How to Get Torchflower and Pitcher Plant in Minecraft

Most Minecraft flowers just sit in a meadow waiting to be picked. The torchflower and pitcher plant make you work for them: they are ancient plants that no longer exist in the wild, and the only creature that remembers where their seeds are buried is a big, gentle, long-extinct-looking mob called the sniffer.

Step 1: Get a Sniffer

Everything starts with a sniffer egg, which you brush out of suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins. Place the egg and wait — hatching takes about ten minutes, and it goes roughly twice as fast on a moss block. The snifflet that emerges grows into a full sniffer, and adult sniffers periodically lower their heads, sniff around, and dig something out of the ground. That something is sometimes a torchflower seed or a pitcher pod, and there is no other way to obtain either one. Breed sniffers with torchflower seeds to build up a flock, and more sniffers means more digging.

Step 2: Grow Them Like Crops

Despite their exotic looks, both plants farm exactly like wheat:

• Till soil with a hoe to make farmland, with water within four blocks to keep it hydrated.
• Plant the torchflower seeds or pitcher pods on the farmland.
• Keep light levels at 9 or above so they grow.

The two grow at different paces. A torchflower passes through 3 growth stages and needs about 2 bone meal to force to maturity. A pitcher plant has 5 stages, takes noticeably longer, and needs around 4 bone meal to rush. Plan your garden rows accordingly — the pitcher plant finishes as a two-block-tall flower, so give it headroom.

The Catch: No Seeds Back

Here is what makes these plants precious. When you harvest a mature torchflower or pitcher plant, you get the flower — and nothing else. They do not drop seeds, and Fortune does not help. Every single plant in your garden traces back to a seed a sniffer dug up, so your sniffer pen is a permanent part of the production line. Protect it accordingly, and never convert your last seeds to dye.

Uses and Decoration

Functionally the two are mostly ornamental, and they are very good at it. The torchflower glows a warm orange (though despite the name it emits no actual light) and can be placed in a flower pot. The pitcher plant's blue-green pitcher looks unlike anything else in the game and stands nearly two blocks tall in a field. In a pinch, a torchflower crafts into orange dye and a pitcher plant into cyan dye — and a torchflower can even stand in as the flower in a night-vision suspicious stew — but given how slowly sniffer seeds accumulate, most players plant every one they get.

A Simple Collection Setup

Following sniffers around by hand gets old fast. Instead, pen several sniffers on a patch of grass or dirt (at least 6×6) with a hopper minecart running on rails in a loop underneath the floor blocks. The cart passes under the sniffers and collects anything they dig up through the ground, depositing it in a chest at the end of the line. Leave it running while you build nearby, and your seed supply quietly grows on its own.