistic go up and cap out over time.
If the Coop is destroyed, the chickens disappear as opposed to running off, and whatever Food and Egg output that was left falls to the ground in a bag.
Chickens can be individually slaughtered for meat and immediately replaced without impacting other chickens or their mental welfare. Chickens may also be damaged and heal over time, so long as their health never reaches zero.
