The Spawn Chunks 356: Happy Ghasting To All

Welcome to the Spawn Chunks, episode number 356 for Monday, June 30th, 2025. This is a podcast all about Minecraft, and it's available on all of your favorite podcasting platforms, including a video version on YouTube and on Spotify. If you're enjoying the show, please consider subscribing wherever you're listening to this. My name is Joel Duggan and joining me as always is my friend Johnny.

Green Thumbs Pixel Rifts. Hello, sir. Hello. Yes, we've been discussing the joys of gardening and getting some fresh produce out of the garden, even when the stuff from the store is not quite cutting the mustard. So if you're interested in being made hungry by an extended version of the show, you should check out the render distance. That's the extended version of the podcast our patrons get if you support the show over at patreon.com slash the spawn channel.

We usually have a bit of pre and post show chat every week. You also get to participate in Patreon events like our monthly hangouts, one of which we just recorded and published this last weekend, so it's really great to see what everyone's been up to in Minecraft, especially now Chase the Skies has dropped.

Speaking of which, uh today's discussion is going to focus on hands-on experience with the Happy Ghost, both from ourselves and from the community, but also an unexpected new version of Minecraft has popped up, so stay tuned to the news for more about that.

What have you been up to in Minecraft this week, my friend? This week I have been getting that hands-on experience with the happy ghasts. I've got a few screenshots to share of where they have ended up around my world. As I mentioned last week, I have found, crafted, and bartered the dried ghasts. So I have dried ghast three ways to present to you all.

Um yeah, I I started by raising a couple of them over at my spawn area, and those are now happily floating around the floating island pirate ship built.

I thought they made really good almost like background dressing but also like animation for that area, helping it feel like there was a little bit of life to it and you can see them carrying chest boats and like moving through the rigging and stuff as you're hanging out in that area, and it's really fun to see them just kind of pop over the side of the floating island.

I've discovered that the way the happy ghost like um whatever you call it, like migration range works, the kind of idle range that they they sort of uh stay in a certain area, like you can put them in the air and as long as in the air was the last place you interacted with them, they will kind of hover in that general space.

So I managed to avoid them like colliding with the deck too much and like breaking the leads on the chest boats that they're carrying. As long as you keep them like a few blocks above the mast, then they're not really gonna collide with stuff too much. So they've been really like picturesque additions to that whole area.

I've been using them a bit more practically though over at the Windy City, where uh three of them are now installed in what I'm calling a a garage or a garage, depending on your pronunciation, but I'm spelling it with a silent H from the guard. Uh so yeah, I I have a couple of those. I'm planning on maybe putting them over at my spawn base as well for the ghasts I plan to use as a utility and not necessarily just as like you know, a bit of animation and life added to the world.

Um but yeah, I've I've star I've settled on a design that's a little bit airy, not just like a stone box for them, like you can glide them in but it's got open sides and back to it, so the ghast still feels like it's got some breathing room. Uh but they're kept in with just a simple like piston that slides in front of them. You pull a lever and that locks the ghost in place once you've gotten off it so that you can easily return to it without it floating off.

And below that there are hopper unloaders for the chest boats that they're carrying. So if you want to fill that up with stuff and then have that unload into a chest once you're back at ground level, then you can just glide them into this garage. Step down off of them and down to where the unloader is just kind of systematically removing items from the chest boat. Which is four hoppers.

uh just next to a double chest and it's all kind of feeding in there at double speed. So at four items per hopper tick it's it's pretty pretty straightforward.

Um the other thing I've done with them now is take one to the end dimension. I'm currently still raising it from a ghastling, so I haven't had the full happy ghast experience in the end yet, but I'm planning on timing how long it takes you to float one out from the central end island to the outer ring of islands, in case you want to use that to bypass the ender dragon fight in the early stages. But then Uh from there I want to see what it's like to be a little bit more.

Exploring end cities with them, if they're in danger from shulkers, if they're even affected by stuff like levitation, considering that they're flying mobs with their own trajectory to begin with. But yeah, I I have a couple of experiments still to run, but Uh more on my experience of the happy ghast of course in today's discussion. I'm curious about the end because uh there's no clouds to auto heal them.

I guess do they regenerate health on their own? They do, it's just it's faster in a cloud, I guess. Yeah, I bel I believe they have like some natural health regen, but it's not as fast as like a layers or any of the stuff that would generate more natural. Yeah, I just I'm curious about the N city'cause that could be really, really useful, especially'cause I've always found the

parkour stuff in end cities to be a real pain in the butt. Like I'm the kind of person that just brings a dirt pillar and just you know, or scaffolding or whatever and just like ignores the parkour challenge and just Yeah, of course you know, kinda brute forces the the end city. Um but I really like the look of the the ghast uh garage. I think that that's that's a really fun, fun look and neat to put like the

the unloader underneath it as well. Like you'd I imagine you'd have to have a very specific block distance between like the gas and the hoppers so that the boat goes in and doesn't like bump into the hoppers or cause any kind of like lead breakage and all that.

Yeah, I did a bit of creative planning for that. It's about five blocks underneath the happy ghast. So you put the ghast on a platform, then you count five blocks down from that and that's where you need to set up Uh you ca because of course hoppers can drag items through slabs from a container like a chest boat, then the chest boat is obviously a bit more dynamic, it can move around a little bit, so there are some occasions on which If the leads get a little bit tied up if the ghast is turning.

As it uh comes to rest, then sometimes the boat will kind of hover a little bit too high for the hoppers to pick it up. But it usually straightens out, especially if you go away from the chunks and then reload them or go through another portal and then come back. It's usually disentangled some of that stuff when it like re-renders everything and replaces where the entities are.

So most of the time it it's pretty pretty reliable and yeah, uh uh just a couple of experiments in Creative were enough to make sure I knew what what the the approximate height was supposed to be.

Um I also ended up kind of color coding the garages to suit the harnesses for each of the ghasts. So I've got warped wood over the top for the one that has the cyan harness and then orange harness with acacia wood. Obviously there aren't all of the different colours of wood for the different sixteen colours but you can imagine a purple one in the end having like a purper house for it, you know that So uh yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to doing more with that.

Uh I could use the pale oak wood for the one that has the white harness, but for now I like the mangrove and oak combination'cause it kind of looked like it was wearing Iron Man's helmet just with the visor flipped up when I when I parked it for the first time. So I I kinda thought I'll leave it like that for now, maybe install some sea lanterns behind it for like glowing eyes or something, but Yeah I can uh I could do a little bit more with that I think in the uh the design of the

Yeah, I was thinking about what I might do because I think what I'm gonna do is have some happy gas around that eventual sci fi zone that I'm building,'cause I think they would fit in quite well. Uh even even if I decided to like add like a texture change or something and make them look more sci fi, just still use the happy gas as it is, but

I uh I like the idea of the color coding and I was thinking uh I am my father's son and if you go anywhere with my dad and you're parking somewhere and he finds a parking spot that he can drive in and out of. So rather than backing in or backing out, if he can find a spot where he can pull into one and then surprise the site the parking spot on the other side of that is also empty. He'll pull through so that he can uh leave and he will announce, oh, drive-in. We found a drive-in parking spot.

Uh the entire like there could be dozens of empty spaces meters away, but he'll take the drive. And I feel like that would be a really cool idea with a gas where you could drive into the garage, but then drive out of the back as opposed to having to back in or back out of of the garage. Yeah. I guess you could always turn the gas when you're in it, depending on the hitbox size of your of your space that you've allotted. Like once you're in, you could probably just three sixty and then leave it.

the other other direction. Um because I was thinking about using uh tripwire hooks and and string. So like if you if the gas passes into the space then like some pistons or something would kind of like enclose in front of behind to keep it where it is. and then maybe that could be like on a tick, like on a one tick pulse and then you could just use a lever or button or something to then move it forward. But then I don't know if leaving would also then trigger the

the um the mechanism again. So there's definitely I'm gonna have to do some creative experimentation, I think, as well before I get into that. But uh I like the idea of using them in In that capacity and giving them homes. And I also like the idea of them flying around doing like not being used by the player, but just kind of like adding that motion. We've talked before about.

