The Ultimate Guide to Roost Ultimate

Roost Ultimate is a chicken breeding mod for modded Minecraft that lets you collect, breed, level up, and farm chickens to automatically generate resources — from wood essence all the way up to rare end-game materials. Whether you’re just getting started or trying to scale up your chicken production, this guide covers everything you need to know: finding chickens, crafting the key machines, understanding tiers, and maximising your output.

Getting Started: The Chicken Stick

The first item you need is the Chicken Stick, which acts as the wrench for the entire mod. Craft it using an egg, a stick, and a feather. This tool lets you pick up chickens from the wild and collect them as items.

Head out into the world and find a naturally spawning chicken. For example, in a birch forest biome you can find a Birch Chicken. Right-click it with the Chicken Stick and it will drop as a collectible item. The item tooltip will show you its tier (Tier 1), its level (0), its XP (0), and its natural spawn biome (Birch Forest).

To see the spawn biome information displayed on-screen while the chicken is still in the world, you will need the Jade mod installed. Without it, you can still view all the details by picking up the chicken item and hovering over it in your inventory. You can also search @roost in Just Enough Items (JEI) to browse all available chickens and check their spawn locations or breeding recipes.

Keep in mind that some chickens may not spawn naturally depending on your mod pack. Certain chickens — like the Glowstone Chicken — can only be obtained through breeding and will never appear in the wild.

Placing Chickens in a Roost

Once you have a chicken, craft a Roost and place your chicken in the right-hand slot. However, the Roost won’t do anything on its own — you also need to feed it Chicken Seeds.

Understanding Tiers and Chicken Seeds

Every chicken has a tier. The Birch Chicken, for example, is Tier 1. To feed a chicken in the Roost, you must use a seed that matches or exceeds that chicken’s tier. A Tier 1 Seed is crafted from wheat seeds and a Chicken Soul.

How to Get a Chicken Soul

Chicken Souls are obtained using the Soul Extractor. Place a chicken inside the Soul Extractor and it will consume the chicken and produce a Chicken Soul of the matching tier. One Tier 1 Chicken Soul crafts eight Tier 1 Seeds.

Place those Tier 1 Seeds into your Roost alongside your Birch Chicken and the progress bar will begin. Once complete, the Roost produces Wood Essence, which can be crafted into various types of wood.

Breeding Chickens with the Breeder

Because using the Soul Extractor consumes a chicken, you’ll want a sustainable supply. That’s where the Breeder comes in. The Breeder has two input slots for chickens and uses seeds to produce offspring.

Example: Breeding a Glowstone Chicken

The Glowstone Chicken (Tier 2) is bred from a Nether Quartz Chicken and a Yellow Chicken. The Nether Quartz Chicken is found in the Nether Wastes and collected with your Chicken Stick. The Yellow Chicken, like all colour chickens, cannot be found in the wild — instead, craft a Yellow Chicken Egg (an egg combined with yellow dye) and throw it, just like a regular Minecraft egg. Repeat this until a Yellow Chicken spawns. The same method works for all dye colours — for example, an egg combined with light gray dye produces a Light Gray Chicken Egg.

Place one Nether Quartz Chicken and one Yellow Chicken in the Breeder, add at least a Tier 1 Seed (the Breeder will accept any seed tagged Tier 1 or higher), and the breeding process will begin. The result is a brand-new Glowstone Chicken.

Replicating Chickens Quickly

You can view basic breeding combinations by pressing U on any chicken in JEI. For example, two Glowstone Chickens bred together with at least a Tier 2 Seed will produce another Glowstone Chicken — allowing you to replicate your flock.

Here is how the multiplication strategy works in practice: extract one Tier 1 Soul to get eight seeds, breed two chickens eight times to produce eight chickens, then soul-extract those eight chickens to get eight souls (64 seeds), and breed again. Your chicken production can scale exponentially very quickly using this loop.

