Winning Minecraft's mob vote back in 2022 with over 50% in favour of sniffers, the mob were then added to the game in Trails and Tales 2023's update. Because of the mob's rarity in the game itself, its launch has hardly impacted players and most are still wondering; what does the sniffer actually do? Here are all the important things that you need to know about this creature, compiled into one article.

A Sniffer's Life Purpose

This starkly huge animal, like most passive mobs, will wander aimlessly by default. But occasionally, sniffers smell their surroundings and stick their nose to the ground in search of ancient seeds ( torchflower seeds and pitcher pods ). Once a seed is sniffed out, they adorably lay on their bellies and proceed to dig using their big noses until a seed is excavated. After successfully digging out a seed, the sniffer has an 8-minute cooldown before it will look for seeds again. They will do this repeatedly, unprompted by players or other mobs, as if its their life purpose.

Here is a list of blocks, diggable by the sniffer:

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

How To Find a Sniffer

Differing from most mobs, sniffers don’t naturally spawn in its full form anywhere in Minecraft. This is because sniffers are actually extinct in the Minecraft world. The only way to find them is to excavate a sniffer egg in suspicious sand of warm ocean ruins. You can find this structure in the waters near desert and badlands biomes, usually with several drowned spawned with it.

To obtain the egg, you will need a brush. Crafting it requires one feather, one copper ingot and one stick, arranged in that order from top to bottom in any column of the crafting grid. Use the brush on suspicious sand and items will start emerging from the sand. Other than a sniffer egg, which has a 6.7% chance of being found in this sand, you may also find coal, emerald, gold nuggets and pottery sherds.

Pick up the sniffer egg and put it down on the ground to hatch the egg. It usually takes 20 minutes for the egg to hatch (equivalent to 1 in-game day) but you can halve the time by placing the egg on a moist surface like a moss block.

Sniffers were introduced to Minecraft with the archaeology system. The additions to the game in the update alludes to a prehistoric era in the Minecraft world, teasing exciting possibilities for expansion in the future.

Sniffers' Behaviour

The sniffer mob comes 1.75 blocks tall and 1.9 blocks wide, making it one of the largest passive mobs, next to camels. It has droopy ears, a fluffy green and reddish brown body with a big nose that bounces as part of the mob’s animation. They only consume torchflower seeds, which helps them to grow from snifflets, heal if injured and encourages them to breed. Like most mobs, sniffers will drop a sniffer egg when they are bred. However, they only drop experience orbs and no items when killed.

While you can’t ride or tame sniffers, some players farm sniffers to grow a torchflower and pitcher plant farm. Other than that, there really is no reason to farm sniffers- except to help put them out of extinction.

Ancient Seeds

Introduced in the same update as the sniffers, ancient seeds only consist of torchflower seeds and pitcher pods, as of now. 

Both torchflower seeds and pitcher pods can be grown to become torchflower and pitcher plants. Both seeds can be used to tame parrots, feed and breed chickens while the torchflower seed can also feed and breed sniffers and bees. Pitcher plants can make cyan dye and torchflower can make orange dye. The latter plant can also be used to make suspicious stew.

As of right now, torchflowers and pitcher plants are mostly decorative, super rare plants. Unless Minecraft decides to explore more of the ancient seeds in future updates, the plants serve the same purpose as flowers in the game.