Any kind of animation in motion, whether it's from smoke columns from campfires or bees floating around, giving motion to Minecraft just really, really helps. uh because there's not much uh motion in Minecraft and I I think that it's a really cool addition. I'm surprised that you didn't have any issues with the happy gas. floating away from the island and the ship and going down to the ground. So that range that they have must be just short enough that like they don't detect the ground and then

ultimately fly back down to the ground'cause I think that's what they're supposed to do. Like if you m if you dismount it in the air randomly, it's supposed to sink a lot closer to the ground and then resume its like diameter or or circumference of

of um range for for its roaming. Um but if if you had it close to something in the air, like a mountain or something like that, or in your case a floating island with a ship, I guess it just chooses that as the closest land and then bases its its cycle around that. I assume it's just looking for solid blocks, in which case there are solid blocks at the top of the mast.

but you know, it's not really gonna have much to interact with and scrape across there. So yeah, like I I have a little bit more experimentation to do and I haven't spent a ton of time over there just kind of observing them since I've done that, but It'll also be the case that I'll fly over the mountain, they'll get stuck outside of simulation distance, and they'll just pause midair wherever they are.

So there's always the possibility of that happening. I left a couple floating around the towers at the Windy City and one of those did like end up s like uh breaking the lead on the chest boat that it was carrying and the chestboat got wedged up like in one of the roof sections near the top of the structure. So I imagine it just got stuck there as it was

floating past. But yeah, a little bit of experimentation to do using them aesthetically, but I have a very good first impression of the happy gusts. And like I said, more in the discussion section about that. Uh in the meantime, let's talk about you. What's new on the Citadel this?

So much like m the areas around Nova Scotia and my city right now, there's road work everywhere. And that's what I've been doing in in in Westdale. Uh I finished up the uh Western Road that I was talking about last week. It did take longer than I was anticipating. Uh I had to resist the scope of the Uh I think you actually had rated at some point this week and I was in the middle of the year.

like r making a cliff that looked really strange look okay and kind of filling in some stuff with some bone meal and uh it's surprisingly effective actually uh to just hit something with bone meal and then go back and trim out the tall grass or trim out the flowers just to kind of give it like a decent coverage. And so I was trying not to be too precious about things. But the one thing I did do to ease my pain was I switched the road texture at the bridge from a stone brick to a stone texture.

And then the only thing I had to lay in was just andesite, as just like just a little bit of a speckle to kind of give it some wear and tear. And so that's worked out really well. And so that extends all the way to like a a western stone hinge kind of gate that that just kinda ends the road.

Um, and it's a really cool experience now coming over that that hill into Westdill. It creates like a curated experience. The the hills to the left and right feel like they frame the road. It feels intentional. So I was really happy with the way that that turned out. And I just took that momentum and kept on going. Uh so the north road uh was the last of these stone roads that needed some texture work.

Uh and that is extended out uh towards the northern farms and eventually it turns into a dirt road. I haven't addressed the dirt road part yet. Um and I I think I'm gonna leave it dirt. I don't think I'm gonna turn it into stone. I think I'm gonna leave it uh as dirt. Um but it's uh It's one of those things where it just required a lot of crack bricks and a lot of um finesse when it came to going up and down hills,'cause I go up in half slabs.

and there is no cracked half slab and your texture ability is greatly reduced when you start to go on these uh these ups and downs and so I had to kind of like

work out how to do it in a way that didn't feel like too much. If anything, I was actually over texturing it. I had to dial it back a little bit in places. So Um, I just wanted to make it look like there might have been wagons that have gone up and down, kind of create like a you know how either a gravel road or an old stone road will have that hump in the middle where like the weight of the

things have been traveling along have pressed down the the the wheel ruts, but then the the middle will have like a bit of a hump. So I tried to leave the middle of the road. as not texture free, but lightly textured compared to the the left and the right lanes, which would just have more going on. And that again turned out great. It's it's not the most exciting thing to do, but now that it's done, it feels really good walking around, taking screenshots. Nothing feels

too basic, like too day one Minecraft. It just you've you know, you've got all the things that you need to do. And I I was thinking ahead too because as soon as I started the stream, I put Two stacks of bricks and furnaces to smelt them because I knew I was just gonna go through reams

of uh cracked stone bricks for this and it worked out pretty well. Like I I think that it's it's got a nice finished look. I made a couple more tweaks to that like compass rose type design at the crossroads. It's not exactly reading as the compass rose, but it reads as some sort of intentional design and I highlighted the tips with a polished andesite. They were kind of fading away and the the borders of it were getting a little bit lost. So it feels a little bit more um

Finished now and there are some bricks inside the design and I swapped some of those with some cracked bricks. So now it feels like the mosaic design has also been there a while, which helps kind of make it feel like part of the part of the world. Maybe it's just the British guy in me, but uh that definitely reads us roundabout to my to my English eyes. So yeah.

You've left enough like road around the outside of the compass rose design as well to make it look like maybe a cart could kind of pass by and, you know, everyone could kind of pass each other on the right or the left or whatever. So uh yeah, no, I think that's that's serving its purpose and I think it's It's great to see like even though the stone texture is the same as the bordering like mountain that you've kind of built past on the way in,

Like it's still really visible where the road is thanks to the texturing work you've done. Just like a little bit of stone brick around the outside and everything really makes a difference. Eve like especially when your road is stone, you just kind of think Yeah, all they would have had to do really is just mark out where the borders of this road are so that the carts don't like tip off this, you know v

mountain road into the valley on one side, into the the spruce forest that's there and that's really all you need to do. But it's looking great. It's looking like a a a picture perfect part of this area. Thanks. Yeah, I'm really happy with the the stone road. It was challenging to do like the the S curve and also have it increase in height and changes and stuff like that, but it it's pretty effective and uh I uh I did more of what I said I was doing last week, which was to

rough up that stone mountain. So even though it's a stone mountain and a stone road, putting a lot of cobblestone and a lot of things in there outside of those stone bricks really kind of helped it look like, well, this is maybe where

the hill was in the way and they had to move it. Like we had almost enough room for a road, but we had to kind of smooth it out and chip away at it. Um that or just the natural like garbage of of wear and tear of of rocks being pushed off to the side that would naturally fall along that side and and it uh it worked out pretty well.

Um the other thing I did to kind of uh clear my palate is uh I finished up a little duck pond that was hanging outside of the acacia potato farm. It was just something that was by the front drive. I don't know about you, but around here a lot of times in the country when you see like a house that's got a lot of property, there will often be a duck pond or some sort of little pond at the front. And it's usually because like the drainage ditch for the road ends up creating some sort of

water anyway. And so rather than having it be inconveniently pooled where you don't want it, if you create a low area and make it a little duck pond, well, one, you're gonna have, you know, waterfowl and ducks and frogs and things come and hang out in your farm, but also uh it creates a a place for that water to go.

And um I I had it there for a while. I honestly don't remember whether it was like one of those natural ponds that you find in a sunflower planes or a plains biome, or whether it was just a natural dip that I then filled in and thought, oh, this will make a nice pond. But I had done it in a very, very basic way so long ago I don't remember when.

