Domesticated hens aren't eating any more?

[DarkGold]

I posted this in support a while back, and haven't got any replies yet, so maybe that was the wrong place to ask. Posting here to see if anyone has an answer.

So a while back (after I made a new 1.22 world, pasted my base from 1.21 across, spent some time playing 1.22) my gen 10 hens stopped eating. They were initially eating, then one day I noticed they were low weight despite still having about half a trough of food. This is inconvenient since they won't breed or lay eggs any more.

My rooster and elk are still eating, it's just them (all 3 hens) not eating. I'm playing the latest version of the game. I have tried moving the trough and replacing the flax. I have tried closing/reopening the game. Neither worked, nothing in their enclosure has changed between them not eating any more. This has persisted over several play sessions.

Has this happened to anyone else? Is there a way to fix this? Can I use a command to spawn in gen 10 chickens (assuming there is no fix and I need new chickens)?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

Edited Tuesday at 09:03 AM by DarkGold
Correcting typos

[DarkGold]

I've been investigating how I might been able to spawn new chickens (because I would really prefer not to have to breed them back to gen 10 from scratch, especially if this could happen again). I see on the wiki, this command is provided...

/entity spawnat [entitytype] [amount] [position] [radius]

...but it may be easier to spawn chickens from creative mode (/gamemode 2) than try and figure the entitytype out.

And then one would follow it up with this...

/entity cmd l[] setgen 10

...to set the generation of the creature I'm looking at to 10.

I'm going to give this a go and see if the new chickens eat...

[DarkGold]

Sadly, the new chickens don't seem to want to eat either. Although I did notice that the new chickens have the new HP values, whereas the old chickens have the old HP values.

Even though the old chicken in the screenshot says "Portions eaten: 1" that has not updated recently; they just don't eat anything out of the small trough or gain weight.

[coolAlias]

Have you tried setting their generation to 9 and/or 11 (if that's even a thing) to see if those generations still eat?

Could easily be a bug that causes them to stop eating at gen 10.

[DarkGold]

15 hours ago, coolAlias said:

Have you tried setting their generation to 9 and/or 11

I tried both suggestions today (setting to 9, then setting to 11). Neither initially seemed to work, but then one of the new chickens I set to gen 9 did eat 2 portions (eventually 3). The other new chickens I set to gen 9 have not eaten anything in the same amount of time though. The old chickens that were set to gen 9 have not eaten anything either, so it seems inconsistent?

I have considered removing the old chickens, so I might do that and see if that and rebooting the game help. Given the chickens from 1.21 were initially working without issue after coming over to 1.22, I figured it wasn't a version thing, but my new world was made in 1.22.1, and it may have been 1.22.3 that they stopped working. The rooster and the elk are still working fine, that wasn't my initial suspicion.

Poor chickens.

[DarkGold]

The chicken that is eating also seems to have graphical issues every now and then...

My game is unmodded, by the way. Windows 11.

[DarkGold]

I cleared out the chickens, keeping only the gen 9 one that would eat, then spawned in 2 new chickens and set them to gen 10.

Now we have a new gen 10 hen who will eat...

...and another chicken who won't eat regardless of what their gen is set to (tried 8, 9, 10, just in case it was a bug where only one of each gen would eat).

So the issue seems to be generation independent and specific to individual chickens? All I can say, is something is deeply wrong with the hens in my game at the moment. Is anyone else seeing issues like this?

[Demoncyborg]

no this is honestly very strange. as a test, could you throw some of the grain on the ground (dont pick it up) and observe them? I find that the animals tend to prioritize items on the ground when it comes to feeding (and it still counts as portions eaten pretty sure) 

[DarkGold]

I closed the game and reopened it and the 3rd chicken started eating like normal. I would like to reiterated that I have previously closed and reopened the game (and rebooted my computer; this was persisting for weeks) many, many times before this without any of the chickens deciding to eat.

You can see some flax in the corner of the screenshot. I broke the small trough, threw some flax on the ground, so they would be motivated to eat it, not whatever was in the trough, and the white chicken (which was a new gen 9 chicken that I set to gen 10 after confirming one of the new gen 10 chickens would eat) ate it in relatively short order.

So now all the chickens are eating for the moment, no idea what fixed the issue. Nothing I tried before worked. Now it suddenly works. Will it continue to work? Who can say.

Edited Thursday at 12:58 PM by DarkGold
Added note about rebooting.

[DarkGold]

Potential solution was:

1. Kill all hens that came from a previous version of the game. Other animals from previous versions can be ignored.
2. Spawn in new hens using creative mode.

   /gamemode 2

3. Set new hens to gen 10 using 

   /entity cmd l[] setgen 10

   to set the generation of the creature you're looking at to 10.

4. Close and reopen the game.

Maybe. That's a rough approximation of what happened before things started working.