Eggs/Farming Simulator 19
Eggs are a type of Material in Farming Simulator 19. Eggs can only be created in a Chicken Coop by providing Wheat or Barley to the Chickens. Eggs are created in very small quantities, but are by far the highest-value material in the game, per liter.
Eggs are produced at an irregular rate at the Chicken Coop, starting at 0 liters per 15 minutes and constantly accelerating. The more Chickens there are in the Chicken Coop, the faster Egg production accelerates. Eggs accumulate in small boxes of up to 150 liters each, and can never be turned into a loose material.
Eggs can be sold at any of the basic Sale Points. Their average sale value on "Normal" economic difficulty is $2.7 per liter. Eggs have no other use except as a sold commodity.
Production
Eggs are produced exclusively by Chickens inside a Chicken Coop. In this game, you will need to purchase and place your own Chicken Coop on the map.
To begin producing Eggs, you must purchase at least one Chicken and provide it with either Wheat or Barley (either food option works the same). As long as food is available inside the Chicken Coop, Eggs will be produced every 15 minutes of in-game time.
While producing Eggs, each chicken consumes 5 Liters of Food per day. This is the simplest supply chain among all animals. Chickens do not even require Water.
Eggs accumulate in small boxes that are automatically created next to the Chicken Coop in a special marked area called the Loading Area or Loading Platform. The game first attempts to fill any existing boxes found on the Loading Area, and if none are found (or all existing boxes are full) it will create a new empty one and put the Eggs into it. Should the game be unable to create a new box for any reason, Egg production will come to a halt and you will receive a warning message in the top-right corner of the screen.
Production Rate
Egg production follows a very different method than any other animal-produced material, and may be slightly difficult to understand. Here is a detailed explanation of how it works.
When a new Chicken Coop is purchased, its production rate is set to exactly 0 liters per 15 minutes. No matter how many Chickens you put into the coop, they will produce exactly 0 Eggs to start with.
Every 15 minutes the game increases the Production Rate of Eggs by about +0.001 liters multiplied by the number of Chickens living instead the Coop. This bonus is also multiplied by the current Productivity rating of the Chicken Coop, which is always somewhere between 90% and 100% depending on the Cleanliness of the Chicken Coop's feeding area.
After increasing the Production Rate, the game attempts to create an amount of eggs equal to the current Production Rate and place it into one of the boxes on the Loading Platform (or create a new box to put the eggs in).
In short, egg production starts at 0 and increases constantly. The rate of increase is directly proportional to the number of chickens living in the Coop.
Production Rate Limit
Since Production Rates keep increasing every 15 minutes, the game needs a way to ensure that Chickens won't produce insane amounts of Eggs after a while.
Each time the game places Eggs into an egg box, it compares the amount of Eggs it just placed to the current Production Rate. If the amount of placed Eggs is lower than the Production Rate, the game reduces the Production Rate to however many Eggs it managed to place.
Normally this has no effect on the Production Rate, since normally both values should be equal anyway. However, if the game tries to fill a box that is almost full, it may only be able to put some of the Eggs in that box, causing Production to drop.
EXAMPLE: Production Rate is 10 liters of Eggs per 15 minutes. At the 15 minute mark, the game tries to put 10 liters of Eggs into an existing egg box. It finds a box with only 139 liters of Eggs in it, and places all 10 liters into that box. Production Rate is unchanged.
EXAMPLE 2: Production Rate is 10 liters of Eggs per 15 minutes. At the 15 minute mark, the game tries to put 10 liters of Eggs into an existing egg box. It finds a box with 149 liters of Eggs in it, and can only place 1 liter into that box. Production Rate drops to only 1 liter of Eggs per 15 minutes.
Using this mechanism, Production Rates will constantly fluctuate, and can never go higher than 150 liters per 15 minutes, no matter how many Chickens live in your Coop.
Nevertheless, having more Chickens means that Production Rates will recover more quickly after each drop, resulting in a higher average production of Eggs.
Step-By-Step
The algorithm below describes, step-by-step, how the game processes Egg production. This logic chain occurs once every 15 minutes of in-game time.
- 1. Increase the current Production Rate by about +0.001 liters per Chicken (multiplied by the current Productivity rating).
- 2. Is there an egg box on the Loading Platform with less than 150 liters of Eggs in it? If yes, skip to step 3. Otherwise...
- 2a. Is there room for a new egg box on the Loading Platform? If no, the process ends here, and a warning message will appear in the message log at the top-right corner of the screen. Otherwise...
- 2b. Create a new, empty egg box on the Loading Platform.
- 3. Place an amount of Eggs into the selected box equal to the current Production Rate.
- 4. Does the box now contain 150 liters or less? If yes, the process is over. Otherwise...