As in like, I'll just finish that later when the surrounding things are done. Well, now that the surrounding things are done, it was time to go in there and finish it up. And I've done this before, just kind of go in, put some rocks at the bottom, some grass and kelp and Seagrass and things. I like having bushes come down. And now that we can waterloges, as of a few updates ago, you just kind of put those in there and make it look really overgrown and lush. And then I also half buried a little

uh shelter into the into the the side, the embankment of the pond, so that it's got like a little roof over it and a little feed bucket and stuff like that. And there's a waterlogged rail that goes down as like a little duck ladder. The only thing missing is actual ducks because they're not in Minecraft. So uh I'm talking about motion.

I really feel like some sort of swimming duck would be really cool to have in Minecraft. Just like bees kind of wander around in the air, having some sort of waterfowl. uh would be super, super cool in in Minecraft to be able to have that in a pond. I don't know what the player use would be. I guess it would be very similar to a chicken. Like it would, you know, cook like a chicken, it would lay eggs like a chicken, that kind of stuff. So ultimately

It's probably not gonna be added because the chicken already serves that purpose. But I just think think it would be really cool to have that kind of um waterfowl interaction and and motion, uh, especially if you ran into them on the coast, like if you saw them anywhere's you know, uh near the sea or near a a lake or a river, I think that would be really, really fun.

You're on one twenty one dot five now, right? No, not yet. No wait, sorry, yes. Tw twenty one dot five. So yeah, you've you've Yeah, sorry. So I'm I was confusing. Six and five. I was wondering if um either warm or cold chickens could maybe serve as ducks in this fiction. Because if you're used to seeing the traditional like white Minecraft chickens, sure.

Maybe bring in some some warm chickens, even though you're probably getting cold chickens in the tiger biome depending on how many like other passive mobs will spawn there. But like I expect it'd be pretty like picturesque looking to walk past there and there'd be a couple of those warm ducks with the brown feathers and stuff in there. Uh the the warm chickens. And you could retexture them as ducks if you wanted to, like just throw a couple of that too, yeah.

I I joke all the time that the Minecraft chicken looks like a duck as it is. Exactly. It just it c it clucks like a chicken, but it looks like a duck. The only issue is keeping them. Like there's no there's nothing about their AI that will keep them in that space. You have to either fence it off or make it so deep they can't get out. Like there's just not a lot. Uh and then any chicken that gets into the water looks like it's drowning.

So it's yeah, tricky to kind of sort that out. Um, but you're right. Like a ch a chicken if it was if you if I had like a separate pen, like if there was a place like that had actually like a little fenced off area where the house would be

Um, especially if it looked like the chickens could go through, but you built it in a way that the the hitbox was too small, like they couldn't actually fit in the space, then that could be cool. Um and you're right, I think that the warm weather chickens would probably look a little bit more like ducks than the cold weather ones.

Um, but I just I don't know how to control them in that space. It's actually one of the reasons why there's not a lot of livestock around West Hill, is because I'd have to create Minecraft fence level. Containment. Like you can't just you can't just create like a crumbling brick wall that would keep most real life cows in, but Minecraft cows will just find a spot and walk over it.

You know, if it's not if it's not high enough. So it's tricky that way to to kinda keep animals without like um using a lead or uh I do have a couple of pigs that are in very small pens and they just can't get out because it's just a small uh small area where I've put like a trapdoor on top of a log just to make it high enough that they can't just get over the block. Um, but it it can be really tricky to kind of keep animals in a I guess more of a custom designed pen or or feel.

Yeah. Real life farmers don't have to worry about their cow being able to like casually walk over a meter high wall and and their goats having like a five meter vertical leap and things like that. So I've seen some lively goats, but even that's a little unrealistic for the real world.

Well and I find it so I mean I understand that barbed wire is sharp and and that's one of the reasons why, you know, it keeps animals in, but like in some cases, you know, when you look at a cow, the size of the animal The strength that it has, if it's just a wooden fence, that seems to keep a cow in. Um there's like if the cow decided to just be like that fence.

is nothing. Like I'm gonna own this fence. Like you you'd be repairing fences constantly. Right. Uh so I don't I think it's just because they're such a passive animal. They just kind of like, well it's a you know, I get some free food here. It's kind of too much of a bother to ru to run that fence down, so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do that today. I'm gonna eat instead. I feel like they're just kind of like

the law of least effort as far as livestock goes. Yeah, c cows are all about easy living, I think. Uh so that's that's probably why. But uh yeah, who knows? Like I I think I do think there's there's some merit to the duck pond idea and I think maybe there's there's a couple of tricks you could use to keep them in there. Yeah, a couple of people suggesting like leashes to fence posts and stuff like that.

I wonder if maybe even if you install like a couple of chickens laying eggs underneath the duck pond have a dispenser that occasionally dispenses eggs and then you at least get baby ducklings showing up every so often, whether or not they stay there is another matter. But

Then I guess you come back and you've accidentally like chicken bombed your entire area and there's just a ton of chickens wandering around. So, you know, your your your mileage may vary, but definitely some food for thought for anybody out there who's uh interested in making their duck ponds a little more lively.

Yeah, if you had it deeper, like if you really made it look like a deep, deep pond, it only had a couple of spots where you could use moss carpet or strategically paced bushes to kind of like restrict access. then then I think that might work, but it would take some playing around for sure.

Moving into the news, Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.7, release candidate 1, was published on Wednesday, June 25th. This is a hotfix release that takes care of some critical issues that managed to sneak their way into Chase the Skies. In one dot twenty one dot six. If no other critical issues are found, this will be the version for 1.21.7 that can be expected to release.

Soon. New features in 1.21.7 release candidate one. Added a painting of quote a good boy by artist Sarah Boving. Uh, this is a portrait of a wolf with a red collar intended as a reference to the wolf Dennis from a Minecraft movie. Added the music disc Lava Chicken by Hyper Potions. The disc drops when defeating a baby zombie riding a chicken or a chicken zocky. Again, another Minecraft movie reference. Some fixed bugs in the release Candidate 1, some rendering issues with Qualcomm graphics.

Blindness and darkness fog effects no longer work underwater. Sometimes you pass through the happy ghast when dismounting while moving forward. Text on glowing signs is not visible on some graphics. A memory leak in item stack render state leading to out-of-memory errors, and additional bug fixes are noted in the release candidate changelog, which we'll have linked in our show notes at thespawnchunks.com.

In addition to release candidate one, there is release candidate two for Java Edition 1.21.7 that came out on the twenty sixth of June. Technical changes in the Release Candidate 2 data pack version is now 81, resource pack version is now 64. Some fixed bugs again to quote a few. The game crashes upon startup and some AMD graphics cards.

Force upgrading does not write new data versions to converted data. The server crashes when certain mobs write a turtle, and pack formats were not incremented in 1.21.7 release candidate one, breaking some changes. Those are all of the bug fixes, but once again we'll have links to the changelog in our show notes for this week at thesponchunks.com.

So this hotfix doesn't have an official name, uh they don't have like a drop name for it the same way Chase the Skies is, so I'm calling it the movie memes drop because it's it this was some stuff that got added to uh Bedrock Edition, I think, very shortly after or come like concurrently with uh Chase the Skies with Happy Ghost and Vibrant Visuals. So we knew it was coming to Java Edition eventually and it seemed like they were pretty expedient about getting that out there.

Um the Dennis painting I think is quite nice. It actually helps that it just looks like a standard wolf with the default red collar. So a lot of people are gonna be used to wolves looking like this even before the Minecraft movie made this one iconic specifically, but I can imagine some people just wanting a portrait of a pet up on the wall without it being a movie rec.

I've played a couple of games recently, uh Expedition thirty three being one where there's Easter eggs where the picture of like a dog that the studio owned, like the the kind of like developer's pet dog. is just like in a secret room somewhere that you can find. So it's kind of fun to have stuff like that the players can lay in for their little in-game reference.