Progressing Up the Tiers

Higher-tier chickens produce higher-tier resources. For example:

Breed a Brown Chicken with a Glowstone Chicken to get a Nether Wart Chicken (Tier 3). In a Roost with at least a Tier 3 Seed, it produces Nether Wart.

Breed a Diamond Chicken with a Nether Wart Chicken to get an Ender Pearl Chicken.

Breed a Ghast Tear Chicken with a Nether Wart Chicken for further progression.

Remember: when you extract a Tier 2 Soul, you receive a Tier 2 Soul item. A Tier 2 Soul crafts four Tier 2 Seeds, but you also need Tier 1 Seeds as part of the recipe. Always match your seed tier to your chicken tier when feeding the Roost.

Many mod packs also include chickens from other mods — such as Silver, Zinc, Bronze, Stone Essence, and various other material-based chickens. Use JEI to look up their breeding recipes and explore which combinations get you to higher tiers.

Levelling Up Chickens with the Chicken Trainer

Levelling your chickens dramatically increases their output in the Roost. Use the Chicken Trainer to feed XP to your chickens via seeds. Place the chicken in the right-hand slot and a seed in the left-hand slot.

A chicken starts at level 0 and requires 50 XP to reach level 1. A Tier 1 Seed provides exactly 50 XP. A Tier 9 Seed provides 5,000 XP — but the Chicken Trainer will only consume the XP needed to reach the next level, meaning if you use a Tier 9 Seed on a level 0 chicken, you will waste 4,950 XP. It is far more efficient to use the lowest-tier seed possible for each level-up unless you have a large surplus of high-tier seeds.

Why Level Matters: A Practical Example

The difference in output between a low-level and a high-level chicken is enormous. A level 1 Glowstone Chicken fed one seed in the Roost produces just 1 Glowstone Dust. A level 128 Glowstone Chicken fed the same single seed produces an entire stack of Glowstone Dust. Levelling your chickens should be a top priority once your breeding operation is established.

Special Chickens and Liquid Resources

Some chickens produce liquid resources instead of items. A Lava Chicken (bred from a Cold Chicken and a Nether Coarse Chicken) placed in a Roost will produce Lava Eggs. Combine a Lava Egg with a bucket to create a Lava Bucket. The same mechanic applies to Water Chickens for water buckets.

Machines Not Yet Implemented

Chicken Scanner

The Chicken Scanner currently has no crafting recipe and does not appear to be implemented in the version covered in this guide. It can safely be ignored for now.

Soul Breeder

The Soul Breeder also lacks a working recipe at time of writing. Based on its intended design, it is meant to clone a chicken rather than breed two chickens together — meaning the output chicken should inherit the same level and stats as the input. For example, cloning a level 128 chicken should produce another level 128 chicken. If you are reading this guide after these features have been updated, check JEI for a recipe and test accordingly.

Ultimate Chicken Storage

The Ultimate Chicken Storage block acts as a storage cell for your chickens within Applied Energistics or Refined Storage networks. Connect it via an import bus or equivalent and your chickens and seeds will appear inside your storage system. Note that this block cannot be manually accessed — it is exclusively designed to work with AE or Refined Storage and is not a standalone chest.

Summary and Final Tips

Roost Ultimate is a deep and rewarding chicken breeding mod once you understand its core loop: collect chickens with the Chicken Stick, generate seeds via the Soul Extractor, breed new chickens in the Breeder, and scale production by multiplying your flock before levelling them up in the Chicken Trainer. Here are a few key reminders as you progress:

Always use Just Enough Items (JEI) — search @roost or press R on any chicken to see its breeding recipe.

Match your seed tier to your chicken’s tier when feeding the Roost or Breeder.

Use the lowest-tier seed available when levelling chickens in the Trainer to avoid wasting XP.

Different mod packs may alter spawn locations, add new chickens, or change breeding recipes — always verify with JEI in your specific pack.

Prioritise levelling a small number of high-tier chickens for maximum resource output before expanding your flock further.

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