What is the sniffer in Minecraft?
The sniffer is a passive mob added in the 1.20 Trails & Tales update. You will never bump into one while exploring, because sniffers don’t spawn anywhere in the world. They’re an extinct species, and the only way to bring one back is to dig up a sniffer egg from an ocean ruin and hatch it yourself.
Players voted the sniffer into the game at Minecraft Live 2022, and it fills a niche no other mob touches. A grown sniffer wanders with its nose to the ground and digs up two kinds of seeds nothing else in the game can give you. Torchflower seeds and pitcher pods only come from a sniffer’s snout, so if you want either plant in your world, you need this mob.
This guide walks through finding the egg, hatching it faster, keeping your sniffers productive, and turning the seeds into flowers.
Where to find sniffer eggs
Sniffer eggs come from brushing suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins. Not cold ocean ruins, not trail ruins, not desert temples. Warm ocean ruins are the only place they generate.
The full process looks like this:
- Craft a brush: a feather on top, a copper ingot in the middle, and a stick on the bottom.
- Find a warm ocean. Look for shallow, brightly colored water with coral reefs and tropical fish. Ruins in warm oceans are built from sandstone instead of stone, which makes them easy to tell apart.
- Search the ruins for suspicious sand. It has a slightly rougher, cracked texture than regular sand, and it usually sits tucked into the floors and corners of the structure.
- Hold the brush and use it on the block. After a few seconds of brushing, an item pops out.
Two warnings before you swim out. First, suspicious sand is fragile. If you mine it, push it with a piston, or let it fall, it breaks and drops nothing. Always brush, never dig. Second, the egg is one of several items in the loot table, so expect to brush a handful of blocks before one appears. A ruin cluster usually holds several suspicious sand blocks, and a brush has 64 uses, so one trip with a spare brush covers an entire site.
A potion of water breathing, a conduit, or a turtle shell helmet makes the job much calmer. Brushing takes a few seconds per block, which is a long time to hold your breath while drowned patrol the ruins nearby.
How to hatch a sniffer egg
Place the egg on the ground like a block. It cracks in three visible stages and hatches on its own. There’s no light requirement, no biome requirement, and no time-of-day requirement.
The block underneath is the one thing that matters. On most surfaces the egg takes roughly 20 minutes to hatch. On a moss block the timer drops to roughly 10 minutes. That’s the only way to speed it up; bone meal does nothing to eggs.
The egg hatches into a snifflet, the baby sniffer. Snifflets grow into adults on their own, and feeding them torchflower seeds speeds up the growth, the same way wheat speeds up a calf. You can also break a placed egg and pick it back up if you chose a bad spot, so there’s no harm in relocating the nest.
Unlike turtle eggs, sniffer eggs don’t crack when something jumps on them, so you don’t need to fence off the nest or stand guard while the timer runs. Place it, walk away, and come back to a snifflet.
What sniffers dig up
An adult sniffer cycles between wandering, sniffing the air, and pressing its nose into the ground. When it catches a scent, it digs for a few seconds and kicks out one seed. There are exactly two possible finds:
- Torchflower seeds, which grow into torchflowers
- Pitcher pods, which grow into pitcher plants
Sniffers only dig on natural, earthy blocks: dirt, grass blocks, podzol, coarse dirt, rooted dirt, moss blocks, mud, and muddy mangrove roots. Stone, sand, and anything crafted get ignored. Digging doesn’t damage the block either, so the same floor keeps working forever.
One quirk shapes how you should build a pen: a sniffer remembers where it recently dug and avoids those spots for a while. In a cramped pen it runs out of fresh ground quickly and seed output stalls. Give it a wide floor of diggable blocks and it keeps producing at a steady pace.
Torchflower
Plant torchflower seeds on farmland, the same tilled soil you use for wheat. The crop grows through three stages, and breaking the mature plant drops a torchflower. The crop doesn’t return extra seeds, so your sniffer stays the sole seed source even after the farm is running.
