Minecraft: 7 Things You Need To Know About Sniffers (2024)

Minecraft is constantly updating and changing with the times as Mojang tries to keep up with the demands of a community that craves new additions to the game. With the recent 1.20 update leading to some significant changes, the community is once again trying to catch up and learn what has changed about the game.

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While Minecraft1.20 has introduced the world of archeology for players to explore, including items such as the brush, there has also been a new mob introduced which is sure to shake up the gameplay, namely the Sniffer. This large creature has a surprisingly large amount to show even veteran Minecraft players.

7 Sniffers Are Ancient

Sniffers have been described as the first “ancient” mob to be introduced in Minecraft. After winning the Minecraft Mob Vote 2022 against other tough competition, Sniffers are finally available in the game. Coming with the archeology options that have been added to the game in update 1.20, Sniffers are found and added to the world only via players getting their hands dirty with some digging, a great new way to gain XP.

Minecraft calls Sniffers dinosaurs, and therefore they aren’t common to the world. It is possible that players will be seeing more ancient mobs being added to the game in the future as a result of the door being opened by Sniffers getting introduced.

6 Sniffers Are Huge

In terms of appearance, Sniffers have a large yellow mouth or beak, and are mostly green and red. This appearance seems to be about helping them blend in with grass and dirt while they are sniffing or digging.

Sniffers are also very large for a Minecraft mob. They are both taller and much longer than a Minecraft player’s avatar. Coming in at around a similar size to the Ravager, it is uncommon to see a passive mob reaching such a size in Minecraft. The Sniffer is a game-changer of a creature in more ways than one.

5 Sniffers Can’t Spawn Naturally

Many Minecraft players will be wondering how best to spawn a Sniffer into their world, so they can see it for the first time. Unfortunately, Sniffers cannot randomly spawn into Minecraft, they instead need to be specifically found by the player if they crave a look at the new beasts.

While players are engaging in the new Minecraft activity of archeology, they will sometimes find ancient eggs both in suspicious sand and in deep ocean monuments. These eggs can be hatched to produce a baby Sniffer, which will take about twenty minutes to grow into the player’s own large dinosaur.

4 Sniffers Love Seeds

The main purpose of a Sniffer in Minecraft is to do what the name implies, sniff. Sniffers will walk aimlessly around like real NPCs and never do anything except sniff for seeds. This is where their value to the player begins to come in because the seeds that Sniffers can find are extremely useful for players looking to experience every aspect of the Minecraft 1.20 update.

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Sniffers will sometimes locate something that piques their interest and will, quite literally, bury their heads into the ground. When they come up, they will bring with them ancient seeds that the player can pick up. These seeds will grow into one of the unique plants if the player tries to grow them. Still, this does make Sniffers more useful than some recently added mobs like the Axolotl.

3 Sniffer Breeding Is Simple

While it is literally impossible to find a Sniffer naturally walking around in a Minecraft world without player intervention, breeding them after some are already available is easy. Players looking to put two together to make three only need to leave a pair of Sniffers alone together.

When they dig up some torch flower seeds, the player can feed these to the Sniffers which will convince them that it is time to make a baby. Sniffers can only perform this feat once every ten minutes or so, meaning players will have to wait a little while before creating their own army of dinosaurs.

2 Sniffers Aren’t Powerful

One of the more surprising aspects about Sniffers in Minecraft is that, despite their size and notable nature as actual dinosaurs, they are not overly powerful. Comparing the Sniffer to the similarly sized Ravager, players will find that the Sniffer is actually hugely weak as a mob.

Sniffer health bars only amount to seven of a Minecraft player’s health hearts, meaning that despite being much larger than a standard player, a Sniffer wouldn’t last as long under attack. They are also vulnerable to every kind of damage in the game, with no specific defenses to help them survive. It’s no wonder that they went extinct with such liabilities holding them back.

1 Sniffers Never Attack

Some Minecraft mobs are passive, but others are truly passive. Some examples of mobs that can be passive but are also capable of turning on the player when provoked include alpacas and spiders during the day. However, the Sniffer is not one of these, it has no capabilities in attack whatsoever.

If a Minecraft player is to hit a Sniffer with just their hand, it will only take fourteen hits to kill it off completely, and the Sniffer will never once attack the player in revenge. Sniffers, despite being large and being dinosaurs, are completely passive in Minecraft at all times.

Minecraft Update 1.20 was released on March 2nd, 2023, and is currently available on all platforms with both Java and Bedrock Edition.

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