How to Find and Hatch a Sniffer Egg in Minecraft

The sniffer is the only mob in Minecraft you cannot find alive in the wild. It went extinct in the game's fiction, so the only way to meet one is archaeology: dig its egg out of ancient ruins and hatch it yourself. The process is slow, a little fiddly, and entirely unlike normal exploration — but it ends with a giant, gentle seed-sniffing tortoise-ant-eater thing, so it is worth it.

Where Sniffer Eggs Hide

Your destination is the warm ocean ruins — the stone and sandstone structures scattered on the floor of warm oceans, usually near deserts and badlands. Scattered inside and around them are suspicious sand and suspicious gravel blocks, which look like their normal versions with a rougher, cracked texture. Brush one and it might reveal pottery sherds, candles, emeralds... or, with a 6.7% chance per block, a sniffer egg. Those odds mean a single ruin cluster rarely gives you an egg, so plan to sweep several ruins. Two eggs is the real goal, because two adult sniffers can breed and make more.

Gear for the Hunt

• A brush — craft one from a feather, a copper ingot and a stick in a vertical line. Brushing is slow and eats durability, so bring a spare.
• Potions of water breathing and night vision — three minutes of air becomes eight in the extended version, and night vision turns murky seabed gloom into clear visibility. A Respiration helmet and Depth Strider boots help for the same reasons.
• A shield and a decent weapon — drowned guard these ruins, and the trident-throwers are no joke.
• Doors (Java Edition) — a placed door creates a pocket of air underwater, a cheap way to refill your breath mid-search.

Brushing Without Wasting Blocks

Suspicious blocks are fragile: mine one, fall on one, or let it drop and it shatters with no loot at all. Instead, hold use with the brush and sweep it gently — the item inside gradually emerges as you brush, so you can actually see what a block contains partway through. If it is clearly not an egg and you are only here for eggs, stop and move on; each block's loot is fixed and never rerolls. Work methodically through every suspicious block in the ruin, then swim to the next ruin and repeat until the RNG relents.

Hatching the Egg

Back home, place the egg on any solid block and the hatching process starts on its own. A normal hatch takes about 20 minutes; placing the egg on a moss block doubles the speed, bringing it down to roughly 10 minutes. Cracks spread across the shell as it progresses. One catch: the chunk has to stay loaded, which in practice means staying within about 128 blocks of the egg — go mining across the map and the egg simply waits, making no progress. You can pick the egg back up by hand if you placed it badly, just do not jump on it.

After It Hatches

The baby, a snifflet, grows into a full sniffer that wanders around sniffing the ground. Left to its own devices it digs up ancient seeds — torchflower seeds and pitcher pods — which grow into decorative plants found nowhere else. Feed two adult sniffers torchflower seeds and they breed, with one of them laying a fresh sniffer egg as an item you can pick up. That closes the loop: two eggs from the ruins become a self-sustaining sniffer herd, and your archaeology days are over.