Grab your gear and visit with the Minecraft sniffer, the latest and ancient-est of new mobs coming in the Minecraft 1.20 update. While the sniffer is a bit weird compared to some of the other residents of Minecraft’s many fantastical biomes, they’re certainly friendly enough. In fact, if you manage to befriend one, they’ll do more than hang out around your builds looking like a mobile grass block—sniffers can actually get you rare seeds. So whether you’re a botanical expert or just like more decorations for your garden, there’s good reason to be excited for the latest adorable animal addition to Minecraft.
What do Minecraft sniffers do?
Besides beating out the tuff golem and rascal in mob votes, the sniffer has some other handy skills—and an unusual method of discovery.
Unlike most of Minecraft’s cast of reputable mobs, the sniffer is from an ancient era and no longer spawns naturally. Instead, you’ll have to use the new Minecraft archaeology feature to brush off suspicious sand until you find your very own sniffer egg. In the past, Mojang has also said that sniffer eggs could be found in underwater ruins—so it’s likely there will be another path to take to your very own gardening assistant. As for how you’ll get the egg to hatch, we don’t know quite yet. At the moment the sniffer egg is only available in creative mode, where you can spawn them the same as you would any other mob.
Once you’ve got a sniffer, they’re a passive mob that spends a lot of time wandering around or competing with the Minecraft camel for the derpiest sitting stance. Besides that, if you can befriend one, Mojang has said that they’ll sniff out and dig up ancient and rare seeds for you to grow. So far the only specific plant seeds we know the sniffer can dig up are for the new torchflower. We also know that you can breed the sniffer with torchflower seeds, which is rather convenient of them.
- Where do you find sniffers? From their eggs, via archaeology or in underwater ruins.
- Can you breed sniffers? Yep! So far sniffers are bred with the seeds from the new torchflower.
- Are sniffers hostile? Nope. They’re big snuggly grass blocks.
- Can sniffers be tamed? So far no, you cannot tempt or tame a sniffer, only breed them.
- Can you ride sniffers? Doesn’t seem like it, though they’re certainly big enough.
When will the sniffer get added to Minecraft?
You can play with the sniffer right now, with no waiting necessary, and you won’t even have to do any digging around in the dirt. With snapshot 23w07a sniffers are in along with the cherry blossom forest biome and archaeology, though they’re only enabled via their creative mode eggs at the moment. That won’t stop you from spawning in an entire field of them to befriend, though.