Minecraft Sniffer: Eggs, Seeds and Breeding

Stats

The sniffer has 14 health points (7 hearts). It doesn't attack and doesn't defend itself. Its whole value is its ability to dig up seeds you can't get from any other source in the game.

How to get a sniffer egg

Sniffer eggs turn up in suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins. Use a brush on the suspicious sand to uncover the egg: each block has about a 6.7% chance of holding one. You craft a brush from a feather, a copper ingot and a stick. It helps to explore the ruins with a Potion of Water Breathing or a Turtle Shell helmet.

Hatching

A sniffer egg placed on any block hatches after about 20 minutes. Put it on a moss block and it takes only 10 minutes. The baby sniffer (a snifflet) needs 40 minutes to grow up, twice as long as most baby mobs. Feeding it torchflower seeds speeds up growth by 10% per seed.

Sniffing and digging up seeds

An adult sniffer wanders around and every so often starts sniffing: it lowers its head and smells the block beneath it. After a few seconds it starts digging and turns up one of two seeds. Then it needs a break of about 8 minutes before it sniffs again. A sniffer digs on blocks like dirt, grass blocks and mud, and it remembers the spots where it has already dug, so it keeps moving on to fresh blocks. You need a large area of suitable ground.

The seeds

A sniffer digs up two kinds of seeds: torchflower seeds, which grow into an orange flower, and pitcher pods, which grow into a two-block-tall pitcher plant. Both are planted on farmland. A torchflower gives orange dye and a pitcher plant gives cyan dye. Neither plant generates naturally, so a sniffer is how you get them. Torchflower seeds do double duty: they're also the food you use to breed sniffers.

Breeding

Sniffers breed after you feed two adults torchflower seeds. The breeding cooldown is the standard 5 minutes. Keeping several sniffers gets you seeds faster, since each one has its own 8-minute cooldown. Three sniffers on a large patch of grass is a good setup.

Fun facts

The sniffer won Mob Vote 2022, beating the Rascal and the Tuff Golem with about 55% of the votes.
The game's lore suggests sniffers are ancient creatures that were once common but died out, with their eggs surviving in underwater ruins.
A sniffer can't dig while it's in water.
The snifflet is one of the cutest mobs in the game and quickly became a community favorite.