Housing for Hens

[RoiDesCastors]

So, I was just reading a post about ink and pens, and it seems the game already plans on letting us craft our own ink, using black paint and such, which is terribly nice, but what about the pens?

Right now, we can buy them from the alchemist or from the egg basket in the village (two houses to the right of the tavern). But will we be able to make our own? More specifically, how about a henhouse?

I realize lots of farming-themed games did it before, but I had some ideas about how to make the concept somewhat more interesting.

I'd suggest two techs to add to the farming tree.
The first one would give access to the henhouse building, which you could add to your yard, or why not to the garden, and allow you to buy (or maybe breed, through hatching the eggs) chickens and harvest their eggs. You would have to harvest the eggs from the henhouse on a regular basis to avoid them going bad or getting broken. Rotten eggs could be used in alchemy recipes for example, giving you a reason to let some of them rot at times. Or you could just throw them at people (because why not?).
The second tech would allow you to harvest feathers and craft them into pens, and you could add the chicken breeding to this one too, instead of the first one. Pens could be crafted at the church workbench for example, and if you wanted to add some more complexity, you could add a sharpening knife that would work like the chisel does right now.

As for the henhouse, instead of a coop with a contained area, you could go full medieval, and just let the chickens roam all over your yard or garden during the day, and go back to the henhouse at dusk, forcing you to open and close the door in the morning/evening. Leave it open at night, and you might wake up to dead or missing chickens (damn those foxes). Leave it closed in the day, and the chickens would use more food, instead of feeding themselves by picking bugs off the ground. Just turn the henhouse into a container you can open to add and remove food, chickens, eggs (in case you want to hatch one for example) and feathers.

You could even use chickens for some fun side-quest. Maybe have a chicken end up on the church roof. How did it get there? Who knows, but the bishop wants it gone. Or have chickens run amok in the morgue/cellar area, sitting on Gerry the Skull. And so on.

Much mischief can be had with poultry!