Sniffer

A sniffer is a passive mob that does not spawn naturally, and can only be hatched from sniffer eggs. It sniffs out and digs seeds for various unique decorative plants out of dirt, grass, and moss blocks.

Spawning
Sniffers spawn by hatching from sniffer eggs found in suspicious sand from warm ocean ruins. Breeding sniffers with torchflower seeds would also result in a sniffer egg being laid as an item.

Drops
When killed, adult sniffers drop experience points if killed by a player or a tamed wolf; snifflets drop no experience just like other baby animals.

Upon successful breeding, is dropped.

Behavior
Sniffers wander aimlessly, avoiding hazards and obstacles. They occasionally smell their surroundings and track ancient seeds by pressing their nose to the ground. When they find a seed, they sploot and use their noses to dig into the ground until they get torchflower seeds or a pitcher pod. For a sniffer to be able to dig it needs to be doing nothing else, not in water, on the ground, not in a boat or minecart and the block underneath the head needs to be diggable and reachable for the sniffer. The head location is defined as 2.25 blocks in front of the center of the body. The sniffer also stores the last 20 locations it has dug up so it can't dig there anymore. After sniffing out seeds, an eight minute cooldown is activated before it can dig in again.

The following blocks are diggable by the sniffer: Data packs from Java Edition can change this list by modifying the  block tag.

Sniffers cannot dig on mycelium, which is intended.

Breeding
The player can breed the sniffers using torchflower seeds. When two adult sniffers are bred, they drop a sniffer egg, after which the parents have a 5-minute cooldown before they can breed again.

Healing
Sniffers are healed by health points each time they are fed a torchflower seed.

Snifflets
A baby sniffer is called a snifflet and they have a bigger head than the adult. Snifflets take 48000 game ticks to grow up into adult sniffers, which is equal to 40 minutes or two ingame days.

Sounds
Sniffers use the Friendly Creatures sound category for entity-dependent sound events.



ID




Entity data
Sniffers have entity data associated with them that contain various properties.






 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.

Trivia

 * The sniffer was originally a doodle Nekofresa made in their kitchen.
 * The sniffer was Nekofresa's first mob ever designed for Minecraft.
 * The plants that sniffers find are based off kniphofia genus of perennial flowering plants, which can be similarly called "torch lilies" as a common name for torchflowers and pitcher pods are loosely based off existing pitcher plants but with an orchid or ornamental vibe.
 * The sniffer's walking animation was inspired by the leg movement that centipedes do.
 * During the prototype phase for the sniffer's digging up of items the developers used beds as a placeholder.
 * Due to the size of the sniffer it was a big challenge for the developers to perfect its pathfinding especially on 1 block edges.
 * A new team made up of new developers were tasked with developing the sniffer, and most of them had never made a mob before.
 * The sniffer's digging animation was inspired by the way s spread their legs while lying down.
 * To this day, the developers still don't know what the sniffer's front yellow part is. Whether it's a beak, a nose, or eyes, or whether it's used for breathing or finding seeds is unknown.