How large is the dentist painting in um it's a two by two, I think. It's like it's it's it's one of the larger canvases. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I find the timing a little bit strange. Like I would have thought that The painting and the disc would have been included in Chase the Skies? I I understand hotfixes and bug fixes happen, sure, like they mean that that stuff is just part of development.

Um so I'm not surprised about 1.21.7, but it I really felt like the the new painting and and the new music disc would have been part of the coming in 1.21.6 because other than that, 1.21.6 feels a little bit light. Not necessarily to people like us that know all the details and all the changes, but Marketing wise, like having more to say in that YouTube video of like this is what's coming in the draw.

Uh I'm surprised that they weren't ready by then. Um but I mean that that's that said, like they're not necessarily for me and that's the great thing about Minecraft. I can just play around them. I don't really have to to worry about it too much. However, as um you know, someone that does use cum custom resource packs and things like that, I'm sure that Uh resource and data pack.

authors are excited about having an extra painting to mess around with. If you were looking to have one more thing uh to add to your custom textures, then you've got another thing that you can change if you want to. Um and same thing with music discs. I know some technical players use music discs for all kinds of different things and having yet another one uh to assign different values to or or different things to is a cool thing for people that like to tinker under the hood in Minecraft.

Yeah, I think in the bedrock edition changelog we read this previously we covered like that it outputs a certain redstone signal with a comparator and stuff like that. So yeah, like there there's there's more stuff you can do with that. And yeah, uh folks in the chat have confirmed I just checked on the wiki as well. It's a three by three page.

So it's even one of the uh the kind of custom canvas dimensions that we didn't have in the game prior to this, and now we have a bunch of uh both from Christopher Zetastran's portfolio and and Sarah Boving's work as well. So Yeah, really happy. I think more than anything I'm happy that they don't seem precious about updating things like that when there is precedent for it. And now we've got a bunch of new paintings that were made for

the fifteenth anniversary. They were like selected specifically for updates that came out last year. And now we're getting new paintings, we're getting new music discs, the soundtrack artists are kind of diversifying a little bit. Yeah. This is the first credit Hyper Potions has on the Minecraft soundtrack. I'm familiar with their work from

like the intro songs of a bunch of fun, like pixel art games. Like they did Sonic Mania, uh, the opening title theme for that, uh, so that's one that I know of specifically, but yeah, they've done a bunch of stuff. Um

Credit where it's due, I think, the lava chicken disc is actually hilarious, I think from my point of view. Because I was expecting it to just be ripped straight from the movie and be like a recording of Jack Black singing it or whatever, but like I figured after the fact I was like that might have been a bit more complicated in terms of like rights ownership, both with Jack Jack Black being a very well known actor performing it

And then the movie rights belonging in part to Warner Brothers, Legendary Pictures, and so on and so forth. I'm not sure where the soundtrack rights fall, but it might be more difficult or, you know, expensive for them to license that for a music disc to appe uh appear in Minecraft in perpetuity. So instead we get a chiptune bop that about halfway through some villager vocals come in.

And it's just a villager going ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and it's it's really funny. Like i if you're not expecting it and I I went in pretty much unspoiled to listen to this before the show. Like it it genuinely like it it g it gave me a solid grin, which I was not expecting from a Minecraft music disc, so Yeah.

Uh again, like you said, it's something you can play around. It's ignorable enough if you're not interested in like the the references and whatnot. And I think chicken jockeys are rare enough that you're not going to be absolutely flooded with this disc. I had the same concern about tears, because That's one you get from doing the return to sender, like returning a fireball to a gas.

But then most of those are gonna drop in lava anyway, and I haven't gotten hold of one yet, even though I've been in the nether to get gas tears and stuff like that. So I think for some people you're just gonna be able to to shrug and ignore it.

But um yeah, again, extra music disc fun. For people who love the movie references, great. It's honestly relatively listenable even if you're not a big fan of the movie, but I remember when I was talking about the movie, when I'd been to see it, and I I was chatting to a couple of my friends who are tabletop gamers, one of them who was, I think, in their early twenties.

but a Minecraft fan was going to see the Minecraft movie for the first time and they said to me, I've already memorized all of the lyrics to Steve's lava chicken song. It's like they they were kind of in it for that whole audience participation sing along kind of uh movie screening and like the the fact that they

connected with that part of the movie. I think the fact that it's now come to the game in this form as well is is a really fun thing for people who got into Minecraft perhaps because of the movie. It's a way for parents to kind of bring in something goofy for their kids and

So it there's absolutely no harm in it, and I think it's a a fun way of celebrating the success of the Minecraft movie, which at this point has probably made them like a billion dollars, literally. So yeah, I think it it it makes perfect sense, especially now it's on streaming and like broad release and available everywhere. And I think it's smart that they didn't use the the Jack Black version, not just because of the rights and stuff, but I think that's also an acquired taste.

And then I don't know there's no other example of lyrics in Minecraft. So having it be the l the villagers or other kind of chiptuny stuff. fits better with Minecraft than actually having some sort of like one of the music discs have lyrics on it or something like that. So Like that's the lore implications alone. Um I think uh uh G the B in the live chat is saying, uh since we know what the lyrics are to Steve's lava chicken, you can effectively use that to

Uh as a Rosetta Stone you can sort of reverse engineer villager language out of it, which is is is a really a really funny concept. Like it's it's it's like um, you know, Chinese dialects and stuff where it's all about the intonation and pitch and whether it rises or falls or something like that.

It's it's gotta be quite interesting to uh to have that as part of the lore and I think something with actual lyrics in any language would just blow the entire thing wide open. So I think they've obviously walked that back a little bit, but I think it It's very fun that they've included villages in.

Yeah. Uh Villager News doing uh a version would be pretty funny. Yeah. I think that those those voices would be. The official music video for it done by by Element Animation. I would I would love that. That'd be so funny. Uh I also really enjoy the idea behind uh a karaoke disc in Minecraft. Like so if people want to set that up as like a karaoke situation because you know the lyrics. Uh then you can just kind of do that, right?

Yeah,'cause your alternative is to learn the saxophone so you can play along with Stahl or one of the other music discs or something like that. So yeah, or or like Yeah, get get very good with a a key tar and and jam along to pig step. That'd be the uh the other options for it. But yeah, like I think it's

It's fun, it's a bit of harmless fun. I I can't be too mad at it even though our we were kind of lukewarm about the movie in general, but it seems like uh the movie has resonated with audiences, especially the younger audiences, so I think it's great that they've included some of that stuff in the game as like a a reference back into Minecraft from the one time Minecraft escaped into the real world for a bit.

I did find it amusing that some of the crashes were related to mobs riding turtles in Black Trap. And I was just like, What you can ride a turtle? Like when did that become a thing? And immediately my brain goes to like, well, we were talking about gas racing last week. Like could you have like a Turtle versus a gas, like who wins? Like it's it's

the slowest in the sky versus the slowest in the sea. Like how does that pan out? It it reminds me of uh Dash from Zootopia in in the Disney animated movie, The Sloth at the DMV. And then like he gets in a super fast car.

uh just to kind of feel that kind of speed. But like the idea of like a a turtle riding a happy gast or vice versa and it whoever's the fastest between the two, the other one looks at it like a joyride, you know, like it's I've never gone this fast before, the turtle in the back of a of a flying happy gast, right? Just it's an odd, odd vision like riding a turtle around. Yeah, I think any entity can have passengers if you're using commands. So somebody's been like

stress testing how possible that is. But if you think about it on bedrock edition, um, baby zombies aren't just limited to chicken jockeys, they can ride anything. Like you find a baby zombie riding an adult zombie sometimes. So uh there's a very small chance of it happening, but I can imagine there's baby zombies riding turtles occasionally in bedrock edition. And so from there you can only imagine like, you know, if if if that was expanded into Java edition or if you know Java Edition got

uh a bit more functionality in that regard, then you can see things riding turtles being a a very distinct possibility. So good that they caught that, because I'm sure it's it's breaking somebody's workflow for that to cause a crash.

