How to Get a Happy Ghast in Minecraft

The ghast has spent fifteen years as the Nether's flying menace, so its friendly cousin still feels like a magic trick. The happy ghast, added in the Chase the Skies drop, is a smiling, rideable flying mount that can carry you and three friends across your world. You cannot catch one in the wild, though — you raise it from a block, and the whole process starts in the most miserable biome in the Nether.

Step 1: Get a Dried Ghast Block

Your future mount begins as a dried ghast, a small shrivelled block found in the Nether's soul sand valleys. Search around the giant ribcage fossils that generate there: each fossil site has roughly a one-in-three chance of spawning a dried ghast nearby. Soul sand valleys are crawling with skeletons and regular ghasts, so go geared and watch the skies. If fossils refuse to cooperate, there are two backups — dried ghasts can be crafted, and piglins will occasionally barter one for gold.

Step 2: Just Add Water

Bring the dried ghast home, place it somewhere safe, and submerge it in water — a water bucket used on the block waterlogs it, or you can set it in a shallow pool. Then wait. Over about 20 minutes the block rehydrates, its frown turns to a smile, and it pops free as a ghastling: a small, friendly baby ghast that flutters around and follows players. Keep it somewhere enclosed; ghastlings are curious and the world is full of drops.

Step 3: Raise the Ghastling

A ghastling grows into a happy ghast after roughly another 20 minutes on its own. Impatient players can skip the wait with its favourite food: snowballs. Feeding a ghastling snowballs speeds its growth, and it takes 64 snowballs in total to grow one up instantly — a fair trade for a quick trip to a snowy biome with a shovel. When the growth finishes, the little ghastling is suddenly a full-sized happy ghast, beaming and ready to work.

Riding Your Happy Ghast

To fly one you need a harness, crafted from 3 leather, 2 glass and 1 wool. Equip the harness on the happy ghast and climb aboard: it carries up to four players at once, standing and riding together, which makes it the game's best group tour bus and a superb platform for building tall structures from the air. Happy ghasts drift when left alone, so park yours properly — tether it with a lead or build a small station or pen where it can hover in place between flights.

More Than a Mount

The happy ghast quietly solves an old logistics problem: moving mobs. Lead a boat to the ghast and it can airlift the passengers — including two villagers at once, delivered straight to your trading hall — and livestock that would never survive a long overland walk can be ferried by lead beneath it. Heavy mobs that boats and minecarts handle badly suddenly have an airline. Raise one ghast for flying, and you will soon want a second just for freight.