In Chicken Invaders 5, the yellow key glow is assigned to a randomly chosen enemy after a certain delay.

The enemies eligible for this include all types of Chickens, Eggs, Barriers (except for the Metal Egg Barrier) and jellyfish. Most boss waves won't have key spawns, unless if the boss can spawn Chickens as one of its attacks (Henterprise, Ice Cubed, Fly the Coop).

Unlike in Chicken Invaders Universe, there is no requirement to kill some enemies first to unlock key spawning.

The delay between key spawns is randomly decided between two values. These values depend on two factors:

• Currently chosen difficulty - The difficulty settings in this game change the maximum delay value. On Rookie it's 90 seconds, on Veteran it's 60 seconds and on Superstar Hero it's 45 seconds.
  
• Gold Digger - Using this unlockable paintjob reduces both the minimum delay and maximum delay values by 20%, thus "increasing key appearance by 25%".

Here is an useful table for key spawn delays.

Using Gold Digger while playing on Superstar Hero gives you the best key spawn rate out of all combinations of these, however you have neither of them when starting the game. The best option available at this moment is just the Veteran difficulty.

Play on Veteran until you get the 40 keys needed to buy Superstar Hero.

The time it takes for the game to spawn 40 keys:

You may have Superstar Hero now but you're still missing Gold Digger.

You'll have to immediately switch over to this difficulty and farm keys until you get 300 of them for Gold Digger.

The time it takes for the game to spawn 300 keys:

Now you can enable Gold Digger and keep playing on Superstar Hero until you get all of the remaining unlockables. Sadly that means you still have 3370 keys left to get at this point. Have fun.

The time it takes for the game to spawn 3370 keys:

Here's the total time that has to be spent on farming keys assuming you use the strategy mentioned above.


For an average player this is going to take roughly 32 hours.
Good thing the save files you may have here don't carry over to seasonal editions or the InterAction studios website version, so have fun spending 32 hours for each version of this game you get to play.