The latest Minecraft LIVE event has given fans a look at tons of new content set to come to Minecraft later this year, including the adorable new dried ghast block, which will be officially arriving in the game later this year and made available in experimental preview versions soon. Fans of Minecraft may be surprised to discover just how much this one block will add to the game, but a developer breakdown of this upcoming feature highlights how it could just be among the most creative ideas to be implemented in the game in a while.
That’s not to say that Minecraft hasn’t introduced some fantastic concepts over the last few years, however. Lately, Minecraft has shifted from its traditional formula of releasing large updates on an annual basis in favor of launching smaller content “game drops,” as they’ve been dubbed. This affords Mojang a greater degree of both flexibility and freedom when it comes to developing new content, while also allowing the player base to see new features added more frequently, thus keeping the game feeling fresh. This new development model is also hoped to reduce the amount of disappointment felt throughout the community, as many players feel like some of the major updates over the last few years have added too little too infrequently.
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The second planned content drop for Minecraft this year seems to be focused on a single idea, which itself stems from a single mob: the ghast. The upcoming dried ghast block appears to behave just like any typical block and will be found exclusively within the sands of the Nether’s Soul Valley biome. Unlike the usual block, though, the dried ghast block is a living creature, albeit a very dehydrated one. Players will be able to collect these blocks and transport them to the Overworld, where they can then be submerged in water until they’re ready to begin their next stage of life.
This Minecraft Drop Will Let Players Keep Their Own Pet Ghasts
These dried-out baby ghasts will even start to smile after they’ve spent enough time in the water, and will eventually become fully hydrated and grow into ghastlings. These new mobs in Minecraft are exactly what the name suggests — adorable, baby ghasts which appear to be entirely friendly, and even curious around other mobs in the Overworld. As if collecting cute pet ghasts wasn’t already good enough, players will be able to feed these ghastlings snowballs until they mature into fully-grown happy ghasts, which can even be equipped with saddles and ridden through the skies by multiple players.
Happy ghasts also provide a somewhat game-changing element to building in survival mode, as players can dismount the saddle to stand directly on top of them. This makes them useful as mobile scaffolding, which can help with adding to and assessing the progress of a build that’s under construction. This seemingly simple idea is just packed with positive implications for gameplay, and players should expect to see these new features in-game sometime later in the year as the second of Minecraft‘s content drops in 2025.