- 4a. Reduce the contents of the box to exactly 150 liters. Decrease the Production Rate by the same amount you've subtracted from the box.
Maximizing Production
In order to create as many Eggs as possible, you need to prevent the game from limiting the Production Rate as explained above. To do this, you'll need to make sure that no egg box ever reaches 150 liters of Eggs.
You can track the fill of the current egg box in the Animals Overview menu. There is no other way to inspect the fill level of an egg box.
As long as you prevent any box from reaching 150 liters, Egg Production Rates will continue to increase every 15 minutes. Once you reach a Production Rate of 150 liters per 15 minute (or more), you will create a new, full egg box every 15 minutes. This production rate is completely stable.
This can be achieved with any number of Chicken inside the Coop. However, if you allow even a single pallet to fill to 150 liters before the reaching the maximum rate, you'll be set back to a lower Production Rate.
This is incredibly difficult to achieve, requiring constant attention to the Chickens. However, if you manage to pull this off, you will be producing 14,400 liters of Eggs per day, equal to a profit of about $38,880 per day at average market prices, or much more than that if you only sell the eggs when prices are high.
Collection and Transport
Eggs accumulates in small boxes on the Loading Platform at the Chicken Coop. Each egg box can contain no more than 150 liters of Eggs.
Egg boxes are small and light enough to be picked up by hand, requiring no other tools to do so. Once in hand, a box can be rotated to any angle and placed with precision on any surface or on top of other boxes.
Egg boxes can be loaded onto a Bale Trailer for transport, though it is often enough to use the trunk of a Car. You can even deliver them from one place to another on foot.
Note that Egg boxes cannot be dismantled. Eggs are only ever found in box form.
Selling
Eggs can be sold at any Sale Point that accepts Crops. There are multiple such Sale Points on each map provided with the base game.
To sell Eggs, simply bring the boxes to the marked area at the Sale Point. Eggs are sold automatically once over the Sale Point, though this is somewhat finicky. You may need to get out of your transport vehicle and throw the egg boxes out onto the sale point platform.
The average price of Eggs on the "Normal" economic difficulty setting is $2.7 per liter. The actual price at the Sale Point can fluctuate up to around 30% higher or lower, so ideally Eggs can be sold for as high as $3.65 per liter (or even more), especially during Great Demand. For the best profit, stockpile your Egg boxes on the ground or inside Bale Trailers (or in the back of your Car) until the price approaches or surpasses this amount.
Make sure to check the Market Prices menu to see which Sale Point is offering the highest price for Eggs, and whether the prices are going up or down, before selling your Eggs anywhere.
Profit Analysis
Determining the profit margin from Eggs is very difficult due to the production process described above. Production rates fluctuate up and down constantly, and are strongly affected by the player's actions (removing egg boxes, placing boxes back on the loading platform, failing to free up room for new boxes, etc.).
Egg production requires a certain amount of Wheat or Barley per chicken. Since Barley has a lower direct-sale value, it is better to feed Barley to your chickens.
A hundred Chickens consume only 500 liters of Barley per day, which is a small fraction of the yield of a single hectare of Barley. On the other hand, Barley is itself not a cheap product, and could potentially be sold for $0.76 per liter. This, coupled with the Production Rate Limit on eggs, means that at some point extra Chickens will consume more value in Barley than they produce in Eggs.
If you do not put in the extra effort to clear Egg boxes off the loading platform before they reach 150 liters, egg production should reach an average of ~430 liters a day with 100 Chickens, or ~840 liters a day with 400 Chickens. These eggs are worth about $1,161 and $2,268 respectively, assuming you only sell when prices are very high. Subtract from this the value of the Barley consumed by the chickens each day, and we arrive at a net profit of $781 per day for 100 chickens, or $748 per 400 chickens. Indeed, this means that more chickens can actually be less profitable.
The cutoff appears to be somewhere around 170-180 chickens per coop. Any more chickens than this, and the benefit to production rates is not high enough to justify the extra Barley fed to the chickens.
If you take the effort to clear out Egg Boxes before they reach 150 liters, everything changes. You can reach much higher Egg production rates this way, potentially all the way to 150 liters per 15 minutes - the highest possible rate (which is incidentally also a stable rate that no longer requires any effort to maintain). At this rate, you'll be making approximately $38,880 per day, minus the value of however much Barley you need to feed your chickens. This is a massive profit, but extremely hard to reach.
Note: While making Eggs you will also be breeding Chickens. Unfortunately, their sale value is so low (particularly due to the mandatory Transport Fees that cannot be avoided) that selling chickens doesn't really seem to be worth it. However, as explained above, there does not seem to be any benefit from having more than 180 chickens in a coop; You may be better off selling any chickens above this number, for a very modest extra profit.