The happy ghast in Minecraft: dried ghast, harness and flying

A happy ghast in Minecraft is a friendly, flying ghast that up to four players can ride at once. You get one by putting a dried ghast block in water. After about 20 minutes a ghastling hatches, and that baby takes another 20 minutes to grow up, or less if you feed it snowballs. Put a harness on the adult and you can fly. You don’t need a saddle.

The happy ghast arrived in Java 1.21.6, Chase the Skies, on 17 June 2025, and it’s in Bedrock too. Below you’ll find where to get a dried ghast, how to raise the ghastling, the harness recipe and what you can do once you’re in the air. Checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52 (Bedrock 26.60 is planned for 27 October 2026).

What is a happy ghast in Minecraft?

It’s the peaceful cousin of the ghast you know from the Nether. A happy ghast is a huge mob, four blocks wide and four blocks tall, that floats around the place where it grew up. It never shoots fireballs and doesn’t panic when it gets hurt. Unlike a normal ghast, it isn’t immune to fire or lava, so keep it away from both.

Without a harness a happy ghast stays within 64 blocks of its home. With a harness that range drops to 32 blocks. The home moves to its current spot whenever you put a harness on or take it off, detach a lead, dismount, or stop tempting it. Tempting is easy: hold a snowball, or a harness if it isn’t wearing one yet, and it flies over to you.

Find a dried ghast and grow a ghastling

Everything starts with a dried ghast, a block that looks like a small, shrivelled ghast. There are three ways to get one:

• Craft it: place eight ghast tears around one block of soul sand on a crafting table. Normal ghasts drop ghast tears in the Nether.
• Find it: in soul sand valleys, about one in three Nether fossils has a dried ghast next to it.
• Barter for it: give a piglin a gold ingot. Roughly 2 percent of those trades give a dried ghast.

You need a portal to get there, see how to make a nether portal. Then bring the block back to the Overworld. Water disappears the moment you pour it out in the Nether, so the block can’t hydrate there. Place it and make sure it’s waterlogged: put it in water, or pour water onto it.

Green particles appear and the face slowly cheers up. You see the first change after about 5 minutes, more after 10 and a fully happy face after 15. After about 20 minutes the block turns into a ghastling. If the water disappears halfway, the ghast dries out again at the same pace, and breaking the block resets it to dry straight away.

A ghastling grows up in 20 minutes. Snowballs make that faster, and here Java and Bedrock differ. In Java each snowball takes 10 percent off the remaining time. In Bedrock a freshly hatched ghastling is fully grown after 10 snowballs. Ghastlings sometimes follow players and certain animals within 16 blocks, and unlike adults they don’t drown underwater.

Prefer a small flying friend? Since Java 26.1 and Bedrock 26.10 you can feed a ghastling a golden dandelion and it stops growing. A second golden dandelion lets it grow again.

Craft a harness

You ride a happy ghast with a harness. The recipe: three pieces of leather in the top row of the crafting table, then glass, wool and glass in the row below. The colour of the wool sets the colour of the harness, so there are 16 versions. You can also dye a finished harness with any dye.

Use the harness on an adult happy ghast to put it on. Ghastlings can’t wear one. A dispenser can equip a harness too. To take it off again, use shears on the ghast and the harness drops as an item.

Fly with up to four players

• Steering: the first player to climb on steers, from the seat above its face. Forward flies in the direction you look and jump goes straight up. There’s no button for down: look down and fly forward.
• Passengers: up to three friends sit around the sides. When someone gets off, the others shift round to fill the empty seat.
• Speed: about 3.6 blocks per second while you steer. A Speed effect doesn’t make it any faster.
• Standing on it: when you dismount, you land on top. While a player stands on it, the ghast hangs still in the air and turns to face north, east, south or west. That makes it a floating platform for building high up. Once nobody stands on it any more, it moves again and anything left on top falls off.
• Cargo: hold the lead of a boat or a large animal such as a horse, camel or sniffer, sneak and use it on the happy ghast. The load hangs underneath. Shears cut it loose. You can’t ride in a carried boat yourself, but you can sit on a pig or an unsaddled horse hanging below.
• Leads: a lead on a happy ghast stretches to 16 blocks instead of the usual 12.
• Healing: it heals 1 point every 30 seconds. In rain or snow under open sky, or at cloud height between Y=187 and Y=196, it heals 1 point every second.

Happy ghasts on a server

A happy ghast is a group mount by design, so it really shines on a server with friends. A few tips:

• Tie it up at spawn. A harnessed ghast drifts within 32 blocks of its home, and the home moves whenever someone dismounts. Tie it to a fence post with a lead, so it’s still there when the next player logs on.
• Agree who flies. Whoever climbs on first is the pilot, and the others are passengers until they hop off.
• Build together. Park the ghast where you want to build and stand on it: it stays put as long as someone is on top.
• Move animals between bases. Fly horses, camels or a sniffer to a friend’s base instead of walking them across the map. See how to tame a horse if you want something to carry.
• Keep it safe. With 20 health points and no fire resistance, a happy ghast is easy to lose over lava. Give it a name tag so everyone recognises the group’s ghast.