That's something that they did more of in the Minecraft movie too,'cause uh spider jockeys are pretty rare, I think, in Java edition. But there were lots of them. Like it was almost like the mount of choice for skeletons in in a Minecraft movie. So it would be cool to see more stuff like that. I

I like the idea of baby zombies riding an actual zombie. Not which would be funny'cause again the zombies are slower than the baby zombies, so it wouldn't be all that effective. Yeah. Like like having more armor, I guess. I don't really know.

I think the first time I ever saw it happening I said, This must be bring your child to work day'cause that's that's what it looks like. It's like here son, I'm gonna teach you how to really take a bite out of him you know just riding on, Go get'em dad you know, the kind of Uh riding on the shoulders thing, the piggyback is is very good. Well and in the movie they made uh baby zombies

feel more intelligent than yeah and like the the older zombies stuff. Like I can I can see like a baby zombie either like using hair or ears, I guess depending on whether the zombie had ears. To steer Yeah, to like ratatouille them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. That oh yeah. That'd be hilarious. Yeah.

Moving into chunk mail this week, uh we do have an email about vibrant visuals that we talked about last week, so this will be fun to get into. If you'd like to email the show, the uh email address is spawnchunkmail at gmail.com. Please use that email address.

Keep them short and sweet to help us choose them to be on the show. And if you've got something topical, if you have some experience with a happy ghast, if you've got some experience with vibrant visuals or the new updates, then let us know. Or if you're riding a turtle. Again, all valid things for spunchunk mail at gmail.com. And Johnny has this email this week.

Yes, uh if you are riding a turtle, by the way, please send us screenshots. Uh this one comes in from Diamond Dome twenty ten, uh, with the subject of Vibrant Visuals Animation. Hey Pix'Joel, I am having a blast with Vibrant Visuals, and in my opinion, it is almost perfect. Like you, I do think the sky needs to be a lot darker when it's raining. However, there's another issue I've noticed that doesn't really even have to do with vibrant visuals itself.

Imagine you're in a village during a gorgeous sunrise with light rays coming through the house windows and trees reflecting off the water. And then you see a villager, a very boring looking villager, kinda just floating around looking very outdated in comparison. Mojang has said that vibrant visuals is the first step towards modernizing Minecraft's look and feel.

Do you think the next step should be updating the animations for old mobs? I'm not asking for much, no added joints, just some smoother animations, and maybe facial expressions for certain mobs such as villagers and illogs. Thank you for your time. Keep up the good work on the podcast. Diamond Dom twenty ten was shot by a very boring looking skeleton during a beautiful, vibrant sunrise.

I do wonder how many people have died admiring vibrant visuals and walking around in Minecraft going, Look how nice and shiny everything is and then phew, you know, skeleton. It's a health hazard, yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, I am of course on board uh for more updated animations in Minecraft. For people that might be new to the podcast, I worked in animation for the few first five or six years of my career.

And I would love to see some improvements there. I think recently that fresh animations has been updated or available now for fabric. Uh I don't know if it requires Optivine still or if it's or if it's something that you can do with um

with sodium. I think sodium is the reason why I don't have it on the citadel. But I do like it when I see it because I think it does um create a more immersive experience in Minecraft and Beyond that, I was thinking that a way to update Minecraft animations and still try to keep them quote unquote Minecrafty. This likely wouldn't be implemented because it can be quite divisive for people that don't understand the stylistic choice, but

There's been an ongoing trend in CG animation lately that has a snappier look. And back in, you know, early production days when I was in TV. We would have recorded referred to it as animating on twos, or instead of twenty-four or thirty frames a second, you're looking at twelve to fifteen frames a second, but just on the characters. And what it does in a CG situation or a video game situation is it makes it look more like stop motion animation or it makes it look a little bit snappy.

And a good example would be Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. That's probably something people are pretty familiar with. Or more recently, the video game South of Midnight. And we'll have links to both of those trailers in our show notes just to kinda get a quick example. Um and now in South of Midnight, if you don't like it, it is a feature you can turn off because it's it's not

animated that way from the get-go. It's it's because it's a video game, it's responsive, so it's a setting. Whereas something like uh Into the Spider-Verse would have been animated that way and it's not something that you adjust on the fly. And I think that animating mobs in Minecraft that way would be really interesting.

Vibrant visuals sort of makes things look we'll say a little bit plastic, uh, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not, but it does make things look a little bit miniature. Like it makes things feel a little bit more uh toy like or um

Not stop motion, what's the word I'm looking for? It's a tilt shift photography as a is a technique. Yeah. Where things that are l like th a real life photo from an from the air is meant to look like a miniature because of the the depth of field and the focus and stuff. And I feel like that's something that could be implemented for mob animations. So

I don't think because Minecraft is so blocky and rigid we'd get something as as dynamic as squash and stretch. That's something people would notice from something like a Looney Tunes or a traditionally animated Disney cartoon where the character actually squashes and stretches like a uh like a rubber band. But something that is in something like fresh animations or better animations is what's called overshoot and settle.

And that's where before a character turns right, they would turn left a little bit to wind up before they uh if they're jumping down from something, then their whole body would kind of like bounce under the the landing, kind of adjusting as their knees adjust, or their I mean Minecraft knees. No one has knees, but like adjusting to the weight. And I feel like I've seen that kind of stuff where they've just made

Cows kind of wobble a little bit. We do see it in newer mobs in Minecraft, like the frog or the sniffer. The sniffer really feels like it's a heavy animal as it kind of like shifts and moves as it walks around in the world. And I think more of the mobs, uh including villagers in Minecraft, could have that kind of dynamic animation to them. And it wouldn't need new models necessarily. It wouldn't need any kind of like

Changes that would make Minecraft feel unlike Minecraft, but it could be something that could move things forward. So Mojang sends seems to like their alliteration. So Minecraft motion or mob motion perhaps coming soon to vibrant visuals. Who knows? Uh but I do feel like adding that kind of weight and gravity to the world would really help uh in terms of making vibrant visuals feel a little bit more like it's it's part of the world because I'm wondering

You talked about it last week where if you watch the shadows on the ground in vibrant visuals, they they tick along the ground in pixelated increments, like those 16 pixels along a block, they tend to jump. And I'm wondering if they were smooth. if the existing fairly limited animations and movements of villagers

felt odd compared to like smooth lighting changes in Minecraft now. That's part of their default setting. If the the animations felt too stiff and too strange, I don't know whether the vibrant visuals as it is now is Finished and that's how it's going to be, or if they're going to adjust that timing to make it more smooth, if other things come in there, like moving animations to slightly more modern aesthetics.

Yeah, it's certainly a possibility. And I like the idea. I sort of like the notion of things feeling a bit more stop motion, although I'd be curious to see if that affected some people's experience when it comes to stuff like motion sickness. I think that's one of the reasons that people turn it off in games like South of Midnight is because the jerky sort of frame rate of it feels like

Less uh like it feels like it induces nausea a little bit more easily easily, especially when you have such freedom of control as you do in Minecraft. Like even I get motion sick. sometimes just from the motion of like sweeping back and forth when I'm collecting sand in a desert or something like that. So It's something they'd at least have to provide settings for and have to get like fairly uh like uh accessibility settings would be would be a a necessity, I think.

