Moody Ghasts

Your ghast has feelings. Maybe don't ignore them.

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 treat them — and it has real consequences.

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 🍪 Treats (snowballs & cookies) Direct mood control 💥 Damage taken Upsets them 💚 Healing received Can soothe them ⏳ 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 — Projectile effects grow significantly stronger with angrier mood

🎯 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
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 and cobblestone
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

🍪 New Cookies

Two new crafting recipes that 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.

⚙️ 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 → implement GhastProjectileFactory
New shooting behaviours → implement ShootingBehaviourFactory

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.