I don't know if you all have seen ShadowDragon's automated chicken farm, but here it is.
I plan to take some of the ideas from it, along with some discussed here for my uses.
I am running a modified mindcrack using GT. You get 1 methane for 16 cooked chickens, but if raw, you only need 12 chickens. So, I'm getting an extra methane for every 3 sets of raw chicken I use (vs cooked chicken). I plan on having an egg laying coop, that never kills the chickens, but just collects the eggs (to make the kill cycles faster as the kill cycle is triggered when the deployers are full of eggs). From there I plan to feed to two kill pits. The pits will be 2 blocks tall with water in one corner flowing down to a transposer in the the opposite corner. the second layers of the kill pit will have blocks attached to sticky pistons going the entire length. Glass blocks will cover the top to prevent escapees. Since chickens float, when the pistons close, they will take suffocation damage, and drown leaving me feathers and raw chicken automatically collected by the single transposer.
The bottom layer (or top layer on an end) will have the deployers to restock the kill pen from eggs after they are all killed.
I tried building it without the water layer, but when the chickens died, the items exploded everywhere to the closest air space. I needed the water layer to keep everything inside the pen.
I plan to take some of the ideas from it, along with some discussed here for my uses.
I am running a modified mindcrack using GT. You get 1 methane for 16 cooked chickens, but if raw, you only need 12 chickens. So, I'm getting an extra methane for every 3 sets of raw chicken I use (vs cooked chicken). I plan on having an egg laying coop, that never kills the chickens, but just collects the eggs (to make the kill cycles faster as the kill cycle is triggered when the deployers are full of eggs). From there I plan to feed to two kill pits. The pits will be 2 blocks tall with water in one corner flowing down to a transposer in the the opposite corner. the second layers of the kill pit will have blocks attached to sticky pistons going the entire length. Glass blocks will cover the top to prevent escapees. Since chickens float, when the pistons close, they will take suffocation damage, and drown leaving me feathers and raw chicken automatically collected by the single transposer.
The bottom layer (or top layer on an end) will have the deployers to restock the kill pen from eggs after they are all killed.
I tried building it without the water layer, but when the chickens died, the items exploded everywhere to the closest air space. I needed the water layer to keep everything inside the pen.