One fun new addition to FarmVille, the social networking game put out by Zynga, is the ability of players to feed their friends chickens and to collect Mystery Eggs as they do so.  Ever since the Chicken Coops were introduced into FarmVille, players have occasionally been lucky enough to find Mystery Eggs when they were harvesting their coops.  However, making Mystery Eggs discoverable in all of your friends’ coops makes these treasured items exponentially more available.

The Basics

Chicken Coops hold up to 20 chickens at once, and they can be harvested once every 24 hours.  It’s during these harvestings that Mystery Eggs began to be discovered, and while they don’t actually provide any direct benefit to the discoverer, they can be hatched by the friends and neighbors of the person who found them.

Better Chickens, Better Eggs

The kind of chickens that can be found in the coops has a direct effect on the types of Mystery Eggs that are discovered.  For example, a chicken coop with only normal white chickens in it can only produce white Mystery Eggs.  If there is a Black or a Brown chicken introduced into the mix, though, the possibility will exist that a Black or Brown Mystery Egg could be found.

And of course, adding a Golden Chicken to a coop means that there will be a possibility of discovering a highly coveted Golden Mystery Egg.  All Mystery Eggs contain a prize, of course, but the better the egg, the better the prize to be “hatched.”

Sharing the Discovery

As we touched on earlier, you won’t actually receive any benefit for finding a Mystery Egg.  You will, however, be able to post an announcement of the find on your wall so that your friends can each hatch an egg to collect a prize.  Of course, every time one of your friends finds a Mystery Egg, you’ll be able to try your hand at hatching it.

Feeding Chickens

For a while now, it’s been possible to fertilize some of your neighbors’ crops when you make your daily visit to their farms.  This gives you the benefit of an extra opportunity to pick up Experience Points and also makes their harvesting more profitable in the Experience Point category as well.  Now there’s an extra task waiting for you when you stop by your neighbors’ farms, though, and that’s feeding the chickens.

Like fertilizing crops, feeding your neighbors’ chickens earns you a coin and Experience Point Bonus.  However, it also provides you with the opportunity to discover Mystery Eggs with each feeding.  And the more often the chickens in a given coop are fed, the more likely they are to produce Mystery Eggs.  Of course, this means that your friends will be more likely to find Mystery Eggs as well, giving you more chances to hatch one.  And even if you don’t find a Mystery Egg when you’re harvesting your coop after your friends have fed your chickens, you’re likely to come away with a hefty coin bonus.