Minecraft 25w15a

25w15a started the 1.21.6 cycle on Tuesday, April 8, 2025. Snapshots for this drop came out on Tuesdays, a day earlier in the week than during 1.21.5. This one introduced the happy ghast, and you have to grow your own. A dried ghast block sits in Nether fossils in soul sand valleys, or you can craft one from a bone block and eight ghast tears. Put it in water and it rehydrates through three stages over about 20 minutes before a ghastling spawns. Break it before then and it dries out again.

A ghastling has 20 health and follows nearby players around. It grows into a happy ghast after about 20 minutes, faster if you feed it snowballs. Craft a harness from three leather, two glass and one wool, which also sets its color, put it on the happy ghast, and up to four players can ride it, with the first one steering. You can stand on its back like on a shulker, and it heals faster in rain or snow or when flying at cloud height. Unlike a regular ghast it can be hurt by fire and lava, and it drops nothing but experience.

Two advancements came with it: Stay Hydrated! for placing a dried ghast in water, and Heart Transplanter for placing a creaking heart correctly between two pale oak logs. Regular ghasts got a higher resolution texture to match the new mob. The locator bar also appeared, behind an experimental toggle. It sits where the experience bar is and shows the direction of other players, and crouching hides you from it.

Operators got a /version command that prints version information, and server owners can start a new empty data pack in the current world with /datapack create. Pack format 72, 20 bugs fixed. The locator bar left the experiment two snapshots later, in 25w17a.