Erm, do i need to add here that Chickens can 'float' down, meaning they or their rider do not take fall damage. Hence, neither die when falling from darkrooms/mob farms. And the chickens can collect in the bottom of said farms. Also pigmen are immune to fire, so while a chicken will burn and die in a lava place, the pigmen will not.
But the bug is that they are not "Rare" at all. They spawn frequently. Also, since the chickens do not despawn, /entc keeps going up all over the place (except /town and /shop). I hope this is improved/fixed on EMC, soon. Thanks.
Ah ok.. perhaps Aikar's altering of spawning rate for all mobs in EMC did not include the new spawn 'chicken jockey's". So they are spawning at the same rate as vanilla minecraft, while everything else is spawning at much reduced rate... I'll find out if Aikar is aware of this.
Update: The problem was the way bukkit (and hence EMC) cancels vanilla spawns to reduce spawn rate. The chicken jockey is canceled, which removes the hostile, but it leaves the chicken. So all those canceled spawns were leaving chickens at vanilla spawn rates... If that makes sense There is a ticket on it, and the spawn rate will be fixed: http://track.emc.gs
http://track.empire.us/issue/EMC-490 I really hope this bug can be fixed soon, because the entity count is permanently increasing in the wild, and nether. This really stinks when you have a wild and/or nether base, and now chickens are spawning in hidden caves and never despawn. This can lead to valuable villagers, our farms animals, etc, being auto-killed because of /entc permanently growing. So, I guess we have to avoid our wild bases until this bug is fixed, or else we will need to spend hours finding all these hidden chickens and killing them, after the bug is fixed. I have a couple new wild areas to explore, but I dont even want to explore these new areas, because then I will seed them with hidden permanent chickens. Please let us know about when it will be fixed. I know developers are working hard, and it is much appreciated. I am sure /entc going up all over permanently is not good. I remember when nether hounds did not despawn, and it took many hours to find and clear one of my bases, after the bug was fixed. Also, I lost a lot of good gear hunting the original nether hounds to get /entc back to normal. This is similar. Help is appreciated, at least a guess on when it will be fixed. Thanks. Also, I noticed this issue 490 in bug tracker is set as "Normal" priority. Seems like a higher priority, when you look at the wide and long term impact. Update: Aikar and our development team just fixed this bug, thanks! Just log on at your base, then log off, and when you return, the hidden chickens will be gone /entc will show that. Thank you EMC dev team ! http://empireminecraft.com/threads/big-fixes-misc-updates-4-26-14.38719/