The torchflower itself is a bright orange and red flower. You can craft it into orange dye, pot it, or place it in decorative builds. Bees treat the crop like any other flower and pollinate it, and chickens will take torchflower seeds as feed if you have extras, though seeds are usually too precious for that early on.
Pitcher plant
Pitcher pods also go on farmland. The pod grows through its stages and becomes a pitcher plant, a teal, two-block-tall plant and one of the tallest flowers in the game. It has no dye recipe and no food use. It’s decoration, and a striking one, since very few plants reach that height. Like the torchflower crop, a harvested pitcher plant doesn’t give its pod back.
How to breed sniffers
Feed a torchflower seed to each of two adult sniffers. Instead of a baby appearing, one of them lays an egg on the ground, and that egg follows the normal hatching rules, moss shortcut included.
That’s the full loop: sniffers dig up torchflower seeds, the seeds breed more sniffers, and the new sniffers dig up more seeds. It’s also why your first archaeology trip should aim for two eggs. A lone sniffer can never make another, but a pair turns into a permanent supply of both mobs and seeds, and you never have to brush a ruin again.
Sniffer behavior and stats
Sniffers are fully passive. An adult has 14 health (7 hearts), never attacks, and has no defense beyond wandering off. They walk slowly, follow players holding torchflower seeds, and can be leashed, which is the practical way to move one, because they’re among the largest passive mobs in the game. Build your gates and pens wide.
Snifflets behave like other baby mobs: they stay near adults and grow up after a while on their own. Neither adults nor babies swim well, so keep pens away from deep water.
Tips and common mistakes
Floor the pen with moss. It pulls double duty: eggs hatch twice as fast on it, and adults can dig it for seeds. Moss is also cheap to mass-produce with bone meal, so a big pen costs almost nothing.
Size the pen generously. The re-dig cooldown is the quiet limiter on seed output. A wide field of grass, dirt, and moss beats a neat little enclosure every time. If output still feels slow, hatch a second or third sniffer; each one digs independently, so more snouts means more seeds from the same field.
Resist the urge to decorate the pen floor. Stone paths, sandstone tiles, and anything polished all block digging. If the pen looks tidy, your sniffer is probably unemployed.
Three advancements are tied to the mob: “Smells Interesting” for obtaining a sniffer egg, “Little Sniffs” for feeding a snifflet, and “Planting the Past” for planting any sniffer seed. All three come naturally if you follow this guide.
Frequently asked questions
Can sniffers spawn naturally?
No. Sniffers never spawn in the world, no matter the biome. Every sniffer starts as an egg from warm ocean ruins, an egg from breeding, or a spawn egg in creative mode.
How long does a sniffer egg take to hatch?
Roughly 20 minutes on most blocks, or roughly 10 minutes on a moss block. The crack animation runs in three stages, so you can see the progress.
What do sniffers eat?
Torchflower seeds only. They’re used to breed adults and speed up a snifflet’s growth. Sniffers ignore wheat, carrots, and every other standard mob feed.
Do sniffers dig up diamonds or treasure?
No. The dig results are torchflower seeds and pitcher pods, nothing else. The treasure is the plants, both of which are exclusive to the sniffer.
Can you grow torchflowers without a sniffer?
No. Torchflower seeds only come from sniffer digs, and mature crops don’t drop seeds back. The same goes for pitcher pods and pitcher plants.
Did the sniffer win a mob vote?
Yes. The sniffer won the Minecraft Live 2022 mob vote against the rascal and the tuff golem, and joined the game in update 1.20.
Worth the swim
Treat your first warm ocean ruin as a two-egg mission. One egg gives you a curiosity; two give you a breeding pair, a torchflower farm, and a plant collection no trading hall can match. Set the pair up on a wide moss floor near your base and let them work. The torchflowers alone are worth the trip.