Um there are a few other things that I can think of though that might help add character and would add other animations without necessarily changing the animation style. And I think it's more about the way mobs interact with their surroundings. If you think about how when a wolf goes into like a puddle of water or a lake or crosses an ocean with you or whatever, they come out with their fur wet and sometimes they'll take a second and they'll like shake off.

And the different boxes of the Wolf's uh model, like, are rigged to kind of shape like slightly offset from each other, so it really looks like a dog kind of doing that kind of movement. I wonder if more stuff like that could be applied to other mobs in the game. Say for example, if a villager has spent some time bobbing up and down in water, which we know villagers do. Um if they like if they got out of the water and maybe like the bottom half of their

like texture was like a little bit darker for a second, and maybe they like shook out their feet or something like that and then carried on walking around the village. Then maybe they'd feel like there was some interaction with the more malleable aspects of the environment.

Or if they stopped underneath trees to like look at the falling leaf particles for a second. Or even, to be honest, if they had any kind of interaction with the iron golem, because the golems will go around offering like little poppies to like the smaller villagers. But then they don't really do anything with that. It kind of looks like they reject the iron golem every time.

Whereas if like they were able to reach out, I'm not sure quite how you'd do it considering the village's arms are kind of like locked together but if you, you know, had them walk away with one of the poppies or something like that. I think even that would lend a little bit more character and life to some of the things that feel a little bit still

like some of the little baby villagers running around and stopping to like bend down a little bit and sniff some of the flowers that were planted nearby even. Just little things like that could add some more character and life to them without changing the animation style to be quite so different. And Aside from that, like rigging them slightly differently could be an option, just so they have a little bit more kind of freedom of movement in their animation, but then

Mojang has to start answering questions like, can the villagers actually separate their arms to like wave at something? Or does that feel like something that should be just for players who can emote in bedrock edition to do, for example? Like there's is it necessarily part of their biology, do they want to answer that question for the player definitively or are players sort of left up to their own

uh interpretation of what villager biology actually is, you know? So I I think there's there's a few things that get a little bit kind of th they're answering too many questions that people have fun speculating about if they make the animations too detailed, but I think there are ways some mobs could really interact with their environment that would allow them to feel a bit more alive.

Well I think too that in the featurette we mentioned a couple of weeks ago on the Minecraft movie, there was an entire class, like it was almost like a dance class of teaching extras and actors that were wearing the villager costumes, uh, and then had the digital heads of the villagers replacing theirs in the movie about how to move as a villager. Like how do you walk, how do you run, how do you point at something, how do you gesture?

And again, a lot of that had to do with the fact that their arms were folded in in front of them. And they were, I mean, m in a lot of ways, uh, encased in these costumes. Like they were basically wearing these. um, large kind of boxy things and they themselves couldn't like scratch their nose and do that kind of stuff. So

I'd be curious to see what inventive ways you can come up with for a villager to jest her towards something wave with her elbow, maybe. I don't know. Like I feel I feel like there could be some fun, quirky ways to to address that without revealing too much. As you said, of the Vildure Anatomy, but

I I I've seen some cool stuff from the Fresh Animations clips on YouTube where a villager is running from an elager and they have a look of fear on their face. I think even just villagers with expressions, like even just changing the way that their eyes and their eyebrows work.

able to communicate a lot. You were talking earlier about the villager language and how like the different inflections and trying to like go back with the disc instead of figure out what they're talking about. But that could also be helped greatly by having eyebrows. frowning, sad, happy, scared, doing all those kind of emotions expressed on the face, along with the exact same honk, can can convey a lot, right? So I feel like there could be a lot of um We'll say not immersion but like

different ways that you could communicate to the player what a villager is feeling or or doing. And I really also liked the um the way that the the illegers were aggressive. Like they had eyebrows that were always frowny. When they shot a crossbow the ilager would would lean in with like one eye, you know, and look down the the sights of the crossbow and stuff like that I thought was was cool. I don't know how needed that is in in Minecraft. For me, I would want more

focus on animals, I think, than than villagers like cows and chickens and um bears and other things that you see like polar bears and uh mobs in the nether. Uh I I would say Piglins maybe could get more attention than than um villagers or although I guess piglins are newer, they do tend to move a little bit better. So it's it's hard. Like I just I feel like there's some you know, some animals I think are like mobs in the nether. For example, like when you compare the hoglin to

uh the sniffer. The sniffer feels um like it moves much more in a modern way than than the hoglin does. The hoglin I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, has any kind of like a weight shift. It just kind of like

glides towards you as its feet treadmill underneath it. It doesn't kind of move side to side like a like a sniffer. But then again, I've not seen a sniffer charge. Like so it might be easier to do From the get go because the sniffer is just a lumbering animal, like it doesn't do the same sort of thing that say a camel does.

Um, the camel is something I find looks really silly when it does the sprint. Like if you're looking at it in in third person, it really doesn't look all that convincing. And that's the kind of thing that could absolutely use some overshoot and settle or some dynamic, you know, ways to kind of express that. Um really difficult when the mobs don't have need.

So it's like it's there's there's a give and take there of what your limitations are. Yeah, I think with camels it's also it's gotta be ridden by a player. Does the player experience the same side to side movement? Does the view bobbing get more intense, that kind of thing? A lot of Minecraft mobs they kind of move more like ships than they do animals, right? They have the kind of very smooth gliding thing with just some animation to imply the run, but

With sniffers not being typically ridable, uh, although some people with commands are probably gonna do it like they have with turtles. Um yeah, it'd be interesting to see how that how that changes the the dynamic of them. But Either way, food for thought, definitely.

Uh we're gonna move on to our main discussion this week, which is gonna be about the happy ghost. I've had a bit of hands-on experience with it. Joel, I don't think you've really played around with the happy ghast much. I know you you stepped into Bedrock Edition for vibrant visuals, but did you get to the point where you You'd manage to find a dried ghast or gone to the nether for that?

No, I ended up doing the survival experience and I died on my way out of the cave with all of my stuff to go to the nether and then just decided to go around and explore more of the overworld, see more biomes, see more water, that kind of stuff. So I haven't had any hands on myself. with the happy gast. Uh I do plan on updating the SIDL as soon as we can, but one of the reasons we don't update the SIDL right away is because of things like 1.20, 1.7 coming out.

uh this week that that you know that we're talking about. So like that kind of stuff does kind of delay the updates on the Citadel. And even then I'm pretty um focused on finishing up West Hill. So I'm probably gonna be focusing on that before getting a happy gas. Uh that said, Uh we have had more email come in of of the happy gas.

So I I kind of like I'm hearing a little bit more about what the community has to say. A lot of it tends to be focused on the fact that they are kind of slow. Uh we've had more emails about ideas about how to increase the speed of unhappy ghast. Some of them are more inventive than others. Uh and that seems to be kind of like where I'm seeing a lot is that when I see someone review a happy ghast, it's usually similar to what you've done. They're explaining how to get one.

What's going on with it, but then ultimately if it's just a quick review of the happy gas, most people that I've seen YouTube videos from are saying, like, I wish it was just a little bit faster. You know, like I feel like it's one of the things that when you want to create or do something faster than the game lets you, then that becomes a a creative bottleneck for players that they notice.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I have a few thoughts on that that we'll we'll get into, but um to start with I wanted to talk about just acquiring them. uh which is relatively straightforward. Um there are multiple ways of getting them. I think that's a really good move on Mojang's part is to have it not just be Something that you find in new chunks, the way a lot of newer resources tend to get added. The fact that it's craftable and barterable immediately is honestly a really good thing.

