How to get a sniffer in Minecraft
Brush a sniffer egg out of warm ocean ruin sand, hatch it on moss, raise the snifflet and breed more sniffers with torchflower seeds.
A sniffer cannot be found wandering the world. In survival the only way to get one is to hatch a sniffer egg. Your first egg has to be brushed out of suspicious sand, and after that you can breed adults for more. This guide covers where the first egg is, how to dig it out, how to hatch it, and how to raise the snifflet.
Checked against Minecraft Java Edition 26.3, October 2026.
What you need
- A brush, crafted from a feather on top, a copper ingot in the middle and a stick at the bottom, in a single column on a crafting table.
- Torchflower seeds later, to raise and breed your sniffers. The sniffer itself digs those up.
Find a warm ocean ruin
Your first sniffer egg only comes from suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins. After that, breeding adults drops more. Warm ocean ruins are underwater ruins in warm, lukewarm and deep lukewarm oceans.
If your world has a ruin you cannot find, an operator can stand in the ocean and run /locate structure minecraft:ocean_ruin_warm in game. It prints coordinates for the nearest one, and you can teleport there or travel by boat.
Brush the suspicious sand
- Hold the brush and use it on a suspicious sand block. Keep the use button held down.
- Cracks show up as the block is excavated, and an item slowly appears from the side you are brushing.
- When the item drops, the block turns into ordinary sand.
Each block holds one item chosen from ten possibilities. The sniffer egg is one of them, and it comes up roughly one time in fifteen, so expect to brush quite a few blocks. The rest of the loot is coal, emeralds, wheat, wooden hoes, gold nuggets, an iron axe and three pottery sherds.
Hatch the egg
Place the egg like any block. It cracks over time and hatches into a snifflet:
- On a moss block it hatches in about 10 minutes.
- On any other block it takes about 20 minutes.
Only plain moss blocks give the faster hatch. Put the egg somewhere you can keep an eye on.
Raise the snifflet
A snifflet needs 40 minutes to grow up, which is twice as long as most baby animals. Feeding it torchflower seeds cuts the remaining time by 10 percent each time. Adult sniffers dig for seeds on grass, dirt, mud, moss and podzol, and give you a torchflower seed or a pitcher pod with equal chance.
Breed more sniffers
Feed two adult sniffers torchflower seeds. They do not spawn a baby directly, they drop another sniffer egg that you place and hatch the same way. After breeding they need 5 minutes before they can breed again. Dig up seeds with a sniffer you already have, and use them to feed the others.
On your server
Nothing here needs a plugin or mod. Sniffers were added in Java Edition 1.20, so any server on 1.20 or newer has them, and eggs, snifflets and seeds follow the normal survival rules for your world. To change which version your server runs, see Change your Minecraft version or mod loader. To make a player an operator so they can run /locate, see Whitelist players and set operators.
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