Taking Inventory: Pitcher Pod

Pitcher pods were added to the game in the Trails & Tales update, alongside sniffers. They can be planted into farmland, just like other crops, where they’ll grow over time into full-sized pitcher plants. 

Breaking one before it matures will drop the pod again, but when it’s fully grown then it’ll simply drop the plant and not any additional pods. For some reason, pitcher plants are no longer able to reproduce. Perhaps because whatever insect pollinated these ancient seeds is long extinct?

As well as growing pitcher plants with the pods, you can also use them to breed chickens and tame parrots – just like other seeds. And the plants? They’re good for showing off to visitors that you can grow ancient seeds, and for crushing down into cyan dye.

On Earth, “pitcher plants” is a name that refers to several different carnivorous plants. Wait – a plant that eats meat? Yes! Well, if you include insects as meat, anyway. These plants contain a deep tube where the sides are extremely slippery and the bottom is filled by digestive fluids. Insects are lured in with nectar, fall into the soup, and die, with their nutrients slowly absorbed by the plant. Creepy, right?

It gets creepier – there are other kinds of carnivorous plants too. Some are sticky, some suck in prey with a vacuum, some capture food using inward-pointing hairs that lead to a digestive organ, and some – like the famous Venus Fly Trap – that snap their leaves shut when prey is detected.

All of the pitcher plants live in the tropics – but they mostly have flowers and seeds that they use to reproduce like other plants do. Unlike in Minecraft, there are still enough pollinators around to propagate them, for now!