As per the now well-established post-launch formula of Minecraft, fans will soon have another comprehensive content update to explore and enjoy. The 1.20 update is one of the most anticipated major updates for the sandbox title in recent memory, with the official name of "the Tales and Trails update" being recently confirmed by Mojang.
While the 1.20 update for Minecraft is set to introduce a huge range of brand-new content, it is the new mobs of the update that have captured huge amounts of fan attention, as is usually the case. These new mobs include camels and a unique mob known as the Sniffer, and while not a lot is currently known of exactly how the Sniffer will operate, there seems to be a great and almost obvious opportunity for it to bring about new mobs further down the line.
Minecraft 1.20: The Sniffer Mob
Minecraft's upcoming Sniffer mob is a truly special one, and so it is no wonder that is already the source of so much debate and discourse among the title's wide-spanning community. The Sniffer was the winner of 2022's Minecraft Mob Vote and is subsequently set to be introduced to the game in the near future.
The Mob Vote is an increasingly popular annual event for Minecraft, in which the community can directly influence what mobs are added to the game via voting. The involved mobs in this vote often possess very unique characteristics that target certain areas of Minecraft's gameplay, and the Sniffer appears to tackle the game's penchant for agriculture and exploration. Lore-wise, the Sniffer is a long-extinct mob within the world of Minecraft, and so players must explore and find Sniffer eggs within Ocean Ruin structures should they want to spawn one.
Once hatched, the Sniffer will occasionally seek out and acquire ancient seeds for brand-new plant life in Minecraft which the player can use, such as torchflower seeds and pitcher pods. The range and potential for these seeds is practically limitless, and an obvious opportunity is present for new plant-like mobs to be associated with them.
Minecraft's Sniffer Seed Mobs
The Sniffer mob pushes the lore of Minecraft more and more into the realm of fantasy, so there is no reason that the ancient seeds that it can find should not also match these reality-bending themes. Crucially, the mob opens up Minecraft to a huge range of new plant life that could possess a variety of potential utilities such as buffs like speed boosts and even temporary x-ray vision, but a large element of what these seeds could bring about seems to have been ignored by Mojang.
A lot of Minecraft's survival exploration is anchored in risk versus reward, so the Sniffer mob should have more complexity than simply giving players seeds with obvious and constant utilities. For example, some seeds could be labeled as mystery seeds, and have a litany of random outcomes that could come from planting them. On the good end, these seeds could give the player things like diamonds, but harsher outcomes could see hostile plant creatures spawn as mobs that attack the player.
Despite the huge range and imagination behind Minecraft's mobs, no mobs currently exist that are tied to vegetation, with there being a clear space for hostile plant mobs in the game. If these mobs are to be ever introduced to the game, then the flora-focused Sniffer mob seems to be the perfect opportunity to do so.
Minecraft is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