Um, especially since the occasional bone structures that you find in Sol Sand Valleys, there are a lot of them. If players are exploring that but they haven't really got hold of other means of traversing the nether yet, it's easy for me to fly to new chunks with Elytra, but

not everybody's going to end up being there. So I I think it it's it's a good compromise, uh especially for people who want to have them renewably too. So I think that's that's honestly the the the the early positive about them is how easy it is to get hold of dried gut. And raising them is also pretty simple. Um, I wasn't certain quite how players were going to work this out if they didn't have

like the the lowdown on how dried ghosts work from having followed the snapshots in development and stuff, but there is an advancement for rehydrating them in water. So if you're unfamiliar with the process it's pretty easy to look up in game the the the ramifications of it. Um to me it feels strange that you can't accelerate the rehydration process.

at this stage, but you can then accelerate the growth from baby ghastling into full size ghast. So it starts as a bit of a waiting game similar to hatching turtles or sniffers. But once that uh metamorphosis is done, then you at least have a means to uh to grow them up slightly faster if you're impatient to get to just having something that you can ride around.

Um the other thing that was strange, and maybe it changed at some point during the snapshots and I didn't internalize that information was that I thought there was a strict went through the various stages of rehydration, but it seems a bit more organic than that. It feels like there's a bit of shift from one side to the other. It normally takes about twenty minutes, but the window of each stage of that varies more than I expected it to. It's not like five minutes

Grumpy, five minutes neutral, five minutes happy, five minutes later you get a gasling. It's you know, a little bit of variation to either side. Um but then they're good at like popping up out of the water so they don't end up like accidentally

stuck in a block or drowning themselves, they seem to have like nailed down that mechanic pretty well. And once they're a ghastling, they're very endearing. I think honestly just having them floating around following you and making like little seagull sounding noises. is honestly quite a fun experience. It sort of feels like, you know, this thing is dependent on you in a in a an immediate way and is a a cute little thing to just have hovering around.

Um I have seen a lot of folks anecdotally say that they could wish they they wish they could keep ghastlings without them growing up. And we've had discussions like that on the podcast, I'm sure you remember recently we've had people asking like why couldn't there be this or that item in the game that helps you preserve baby animals as baby animals because you want them to stay cute? In the same way that you can stop like vines from growing and that kind of thing, having a bit more

Control over that would be good. Do you think there's anywhere on the Citadel that you'd want to have like a ghastling but not a happy ghastly? Uh not at the present time, but I could certainly see it in like a nether build or if I wanted to have like uh gas

and happy ghosts be part of my sci-fi area. If they were used for transport in like the mythos of this world, it would be kind of cool to see like, well, where do they come from? Well well there's the little ones that are being raised at like this

you know, gased farm and they're not yet ready to be used on in the transport among the people. Like I could easily see something like that, you know, uh being useful. And I think that Again, we talked about adding motion to the game, but adding a sense of time to your builds is often a tricky and When you see a baby animal and then an adult animal, like you understand like where it came from and what that growth might look like, seeing them before and after.

Same thing with a gasling and a happy gas. Like it's it would be cool to kind of see, oh, well that's how they start, you know, or that's where they come from or'cause otherwise you're just looking at like, well, If it's just existing as it is, the size that it is, there's all kinds of questions as to where it came from. But if you know that it came from something smaller, it's less of

some mystical thing that's coming to thin air and more of like, oh, it grows up. Like it starts small and it and it has to be, you know, um something that that grows over time. Um I'm surprised actually that there's only the single

stage. Like I'm surprised that the gasling doesn't have in the same way that the dried gas has like different expressions as you hydrate it, I feel like it's surprising that the happy the sorry the gasling doesn't either have different sizes or Certainly doesn't have any texture changes over the course of its change from a gas link to a happy gas. It just kind of you wait for a certain amount of time and all of a sudden pop, it just kinda changes. But I guess that's true of

All the baby animals. Like they just go from there's a baby and there's an adult. There's no in between. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only ones that used to change sizes, I'm not sure if they still do, but um horses, whenever you feed them, they used to like change size a little bit until they grew into a full sized horse. Like I'm fairly certain that's not.

Um, but either way, yeah, like happy ghasts I think are just as endearing as ghastlings in the end, so I think it's quite nice having them around, and like I've said. Having them as like aesthetic

uh things carrying chest boats around in the background and everything. It really fulfills that recent goal that Mojang mentioned of adding more life and movement to a world, having a lays kind of fly around delivering stuff and obviously the that was part of the idea behind uh mobs in progress like the copper golem and things like that was to to add more m life and movement to bases, a bit more organic

uh stuff with neutral mobs or or friendly mobs that were going to be able to help players or or just be part of the life cycle of an area. And so yeah, I found that really a a fun part of seeing where they fit into my world, especially in areas where there are taller mountains or kind of sky builds, and I think it really works well to have them as part of that environment.

The movement, as we've mentioned, does feel very slow. Uh it definitely feels like raising them when they're where they're needed is is easier than travelling with them long distance. And Uh I did get a couple of uh a couple of comments from people saying, you know, they're useless next to Elytra just because they don't move very fast. And I think while that's obviously a

Yeah, a a piece of feedback about how that player is using them. They want to be able to use them for long distance transport and they're finding that a frustration. um, I find that they are for transport and not for travel. And that's a fairly important distinction to make, right? The Elytra is obviously like something that you can travel very fast, but Since Electra now can't be boosted with leads attached'cause the firework breaks the lead immediately, I think it

Worth making that distinction. It's worth noting that like the transport options you have available to you with a happy garst are enormous, especially since. As far as I can tell, there aren't really m there's not really an upper limit to how many things you can strap onto a happy ghast with leak. Like you can put as many chest boats as you want to feasibly. I think the the only thing preventing it is the stretch and the kind of collision mechanic.

that would eventually lead to one of the leads breaking. But you can do that with mobs, you can do that with chest boats, you can do that with all sorts of stuff. You can even leash a happy ghast to another mob, or leash another mob to a happy ghast. The two are distinct behaviours is something that I've noticed because If I start with the lead attached to the happy ghost and I tie that to a cow on the ground, The cow is an anchor point for the happy ghast and it doesn't fly away with the cow.

But if I start with the lead attached to the cow and attach it to the happy gust, that cow is going ballooning. That cow is like immediately up into the air. And so I think there's a really interesting nuance to lead behavior now, where the first thing you attach is the thing that's getting attached to the second thing. And my stream chat had some really interesting ideas about leashing a happy ghost to an a lay.

And the Alay sort of acts as like a tugboat for the larger mob, and what you end up with is the allay following you if you've given it an item. And allays can follow you much faster than happy ghasts can fly, but the lead doesn't break. And so what that leads to is the allay effectively bringing with it, following the player at whatever speed it can, bringing with it the happy ghost and any attached chest.

And if you can keep above a certain height so that the chest boats don't get lost in the process, I can see that being an interesting configuration for much faster transport with all of those happy gaster tanks. entities, uh but with the allay kind of leading the charge and following the player. Obviously you can have more control over where an allay goes by throwing an item on the ground for it as bait so that it kind of goes over there and and follows.

Um I also did try out a little bit of an interaction where the happy ghost is the building platform. I've done a bit more of that in survival, but in creative I was trying this out where if, you know, say the an lay is carrying a stone block and I'm taking stone out of uh a mountain or a floating island or something like that. The Allays can go and pick up those stone blocks, deliver them up to you on the Happy Ghast, and they do land in your inventory.

They don't sort of throw them midair and the blocks still fall to the ground. You will actually find them throwing them onto the surface of the happy ghast and the items end up in your inventory.

So I feel like Alays and Happy Ghosts are kind of an interesting team up that I've not seen too many people uh discovering yet, and I think that's something people need to explore more, because they're both flying mobs, they both have a lot more freedom of movement than the average mob, and the fact that they have a bit of synergy between the two of them is uh an overlooked fact I think up until this point.

