Minecraft Ghast Update: A Complete Guide

With a new update comes new ways to play Minecraft. One of the game’s most recent content “game drops” is an update to Ghasts!

Not only is the existing Ghast a bit different, but now there are multiple new kinds of Ghast, including the Happy Ghast and the Dried Ghast. This guide will cover everything you need to know about the new Ghasts, including what they do and how to acquire them.

Updated 9/19/2025

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What Is The Ghast In Minecraft?

As you surely know, the Ghast in Minecraft is a terrifying, ghostly mob that will spawn naturally in the Nether.

Regular Ghasts float around the Nether dimension and make crying sounds. If they see you, they’ll chase you around, yell, and shoot fireballs that not only deal big damage, but also destroy any surrounding blocks. This destruction is especially dangerous in the Nether, as destroyed blocks can have you falling into lava and will absolutely drain your health.

A Ghast will rarely come into melee range. Instead, you must defeat it with a bow or by reflecting the fireballs back with your weapon.

Upon defeat, a Ghast will drop five experience points, a Ghast Tear, and some Gunpowder.

Ghast Update Minecraft Details

Revealed at Minecraft Live 2025, these Ghast additions were announced for Bedrock Edition and Java Edition. While these entities aren’t available in the main game just yet, not even through the experimental toggle, you can enable them by playing the latest version of Minecraft Preview. Unfortunately, this means you can’t play on your normal world file for this content. Wait for a later date.

The Ghast Update in Minecraft introduces the following Ghast mob types:

Ghastling

Much like its adult counterpart, Ghastlings roam around the Overworld and may or may not follow you around a bit. There isn’t much to them, aside from the fact that they’ll grow into a Happy Ghast over time.

You can turn it into a Happy Ghast by waiting twenty minutes or by throwing multiple snowballs to make it fully grown.

Surprisingly, Ghastlings don’t have a spawn egg in Creative Mode like most other mobs do. Instead, you can only acquire one from a Dried Ghast block, which we’ll discuss next.

Dried Ghast

Believe it or not, the Dried Ghast block isn’t a mob. It’s an item!

You can find the Dried Ghast block near Nether Fossils in Soul Sand Valleys, through trading with Villagers, or by crafting it with eight Ghast Tears and a block of Soul Sand, organized as follows:

Note: Previously, this recipe consisted of eight Ghast Tears and a Bone Block. Someone decided that this is no longer the case. Maybe it was Jens Bergensten?

This block is easy to mine, and drops immediately even without a tool. It’s essential to spawn a Happy Ghast.

Place the Dried Ghast underwater to waterlog it. You can tell it is turning into a Ghastling by the green stars.

If you break the Dried Ghast while it’s waterlogged, the damaged entity will revert back to the Dried form.

Happy Ghast Mob

Happy Ghast mobs are a new mob type that up to four players can ride at once. You cannot find this passive version of the Ghast. Instead, you have to create it using a Dried Ghast, a mob we’ll detail in a little bit.

To create the Happy Ghast mob, put a Dried Ghast underwater, turning it into a Dried Ghast block. From there, it will turn into a Ghastling, a smaller version of a Ghast, after twenty minutes.

Once you have a Ghastling, you must wait twenty minutes for it to grow into a Happy Ghast. You can speed up the process by feeding it snowballs.

Unlike their hostile counterparts, the Happy Ghast roams around your world, staying within a 64 block radius of where you spawned it, otherwise known as its home. You can place a Harness on a fully grown Happy Ghast to ride it around your world, or use a Lead to drag it around. A Harnessed Happy Ghast will stay within 32 blocks of its home instead of the initial 64.

The Happy Ghast is Minecraft’s first flying mount. Not only this, but it can support up to four players at once. The first player to mount the Happy Ghast controls it, while the others ride alongside it on each side of the Harness.

Interestingly, the Happy Ghast can act as a block if you’re not mounting it. That means you can fly it up to the top of a mountain, get off of it, and still stand on top — a sort of movable platform, if you will.

Use Shears to remove the Harness from a Happy Ghast.

How To Craft A Harness

Before getting into the other Ghast types, you may notice that the Harness is a new item. You can only use it on a Happy Ghast at this time.

To craft the Harness, combine three Leather, two Glass blocks, and a Wool block in a Crafting Table as follows:

To address player feedback, the game allows you to recolor a Harness by combining it with dye in a Crafting Table.

Aside from all of these changes, the recent Minecraft update adjusted the default Ghast textures.

All of this content will be in a full game update in the near future, once it has been fully tested.

Now that you’ve leveled up your Ghast knowledge, it’s time to impress your buddies with everything there is to know about this strange creature.

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