Moody Ghasts

Moody Ghasts is a full overhaul of the Happy Ghast mob, transforming it from a simple building mount into a companion with emotions, aerial combat capabilities, and new items to interact with. This is my first mod!

😄😟😡 The Mood System

Happy Ghasts are no longer endlessly smiling. They have a dynamic mood that shifts based on how you interact with them which leads to noticeable

Track your ghast's current emotion through the mood bar (visible while riding) or simply by reading their face.

What affects mood?

Factor Effect ☄️ Projectile type fired Varies — some excite, some enrage 🍪 Ghast foods Direct mood control 💥 Damage taken Upsets them 💚 Healing received Can soothe them 👻 Witnessing another ghast die or tantrum Affects nearby ghasts too ⚔️ Killing another ghast Has its own consequence 👶 Baby ghast nearby Cute babies make everyone happier ⏳ Time Mood slowly neutralizes on its own

What does mood do?

• Excited — Grants a speed boost to your ghast
• Enraged — Your ghast begins crying and risks turning hostile. Calm them fast.
• Scaled power — Most projectile effects grow significantly stronger with angrier mood

On Peaceful, a tantrum that reaches its peak calms your ghast back down instead of turning it hostile. Every other effect of the tantrum still happens though, so you can now obtain ghast tears in Peaceful difficulty.

🎯 Aerial Combat

Mount up and start shooting. While controlling a Happy Ghast, you can fire a variety of projectiles depending on what you use while riding:

• Fire Charges — The classic ghast fireball, explosive and burning
• Wind Charges — Stronger than anything a player can throw by hand
• Ice Charges — A new freezing projectile with unique area effects
• Dragon Breath — The ender dragon's AOE fireball
• Powdered Snow — Unleash a rapid snowball barrage

🧊 The Ice Charge

A brand new craftable projectile. Throw it yourself, load it into a dispenser, or fire it from your ghast.

On direct hit:

• Deals damage and applies Slowness
• Transforms Skeletons into Strays

Area effects on impact:

• Converts water sources into frosted ice (only adjacent to air or non-source water — you can shoot through water bodies!)
• Turns lava into obsidian, cobblestone, or basalt, matching vanilla's own rules
• Dusts nearby blocks with snow layers
• Freezes water cauldrons into powdered snow
• Extinguishes fires

In the Nether:

• Deals double damage to water-sensitive mobs
• Harmless to anything else
• Area effects have reduced range

🍪 Food & Treats

Two new crafting recipes give regular cookies a reason to exist — craft them into Frosted or Spicy variants to manage your ghast's mood, or eat one yourself and roll the dice.

Player effect is always a 50/50 chance of something good or something bad.

🌶️ Spicy Cookie

• Fed to ghast: Upsets them
• Eaten by player: Fire Resistance for 15 seconds — or get set on fire

❄️ Frosted Cookie

• Fed to ghast: Brings them joy
• Eaten by player: Speed for 15 seconds — or take freezing damage

Both cookies share the same hunger restoration as a regular cookie.

🍥 Chorus Fruit

Feed your ghast Chorus Fruit and it'll randomly teleport a short distance. Useful for dodging incoming attacks mid-flight. The disorientation is upsetting however.

⚙️ Configuration

Almost everything in this mod is driven by datapacks — no code required for most customization.

Tunable via datapack:

• Mood system values (base mood, regression speed, damage/healing rates, tantrum thresholds)
• Mood states (thresholds, effects, speed modifiers, tantrum timers, ghast textures, bar colours)
• Define entirely new mood states with custom textures and bar colours
• Ghast foods (add new items, configure mood change amounts)
• Projectile system (mix any projectile type with any shooting behaviour, tune velocity, inaccuracy, strength, radius, count, and per-mood scaling)

Requires a companion mod:

• New projectile entity types
• New firing patterns

Both use NeoForge's registry system, so other mods can extend cleanly.

There is a resource pack also named Moody Ghasts which has many expressive faces that I believe should be compatible if you set the "ghast_texture" in ghast_mood_map.json to the correct resource path.

🗺️ Roadmap

Things coming post-1.0:

• Inevitable Bugs and Bugfixes
• Balancing changes

Later:

• More visual effects during tantrums
• New Ice Charge item texture, model, particles, and sounds
• Additional vanilla projectile support