Minecraft Sniffer: How to Find, Hatch Eggs, and Breed the Mob

The Sniffer in Minecraft is a prehistoric mob that’s as adorable as useful – especially for players who love decorating their base with rare and vibrant plants. Unlike most creatures, you won’t find a Sniffer randomly wandering around in your Minecraft world. Instead, discovering it can be a part of your exciting archaeological adventure. To bring a Sniffer into your world, you’ll need to find its egg first and nurture it. It will then hatch and help you find some ancient seeds for exclusive plants in the game. So, if you’re curious about the Sniffer, this guide covers everything you need to know.

What Is a Sniffer in Minecraft

Sniffer has been the winner of the Minecraft Mob Vote in 2022, and is a passive functional mob added to the game with the Trails and Tales update. It is the first ancient mob to enter the game’s world and possesses some unique powers.

The Sniffer roams around the overworld, moving its nose dramatically and sniffing ancient seeds. It pulls ancient seeds out of the ground, which you can collect to grow exclusive plants.

How to Get Sniffer Egg and Hatch in Minecraft

Sniffer is one of the few Minecraft mobs that can’t spawn naturally in the game’s world. Instead, you have to make it come out of an ancient egg in the form of a Snifflet. This Snifflet or baby Sniffer will then grow into the giant dinosaur mob that we know and love. This egg can be excavated from the suspicious sand blocks in the warm ocean ruins. Follow the guide linked here to learn how to find the Sniffer egg in Minecraft, and also, how to hatch it.

What are the Basic Properties of a Sniffer

Now that you know the basics of Sniffer in Minecraft, let’s dive into the detailed mechanics of this new mob.

Health & Regeneration

Even though Sniffer is one of the largest mobs in the game, its size doesn’t reflect in its strength. Its health is 14 points, which is equivalent to seven player hearts. Sniffers regenerate one heart after they’re fed a torchflower seed.

When it comes to health reduction, Sniffer doesn’t seem to have any special abilities or defenses. Its health is fatally reduced due to fire, lava, and fall damage in Minecraft.

Even though Sniffer’s eggs spawn inside the ocean, the mob itself is not immune to drowning and suffocation. So, except for its special sniffing ability, this mob is like every other passive mob.

Attack & Drops

Sniffer is a passive mob in Minecraft, so it’s completely tolerant and doesn’t attack you even if you hit it first. Moreover, when it comes to mob interaction, both Warden and Wither attack the Sniffer without any discrimination. The former can slay the Sniffer with a single hit. Meanwhile, it takes around 14 simple hits for the players to put the Sniffer to rest.

When it comes to loot, the Sniffer only drops 1-3 experience points (around 10% of the time). However, we suggest that you don’t take drastic steps for this loot, as breeding the Sniffer provides more experience.

What Does the Sniffer Do in Minecraft

Focusing on mob behavior, the Sniffer mob roams around the world of Minecraft aimlessly. It consciously avoids any obstacles, including water, fire, lava, and non-climbable blocks. While roaming, the Sniffer smells its surroundings and dramatically moves its nose around.

Then, after a little while, the Sniffer sits on all fours and puts its head underground. After that, slowly but surely, it pulls out ancient seeds from the ground. You can pick up the seeds as an item and throw them on the farmland to get unique plants.

Ancient Seeds in Minecraft

As the name implies, the ancient seeds are rare seeds that are buried underground in the overworld, and only the Sniffer can find them in Minecraft. Each seed grows into a beautiful plant that you can use for decorative purposes. However, unlike regular plants, you can’t get more seeds from the plant. For these seeds, you have to rely entirely on the Sniffer.

There are two ancient seeds in Minecraft that the Sniffer can find:

• Torchflower Seeds – has three stages of growth
• Pitcher Pods – have five stages of growth

You can plant these seeds on the farmland blocks and wait for them to reach full size. Then, you can break them and get a decorative plant you can place anywhere in your world.

How to Make Sniffer Sniff in Minecraft

When a Snifflet grows up into an adult Sniffer, give them a little time, and they’ll start sniffing. Immediately after they are done, the eight-minute cooldown starts, and they will not look for any seeds in that time period.

Besides the cooldown timer, Sniffers remember the last 20 blocks they’ve dug in and will not choose those blocks. After they dig in more than 20 blocks, they will have forgotten the first blocks they chose and will consider them suitable digging spots.

In Minecraft, the Sniffer needs at least a 6×6 area of diggable blocks to be able to start sniffing, and those blocks are the following:

• Dirt
• Podzol
• Coarse Dirt
• Rooted Dirt
• Grass Block
• Moss Block
• Mud
• Muddy Mangrove Roots

Once you have set up the compatible area for the Sniffer, it all comes down to waiting for the Sniffer to do its job. However, having more than one Sniffer will surely help.

How to Breed Sniffer in Minecraft

The steps to breed the sniffer in Minecraft are easy. You need to get two Sniffers together and wait for them to dig out Torchflower seeds. Once they find them, you have to feed the seeds to the Sniffer to get them into “love mode”. After that, the sniffer egg will be dropped. Now, you can place the egg and wait for it to hatch into a Snifflet.

It takes around 20 minutes for the Snifflet to grow into an adult Sniffer. Furthermore, the parents need a 5-10 minute break (cooldown) before being ready for another round of breeding. With such simple breeding mechanics, you can get a small army of these new mobs in no time.

Just like that, here is everything you need to know about the Sniffer in Minecraft. So, how excited are you to get some prehistoric seeds? Tell us in the comments below.