How to get a Happy Ghast in Minecraft

Happy ghast interacting with Steve in Minecraft Live 2025

(Image credit: Mojang)

For groups of friends, knowing how to get a Happy Ghast in Minecraft is your key to adventuring as a pack. Rather than having to keep a close eye on your friends and pray everyone arrives at the same place after trekking through the overworld, a Happy Ghast lets you take to the skies and has space for four players to keep everyone close. You'll also be able to use leads and boats to transport your animals should you need to relocate.

Unfortunately, the Happy Ghast won't spawn in the overworld naturally and you need to go through a pretty lengthy process to get one for yourself. You need to be at a point in the game where you can access the Nether too, so don't expect to start a new survival world and immediately be able to get a Happy Ghast in your first few days. Unless you're a strip mining pro of course. When you are ready to go to the Nether though, here's what you need to do.

Where to find a dried ghast in Minecraft

Dried Ghast next to a fossil in a soul sand biome in the nether in Minecraft — (Image credit: Mojang)

The first step to getting a Happy Ghast is finding a dried ghast in the Nether. These spawn around Nether fossils in soul sand valleys, but from my experience can be pretty challenging to locate. A dried ghast is about half the size of a full block and grey in appearance, so it camouflages with the Nether and makes the hunt a lot harder. Once you've found one, you'll be able to mine it with any pickaxe and bring it home.

You can also barter for them with Piglins in the Nether, but prices are constantly changing and sometimes it's better to find one for yourself. If you are really struggling, you can also craft one but I can't say its materials are much easier to gather. To craft a dried ghast, you will need the following materials:

8x ghast tear
1x soul sand

Obviously, soul sand is easy enough to gather, but ghast tears can be challenging to come by. Fortunately, with the introduction of the dried ghast, I've definitely seen a lot more ghasts spawning in soul sand valleys in the Nether and attacking one doesn't feel so perilous now they aren't dangling over giant lakes of lava.

When you've got a dried ghast, you'll need to submerge it in water for 20 minutes. It needs to be fully encased in water, so dig a pond or place it somewhat deep in the ocean. You'll know when you've correctly done this, as green particles will start appearing around the ghast. Every five minutes it will also change expression, and after 20 have passed you will have a ghastling.

How to get a Happy Ghast in Minecraft

A ghastling will naturally turn into a Happy Ghast after another 20 minutes have passed, but you can speed up this process by feeding it snowballs. When it's fully grown into a Happy Ghast, you can craft a harness to put on it and take flight. A single harness will seat up to four players.

When you aren't riding it, the ghast will float around a 64 block radius of its spawn point without a harness, or 32 blocks with a harness, so you don't need to worry about it flying off if you don't tie it down with a lead. You can also tempt it with snowballs as you would wheat with sheep should you need it to come back down for the next adventure.

Kara is an evergreen writer. Having spent four years as a games journalist guiding, reviewing, or generally waffling about the weird and wonderful, she’s more than happy to tell you all about which obscure indie games she’s managed to sink hours into this week. When she’s not raising a dodo army in Ark: Survival Evolved or taking huge losses in Tekken, you’ll find her helplessly trawling the internet for the next best birdwatching game because who wants to step outside and experience the real thing when you can so easily do it from the comfort of your living room. Right?

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