Henk and Henkster

[senpaiyaa]

Just fed Hens with some banana feed. Still won't evolve into Henks. How many bananan seeds should I feed them?

[AGreywolfe]

you need to feed roosters banana feed and have them hatch a normal white egg to get a henk/henkster

[SenExus]

It is RNG based afaik, so make sure to get a bunch of white eggs, then let the banana-fed rooster hatch them all, you'll get a couple henks from that

[Cal]

50% chance if a rooster hatches another breed's egg to be either breed iirc

[Kotlol]

Again this is why some people want more options to streamline rancher to get what they want, insted of less RNG.

Ranchers take time and RNG and unlike Botanists who can manipulate a plants growth, mutation, speed, yield and potency.
Ranchers don't have that luxury.
Heck some chickens are only unlockable if you get certain events happening and know about it.

If the rancher has more ways to lower the RNG and control things, I bet more people will play rancher, but lately I see too many people not caring for Rancher and most Antag ranchers don't even breed anything, they just go at it... but that's just my sighting.

[Cal]

theres almost no rng with rancher besides that and the chicken gender (which there is a pity system for)

[Kotlol]

theres almost no rng with rancher besides that and the chicken gender (which there is a pity system for)

Stil takes atleast 15/20 mins (for me) to get a new species of chicken.

[senpaiyaa]

theres almost no rng with rancher besides that and the chicken gender (which there is a pity system for)

Stil takes atleast 15/20 mins (for me) to get a new species of chicken.

They should at least reduce the time for the evolution at least. One round in goon takes like only 1 hour. I find breeding white chickens hard because it takes them too long to evolve. This is time consuming and not making the job fun. At the end of the round I was breeding like what 50 or so white and brown chickens in my ranch and you can't do anything with them besides butchering and make the chef cook them for you.

[Danger Noodle]

You shouldn't be raising that many chickens, focus on maybe 2 or 3 from a certain species until you get the species you want and then raise a ton.

[Kotlol]

You shouldn't be raising that many chickens, focus on maybe 2 or 3 from a certain species until you get the species you want and then raise a ton.

Indeed that's the point, but the problem with it is the constant babysitting... also the breeder's guide doesn't say: "You need to give banana feed to a rooster and have them hatch eggs with 50%" It just says : FEED BANANA. 
Also the water chickens require you to make an aquarium, this means you need engineering and mechanics to make this route wich is already gonna be hard with limited resources to get what you need.

It's not like chemicals where if you mess up it's an OH WELL... or Botany where if your plant aint well enough it's an OH WELL.
Good botanists and chemists lost time but can reobtain the resources from scratch in less then 5 mins flat to start over.

With Rancher you need the right feed, right chickens and such. And something like a RAD STORM will set you back horribly, cause chickens are effected by rad storms.

While I am glad at the multiplue pens...my problem with rancher is that infact it's boring to start with, making all the feed and waiting for chicks to grow up.
Comparing this to Botany... can start getting desired effects in the 1st 5 minutes of starting.
Or chemistry that can start mixing right away. The rancher has to WAIT. They have almost nothing to do in the meantime, cept fishing if they got a portal or place to fish or Trimming Dolly for wool that does nothing yet

While the mid game it is very intensive baby sitting to getting desired effects.
And if you want to do something like a raptor invasion.. well good luck that no one tells security you are breeding raptors and killing them. (And if you do it off ranch, good luck keeping an eye on it)

So slow start, invisible RNG where the pay off is "hope to see it happen", Unclear instructions that if you do wrong wastes a lot of time and resources and if you wanna do something sneaky, it gets really hard since it's all slow and takes time.... makes Rancher kinda unappealing. While some have amazing pay offs... alot of RNG hurdles have to be overcome.

Imagine your shift working on a chicken type to have the right feed that botany had to make for you and just when all seems well..
A rad storm comes in and mutates the chicken that it escapes into space... thus having you to start mostly over. INFURIATING! And it's the only job where this happens... (yes you can catch the chicken and take it away in a cage and keep feed on you, but that's still 1 chicken surviving the rad over your 6 other chickens)

Either way... it's not as rewarding as let's say botany or art sci.

[DioChasek]

The biggest reason I hate rancher gameplay is rad storms. No other department can get completely wiped out by one and the moment it happens I pretty much give up on the round. I have said it before and I will say it again chickens (and Dolly) need rad immunity.

[Lord_earthfire]

While i don't have a problem with some chance on the chicken breeding, my biggest problem lies with the raising of chicks. For one, it takes far too long to from an egg to hens or roosters. What's worse, you cannot differentiate if a chick grows up to be a rooster or a hen.

It would save so much time to see a hatched chick and know if it becomes a hen or a rooster so you can put the unwanted gendered chick onto the mass driver and fling it into space (ok, that sounds absolutely wrong). Now you are stuck either mass hatching eggs and painstakingly wait until they grow up or just wait a bunch of time.

For comparison, going from an egg to a chicken takes up ~10 minutes, a decent botanist can mutate weed into lifeweed consistently at the 16 minutes mark.

Just somewhat reducing the raising time of chicks and making their gender visible on hatching would go a long way to make rancher able to engage with the rest of the station on non-rp servers.