Sniffer in Minecraft: How to Get an Egg and Ancient Seeds
Sniffers never spawn in the wild. Brush a sniffer egg from a warm ocean ruin, hatch it faster on moss, and it digs up torchflower seeds and pitcher pods.
The sniffer is a big, gentle mob that won the 2022 Minecraft Live mob vote and arrived in 1.20. It never spawns in the wild. You get one by brushing a sniffer egg out of suspicious sand in a warm ocean ruin, hatching it, and then letting it sniff out two ancient plants you can’t get anywhere else: torchflowers and pitcher plants.
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Health | 14 HP (7 hearts) |
| Behavior | Passive |
| Spawns | Never naturally; hatches from sniffer eggs |
| Food | Torchflower seeds |
| Drops | Nothing but XP |
| XP | 1-3 on kill, 1-7 from breeding |
Getting your first egg
Warm ocean ruins sit in warm and lukewarm oceans, usually as sandstone rubble on the seabed. Some contain suspicious sand, which looks like sand with a faint pattern. Craft a brush (feather, copper ingot, stick), wear a turtle shell or carry water breathing, and brush every suspicious block you find. The sniffer egg is one of several possible results. Be careful: mining suspicious sand instead of brushing it destroys the loot.
Hatching
Place the egg and wait. It cracks over time and hatches into a snifflet:
- On a moss block: about 10 minutes.
- On anything else: about 20 minutes.
Moss is easy to get from lush caves or a wandering trader, so put one down first. The snifflet takes 40 minutes to grow up, and feeding it torchflower seeds shortens that.
What sniffers do
An adult sniffer wanders around sniffing the ground. Every so often it stops, digs with its nose on a suitable block (grass, dirt, coarse dirt, podzol, rooted dirt, moss, mud and a few others) and pops out a seed. The result is either torchflower seeds or a pitcher pod, 50/50. After a successful dig it waits about eight minutes before searching again.
It won’t dig while leashed, in water, in a boat or when you’re tempting it with food. A pen floored with grass or moss and nothing else to distract it works well.
The ancient plants
Both are crops you plant on farmland:
- Torchflower: an orange flower that makes orange dye. Its seeds are also sniffer food, which makes breeding self-sustaining.
- Pitcher plant: a two-block-tall teal flower that makes cyan dye.
They’re decorative rather than food. Parrots can be tamed with either seed, but the sniffer is really for builders who want flowers no one else has. Tips on soil and water for your crop farm apply to these too.
Breeding
Feed two adult sniffers torchflower seeds. Instead of a baby appearing, a sniffer egg drops as an item, which you then place and hatch. Each parent has a five-minute cooldown afterwards. On Bedrock, sniffers need to be at full health to breed, and feeding them seeds heals 2 HP.
Edition notes
- Bedrock snifflets are slightly smaller.
- Bedrock sniffers heal from torchflower seeds; Java ones don’t.
Other mobs from recent updates, like the armadillo, are on the mobs hub.
Common questions
Where do you find a sniffer egg?
Brush suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins. A sniffer egg is one of the possible finds, along with pottery sherds and other loot, so you may need to brush a few ruins.
How long does a sniffer egg take to hatch?
About 10 minutes on a moss block and 20 minutes on any other block.
What do sniffers dig up?
Torchflower seeds and pitcher pods, with equal odds. They're decorative plants, and torchflower seeds are also what you feed sniffers to breed them.
Sources & verification
Facts on this page are checked against these references and in-game behavior for the stated edition(s). how we verify.
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