Chicken & Rooster Breeding

The chicken family just got a full overhaul. Hens and roosters are now separate species with their own sprites, their own coat colors, and their own breeding rules — modeled on the cow/bull and horse systems.

When you buy a Chicken from Wick, the system rolls a sex like it does for cows: female stays a Hen, male becomes a Rooster. Most roosters are White Roosters with random coat colors; the remaining 15% are rare classic breeds — Gallus, Australorp Black, Rhode, and White Crested.

Coat Inheritance

Hens use a single red mask (body), White Roosters use four (mane, body, legs, feet). Every baby's color traces back to a parent — there are no random mutations at birth:

• Hen + White Rooster: female baby's body is 50/50 mother or father; male baby is a White Rooster with mane/legs/feet 100% from father and body 50/50.
• Hen + legacy rooster: female baby keeps the mother's body color, male baby is identical to the legacy father (breed-true).

To introduce new male colors into your flock, buy a fresh chicken from Wick. Legacy lineages stay legacy unless you bring in new blood.

Other Gameplay Changes

• Horses no longer leave a corpse. Using a Butcher Knife on your horse now plays a small puff and the horse "runs away" — no body, no loot. You still get the slaughter XP and achievement progress.
• Sprinklers must sit on top of a pipe. Adjacent pipes no longer count. The Building Book blocks placing a pipe over a sprinkler, and a sprinkler can only be placed where a pipe already exists. Existing irrigation networks may need a quick rearrange — the lever message tells you exactly what is missing.
• Logs are locked while you saw them. Dragging a log mid-cut is no longer possible — the saw animation finishes cleanly.

Quality of Life

• The phantom "You just lost your daily reward streak" login message is gone. Thornfeld does not use the daily reward system, but the engine was firing the message anyway every time you logged in.
• The chat panel no longer shows a dark background after toggling Hide Chat — fully transparent in every mode now.
• Greta's tutorial troughs in the corral are now reserved for tutorial players. Visitors can no longer top them off, which was preventing the auto-reset and leaving the next student stuck.
• The petbook now groups Hens and Roosters together under "Chickens" (same pattern as horse colors).

Account & Website

• Lost Account, Confirm Email, Logout, and Resend Email Verification pages all rebuilt in the Thornfeld pixel-box layout. The whole account flow finally looks consistent.
• New Cloudflare Turnstile captcha on the create account page, plus a server-side IP rate limit. Anti-bot defenses are now in place ahead of launch.
• The login error for unverified accounts now renders the resend link as a clickable link instead of raw HTML text.
• Wiki and Cyclopedia tab Ranching updated with the new Hen/Rooster sections, Chicken Coat Inheritance, and the irrigation pipe-under-sprinkler rule.

Performance

The site's hero, page background, and seven landing screenshots are now WebP with aggressive compression. The images folder went from 38 MB down to 2.8 MB — homepage first paint is now under 2 MB instead of ~10 MB. Should feel noticeably snappier on first visit.

As always, feedback on Discord!