The sniffer and the armadillo in Minecraft

The sniffer digs up ancient seeds you can’t find anywhere else, and the armadillo supplies the scutes for wolf armour. You hatch a sniffer yourself from an egg found in warm ocean ruins, while armadillos simply wander around savannas and badlands.

Below you’ll find how to get a sniffer, what it digs up and what to do with an armadillo. Checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52.

What does the sniffer do?

The sniffer is an ancient mob that won the 2022 mob vote. It plods around, sniffs the ground and now and then digs something up: torchflower seeds or a pitcher pod, with equal odds. After digging it waits eight minutes before it searches again.

It digs in dirt, coarse dirt, rooted dirt, grass blocks, podzol, mud and moss. On a lead, in water or while following the seeds in your hand, it won’t dig. A baby, the snifflet, can’t dig at all; growing up takes forty minutes.

Finding and hatching a sniffer egg

Sniffers never spawn on their own. Your first egg comes from suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins, dug out with a brush: a feather, a copper ingot and a stick stacked on the crafting table.

1. Find warm ocean ruins. They’re in warm and lukewarm oceans. Since 26.3 the secret chest of an abandoned camp can also hold a Warm Ocean Ruins Map.
2. Brush the suspicious sand around the ruins. Watch out for drowned in the water. In Java roughly one in fifteen blocks holds an egg.
3. Put the egg on a moss block. It hatches there after ten minutes, on any other block after twenty.

Got two? Breed them with torchflower seeds. They lay a new egg that you hatch again, and then they need five minutes before they can breed again. In Bedrock they only breed at full health. Do build a roomy pen, as an adult sniffer is almost two blocks wide.

Which ancient seeds does it dig up?

You plant both on farmland, just like wheat seeds. They’re mostly pretty flowers for your garden: a sniffer is more of a gardener than a farmer.

What does the armadillo do?

The armadillo won the 2023 mob vote and lives in savannas and badlands. It’s shy. When a player sprints past, someone rides by or a zombie or skeleton comes near, it rolls up into a ball and takes less damage. Spiders, on the other hand, stay away from armadillos.

You breed armadillos with a spider eye, and they follow you while you hold one. One stuck rolled up? Put it on a lead and it unrolls straight away. What the other animals eat is in what animals eat in Minecraft.

What can you make from scutes?

An armadillo drops an armadillo scute every five to ten minutes. A brush is quicker: each stroke gives one scute and costs 16 points of durability. A new brush is good for four scutes in Java and five in Bedrock.

Six scutes on the crafting table make wolf armour:

• Only for your own wolf. You put it on an adult wolf you tamed yourself. No wolf yet? Here’s how to tame a wolf.
• It absorbs nearly all damage until it wears out. Drowning, freezing, suffocation and magic still get through.
• Repair it with scutes: use one on your wolf.
• You can dye it, and take it off again with shears.

Find a savanna quickly with /locate biome savanna; more commands like that are in our Minecraft commands guide. There’s more about abandoned camps in Minecraft 26.3 Wilderness Bound. If you find a camp’s rare secret chest, it always holds a map, sometimes to an ancient city or a trial chamber.