Minecraft’s wildlife includes not only familiar creatures like sheep or pigs but also very exotic and fictional animals. Among them is the new Sniffer, a large and slow creature that likes to dig around in the ground and can give you rare items. The Sniffer has many exciting mechanics that aren’t always easy for players to understand. Perhaps you don’t even know how to obtain this mob at all. That’s why we’re presenting everything important about the Sniffer in this guide!
Finding and Breeding Sniffers
You won’t find Sniffers in Minecraft’s Overworld, as they don’t spawn naturally and must be found and then hatched by you. In terms of lore, Sniffers are very old and already extinct animals that you can essentially revive as a player. For this, you need a Sniffer Egg.
This can be found through an archaeological dig. We’ve already written a large article on this topic (Minecraft Archaeology: Discover All Excavation Sites & Rare Items) , if you want to learn more about it. For the Sniffer Egg, you should focus on warm ocean ruins. It’s best to use a potion of night vision and water breathing to search for suspicious sand with your brush. Sniffer Eggs have a 6.7% chance of appearing. And you need at least two eggs for an effective farm.
Hatching and Breeding Sniffer Eggs
You must hatch the egg, preferably on a moss block. With our article on a moss farm (Automatic Minecraft Moss Farm: Infinite Bone Meal Generation) , you’ll surely have enough of it! Simply place it and wait about ten minutes for the egg to hatch. In the meantime, the egg will crack and emit green particles to signal its progress. In the end, a small Sniffer hatchling will emerge, which will take another twenty minutes to grow into a fully-fledged Sniffer.
We mentioned that you should look for at least two eggs. Because if you have two Sniffers, you can breed and reproduce them yourself. For this, you need torchflower seeds. You use these like items in normal breeding, but then receive another egg to hatch. But you’re probably wondering how you can obtain these seeds for breeding. This is where the unique ability of the Sniffers comes into play!
Rare Plants for Your Minecraft World
Sniffers live up to their name and enjoy sniffing around on the ground. Every eight minutes, they have a chance to dig up one of two rare seeds. This is where the aforementioned torchflower seed and pitcher plant pod come into play! Both have a 50% chance of being dug up by a Sniffer. The seeds or pods can then be collected by you.
This only works on the following blocks:
- Dirt
- Grass Block
- Podzol
- Coarse Dirt
- Rooted Dirt
- Moss Block
- Mud
- Muddy Mangrove Roots
Uses and Applications of the New Crops
Interestingly, the pitcher plant and torchflower are not flowers, but crops! You must cultivate the seeds with farmland, just like wheat or carrots. Both flowers are really beautiful and significantly more detailed than any other plants in Minecraft. This alone makes it worthwhile to search for Sniffers. You won’t get the seeds from growing them; only the flowers. However, you can still build automatic fields with water (Build an Automatic Wheat Farm in Minecraft: Unlimited Wheat with Minimal Effort) .
At the end of the day, both flowers are more intended for decoration. You can turn them into orange or cyan dye, but this isn’t really worth it for such rare plants. They can also be composted or used for breeding bees. With the torchflower, you can also make a suspicious stew that gives you the night vision effect for five seconds.
Building Your Own Automatic Sniffer Farm
To have enough seeds, you need enough Sniffers and, ideally, an automatic way to collect the dug-up seeds. We’ll introduce two different ways to do this. Both are equally effective but use different Minecraft mechanics.
Starting Point: For both farms, a very similar setup is needed. First, measure a field of 10x10 blocks and fill it with a block that the Sniffer can dig through. Normal grass is perfectly fine. Surround the field with a 3-block high wall, ideally made of glass or fences. The roof should be made of slabs to prevent monsters from spawning on it. Light up the farm itself with torches.
Once you’ve installed one of the two mechanisms, you can bring your Sniffers into the farm using a lead. And, of course, you can hatch more baby Sniffers and expand your farm.
Allays as Support
Allays are a helpful creature we also discussed in more detail in another article. Their ability is to collect items and then give them to the player. But thanks to note blocks, we can also have Allays drop items over a hopper.
On one side of the cage, you should build a small collection area for the Allays’ drops. To keep the note block ringing continuously, use two observers facing each other, which emit a constant signal. The Allays will then fly to the note block and drop the dug-up pitcher plant pods and torchflower seeds into the hoppers. Two Allays are perfectly sufficient, and you give each one of the exotic plant seeds.
Rail System with Hoppers
If you haven’t found any Allays yet or prefer a different method, you can also build a simple rail system with a hopper minecart under the 10x10 field.
Again, start on one side and place two hoppers and a double chest in front of them. Then lay out a rail network that covers each block once. In between, you need 4 sections with 3 powered rails each, powered by a lever. This way, you can let a hopper minecart run indefinitely, which pulls the pods and seeds through the layer of dirt above and deposits them in the chest.
Conclusion
Sniffers are incredibly cute and fit perfectly into Minecraft! They have unique abilities that allow you to cultivate long-forgotten plants and use them as decorations. Rent your own Minecraft server with us and embark on a quest with your friends to find the rare Sniffer Eggs, to start your breeding and building of an automatic farm.
