I have a row of 10 emerald chickens (10, 10, 10 stats) and a mirror copy of Prismarine chickens (also 10, 10, 10 stats). By row I mean the chicken sit in a Nesting Pen of course. The drop rate of the prismarine is *significantly* lower than the emeralds. In an equal amount of time (over a couple of days of playing) the emerald chickes have laid (besides eggs, poop and feathers) about 21 emeralds and the prismarine have laid about the same amount of eggs, poop and feathers, but only 1 prismarine shard. Is there something to check? The drop rates are tuned ok? Besides the point that keeping and reaching the 10 chickens to 10, 10, 10 stats might not justify the yield. The difference between one and the other is way too high, so I suspect CFG file might have something missing.
Something is off with nesting pens, unless it's now been fixed. They don't seem to give the correct drops.
I wouldnt go slaughtering all your chickens just yet, you can still get some resources from the chickens if you take a few out of the nesting pens and keep them in a sealed area with a vacuum hopper and they will produce their drops as normal (just be wary of the mob cap and the fact that mobs will sometimes despawn for seemingly no reason so only keep a few disposable chickens out at a time).. The good news is that one of the sponge devs Aaron1011 is already working on a fix for the nesting pens so give it another week or two and hopefully a new build of sponge will make the nesting pens viable again.
Yes I read, thanks for the info!. Maybe this helps others. What I did is create an automatic spawning/killing system. Since they do drop eggs in reasonable amount. I place them in nest, wait for them to hatch, then wait for them to grow, this later step, while the next eggs are laid to begin hatching. When the chicken has matured, I kill it, and it then drops good loot (let's venture to say: better loot)