Updated for Java Edition 26.3 (October 2026).
The happy ghast is a friendly, rideable flying mob added in Java Edition 1.21.6 (Chase the Skies, June 2025). You don’t find one: you grow one. Put a dried ghast block in water, wait about 20 minutes for a ghastling to hatch, then about 20 more for it to grow up, and put a harness on it. Up to four players can ride one.
| Type | Passive, rideable flying mob |
|---|---|
| Starts as | A dried ghast block, found at Nether fossils in soul sand valleys or crafted from 1 soul sand and 8 ghast tears |
| Hatching | About 20 minutes in water (3 hydration stages), then a ghastling |
| Growing up | About 20 minutes, faster if you feed it snowballs |
| To ride | A harness: 3 leather, 2 glass, 1 wool |
| Riders | Up to 4; the first one steers |
| Can’t | Be bred, or ride in a boat |
| Added in | Java Edition 1.21.6 (Chase the Skies, June 17, 2025) |
How to get a happy ghast
- Get a dried ghast. Find one at a Nether fossil in a soul sand valley, or craft one from 1 soul sand and 8 ghast tears.
- Put it in water. Place the dried ghast and waterlog it. Over about 20 minutes it goes through three hydration stages, with sounds and particles showing its progress, and then a ghastling pops out. Keep it waterlogged the whole time: if the water goes, it dries out again at the same speed, and mining the block resets its progress.
- Raise the ghastling. The baby follows players within 16 blocks, or a nearby adult passive mob. If nobody is around, it drifts within 32 blocks of where it hatched. Feed it snowballs to speed things up; left alone, it grows into a happy ghast in about 20 minutes.
- Harness it. Craft a harness and use it on the adult. Now you can ride it.
Where to find a dried ghast
Dried ghasts generate at Nether fossils, the big bone structures of the Nether, and Nether fossils only generate in soul sand valleys. That makes the search short: soul sand valleys are common. In our sample of 300 Java 26.3 seeds, a soul sand valley covered 17% of the Nether, the nearest one was a median 138 blocks from the Nether’s 0,0, and every seed had one within 1,000 blocks. Fossils are everywhere inside them; check around the base of several fossils for the block.
These Java 26.3 seeds have a Nether fossil at exactly X 0, Z 0 in the Nether, inside a soul sand valley, checked with our seed map engine. A portal built near your Overworld spawn usually opens close to the Nether’s center, so these give you a short walk to a fossil.
| Seed | Nether fossil at | Map |
|---|---|---|
-6053742407347306930 |
X 0, Z 0 (Nether) | Open on the map |
-6325005465554533713 |
X 0, Z 0 (Nether) | Open on the map |
-1686366786754117279 |
X 0, Z 0 (Nether) | Open on the map |
If you would rather not visit the Nether’s soul sand valleys at all, crafting works too: 1 soul sand and 8 ghast tears make a dried ghast. Ghast tears drop from ghasts, so you still need some Nether trips, but you can collect the tears anywhere ghasts spawn. See the soul sand valley page for the biome itself.
Harness
A harness is crafted from 3 leather, 2 glass blocks and 1 wool block, and takes the color of the wool, so there are 16 colors. You can re-dye one in the crafting grid. It only fits a happy ghast, and you can take it back off with shears when nobody is riding.
Riding a happy ghast
The first player to mount sits in the front seat and steers; the ghast’s goggles flip down when someone is in control. Up to three more players can climb on, filling the seats around it. Press sneak to get off. When you ride, the third-person camera pulls further back so you can see where you’re flying.
A happy ghast is also a building platform. If players stand on top of it, it stops moving and turns to face the nearest cardinal direction, which makes it a stable spot for placing blocks high up. It regenerates health slowly, and faster in rain or snow or when flying at cloud height.
When nobody is riding, it wanders: within 64 blocks of its home normally, within 32 blocks while it wears a harness, and within 10 blocks on a lead. It tries to stay close to blocks rather than drifting off into open sky. If you jump off mid-flight, it slowly comes down to the ground before it starts wandering.
What changed since it was added
The happy ghast arrived in Chase the Skies (Java 1.21.6, June 2025). Since then the changes have been small: in The Copper Age (Java 1.21.9) it became audible from 64 blocks away. Source: the official 1.21.6 and 1.21.9 release notes.
How we measured
The soul sand valley numbers come from our own seed map engine, running Java Edition 26.3 world generation: 300 random seeds, sampling every 16th block across a 10,240 by 10,240 block square of the Nether centered on 0,0. The fossil positions were checked with the same engine. Everything about how the happy ghast behaves comes from the official release notes linked above.
