Minecraft 1.20: Sniffer Secrets & Cherry Groves

Hi, my name is Magnus, I’m a gameplay developer. And I’m Chi, I’m a 3D artist on Minecraft Vanilla. I’ve worked with the Sniffer from the start. It was the team’s first mob we worked with. And there were many kind of… -Oh, you felt something sniffing behind you! -Something really big just behind me.

It felt really exciting to work with a big mob, like the Sniffer. -With the mob vote and… -Hold on! Who did you vote for? I did vote for the Sniffer, I have to say, yeah. The Sniffer was in my heart, I felt it, I knew it.

The Sniffer is a large animal, what kind of problems did you encounter? There were a lot of different kinds of difficulties. Especially the pathfinding, moving around small edges, jumping up, swimming… There was a huge amount of different things to take into account. Chi, what is the head? Is it a nose? A beak?

-Or two eyes in front? -I still, to be honest, don’t know. Are they noses for breathing or is it for looking? The Sniffers walk was inspired by locomotion from animals. One of them was centipedes, how they walk. I really wanted to model and animate an animal with six legs.

It’s a challenge to make good animations for Minecraft, to make it fit the game. -You outdid yourself! -Aw, c’mon, you outdid yourself. -Teamwork. -Sniff, sniff. I recall us prototyping it quite early on. The first thing we did was, like: Okay, we have the Sniffer, and we start popping up items.

What’s a random item we can add? Let’s just add beds! -I remember that! -Yeah! The Sniffer started to dig up beds everywhere! We had maybe ten Sniffers and beds everywhere. The server started lagging because we tweaked it a bit wrong. The whole team had a good laugh.

Would you have made the Sniffer even larger? No, no. I mean, as a player, yes! As a developer, I would say a big “No”. -Good answer! -The bigger, the harder. -This scale was already a challenge. -But definitely a fun challenge. We definitely tried to essentially make it as big as we could.

-Magnus, do you know what a “sploot” is? -A sploot? Have you seen animals lying down, their legs all spread out, starfishing on the floor? -Yeah! -It’s super cute when corgis do that. That was one of my inspirations for the Sniffer, plopping down after searching for the seed and then digging.

So they spread their legs. I call it a “sploot”. Oh, that’s where it came from! I had no clue, I just thought it was so cute! When you introduced and showcased the animation, like: “We need this for the Sniffer! Wow! That looks so amazing!

I’m curious, with the cherry blossoms, what was the inspiration around it? -I don’t know. -You don’t know? Okay, I know! The cherry groves were one of the top community picks. This is an update we built together with the community.

And adding this is a nudge, like, “Hey, we hear you. We’ve got you, bro!” Walking underneath them, it feels like you are in a scene in Japan or something. Like springtime is here. I can just see the Sniffer, the cherry blossoms,

And even the hanging signs, like wooden… It feels so much like you are in Japan. Yeah, and the pink wood set as well, for the cherry groves, It’s like it makes sense to add that. Early development of the cherry grove, like the trees… Oh, that one! Yeah, that was something, for sure!

When we started developing it, we didn’t have any art yet or any textures. So I recall one of our colleagues added the pig texture. -Because it’s pink. -Oh, because it’s pink! So you could see the whole tree with pigs everywhere! Like small pig faces all over the tree!

It was such a good laugh, everyone loved it! -I mean, yeah. -Sniff, sniff. Text: Iyuno.