I m just last week I mentioned that I think it would be great if we could have two relay points for a happy gas to go between as a constant back and forth, which you can do with the lathe, right? Like it's not going to be pneumatically even the a lay is gonna take an item from one place and put it in another if that's what you've set it up to do.

But in the idea of creating like a parkour course or a a a more helter skelter uh transport platform if you're in like a sky build world or something like that. Something of your own creation, not sky block, but like, you know, something like what you're doing. uh with the sky islands, uh that kind of thing. Then I mean that creates a way for the happy gas to get tugged back and forth. If it's leashed to an LA, that's got another assignment.

You know, if that's something that can actually work. And I think that's really cool. And just to go back to your comparison or someone else's comparisons to uh the elytra and the and the happy gas. Like that to me is like comparing an elytra to a boat. Like they're just they're two completely different things. You know, like and and to our point earlier about the happy gas being too slow

For some players, because they want to do creative things on the back of it and they can create faster than the happy gas can move them. I think the reverse is true of the Elytra. The Elytra is so fast that you very often can't stop to look at something. Uh you're looking at things from the sky if that's what you're using the Elytra for.

you're constantly having to circle around or slow yourself down or kind of like adjust where you're looking. You're just always flying and falling at the same time. And very often in smaller spaces the elytra, even with a tier one rocket, is overshoot. Like you're just gonna go too far too fast and you're not gonna be as accurate, uh it run the risk of smashing into things. And I think that's the extreme end of of the elytra being something that you can't use in that way.

It's meant for travel, it's not meant for observation necessarily. And I feel like I mean, you and I and other content creators might be a little bit spoiled by things like uh the camera mods or uh camera plugins uh to get yourself higher in a different perspective. But on a server where it is just vanilla and you want to do something like what I was doing with the road textures this week.

Uh, a happy gas would be fantastic. You know, you park it off to the side of what you're doing. And anytime that you need to get up higher and take a look at it, something, you can just jump on the happy gas. And take a look at it.

And you don't necessarily have to build a tower of scaffolding, climb all the way up, which is a slow and a pain, and then either look around it or remove it, the happy ghast, if you dismount it, would it also get out of the way of the build and go back to wherever you kind of like let it roam? And so I feel like the happy gas does provide that point of view as part of its function. Like so, yes, for transport over travel, but also for observation.

over over travel. Like it's you or even at the same time as traveling. Like you're meant to be able to look around while you're on. and and stop and and look at things. And so the bird's eye view aspects of the Happy Ghost I think are one of its strengths. And um I am I'm really surprised about the the alay. That's a really interesting idea. And When I think about transport to your point, I think about it vertically.

Like I know that you have to go to the end to get the happy ghast. So if I was gonna create like an iron farm or something and I needed to move villagers way up in the in s in the sky, I would be inclined to go to the nether, try to get some soul sand and send them up via a bubble elevator, because that to me would probably be the fastest way to do that. But if the bubble elevator is not going to be part of your build, you have to take all the time to build it, then you have to

M g move the villagers and then dismantle it. Same thing if you're doing rails, you're trying to get the villagers up thirty, forty blocks in the air for whatever reason, and then you have to dismantle all that infrastructure just to serve its purpose. If you had a happy gas, which does require going to the nether, you could put a villager or two in a couple of boats and get them up there without having to build anything extra.

Without having uh potential errors, loss of control, zombies showing up where you don't want them. Like i if night falls, just have the the villagers under the happy ghast up in the air. Like they're fine. They're safe. Nothing's gonna happen. so there's some real things I think that are challenging in terms of mob transport horizontally when you turn get into cliffs and

ravines and different obstacles that could be a real problem for moving mobs around, getting them into a happy ghost and getting them up above uh the ground while still frustrating it is quite slow. It does eliminate the pain in the butt of like trying to convince mobs or or trying to

provide paths for mobs to go up cliffs that are two blocks high. You know, like something as simple as running into four or five of those over the course of your traversal range is gonna be a real pain compared to just like floating four or five blocks above the ground in a happy gas, it's smooth sailing. It's slow, but the tedium is removed, I think, from it. Yeah. And I I think it also gives a really cool way of

transporting yourself up to floating builds without there being a column of water that's there permanently, right? Especially if you've got like a floating island kind of thing. It's one of the things I've resisted doing with my pirate ship build And I've had a light tray in this world for a while, I think even before I started building the floating islands, so it's child's play to get up there right now, but

if you're thinking about a long term world where there might be other players coming and going and not everyone's gonna have access to Elytra or want to use Elytra if there's some self imposed restrictions going on there. I think happy ghosts are a fun transport alternative that don't necessarily mean you zipping across the sky to and fro. I think honestly their speed, while obviously it's got a

Uh a a bit of a uh it it feels a bit inhibiting to players who just want to use them for like long distance stuff. It prevents them from feeling like you have access to Elytra super early and can just go absolutely anywhere you want to. It's sort of it it It doesn't constrict you necessarily to a specific range, but it makes getting anywhere a little bit more difficult so that you still have incentive to go after Elytra later in the game.

And in the meantime, if players don't want you going too far afield because you don't want to heavily explore a world

too early in the world's like life cycle, then it's an alternative that at least means you can get to and from vertical stuff in near your spawn point to begin with. So I I think there's there's some benefits there that people haven't always considered. Um We we touched on this briefly, but the ability to use them as a platform, now that I've got to grips with it a little bit, I still find myself

uh having a bit of trouble with controls going up and down because especially descending, like I'm so used to using the shift key from tinkering with stuff in creative mode that I do at this point instinctively just get off the ghast a couple of times before I have to remind myself, Okay, you look at the ground, you press down, or you look up, you press backwards. Um It's honestly once you get to grips with that, one of the best quality of life features they've added for builders in a long time.

because it takes out all of the frustration of working with scaffolding, whether it's the length to which you can build with scaffolding before you have to start another supporting block, or whether it's just you don't like working around scaffolding because you have to crouch constantly, otherwise you fall through it.

Like there are plenty of workarounds with a happy ghast. It provides enough of a platform and then you can move the platform so easily compared to scaffolding where like if you're done working in a six-block radius you you kinda have to rebuild all of your infrastructure from scratch. Like he was saying with the s the sky tower for for getting a villager up to world height. It's the same thing.

Whereas now all I have to do is sit on this creature, move it around a little bit, and suddenly I'm in an area that would take me another couple of minutes worth of setting scaffolding up to be able to build there comfortably. I think it's a perfect compromise on those mechanics and it provides a really, really smart way of doing

There are some downsides. Like with scaffolding, if you need to sleep to skip the night away, you can place a bed on the scaffolding. You know, you can put shulker boxes down on the scaffolding. The ghast doesn't provide a solid platform to place blocks against. So you have to find some ways of working with that. And likewise, if you're starting a mid-air build, you still need to have a solid block to place something on in order to get started.

But just making little edits on my floating island this week. Floating around the circumference of it and adding diorite veins into the landscape where previously I'd done that. on the front side, but I hadn't been bothered to go around the back and do the rest of it because I wasn't looking at those sides and it was a pain in the butt to scaffold up and do a six block section at a time before I had to move the scaffolding again.

With the Happy Ghast it's child's play. It it genuinely is so much better for little hovery builds like that. And likewise I can see people working on larger cliffs, like taller terrain pieces, any any like city wall where it's more than five blocks high, these things are going to be used to be. And so I think it's gonna be fun getting to grips with that, not necessarily using them as transport at the same time, because

uh getting to the chest boat that they're carrying is a bit of a pain if it's a midair thing. But I think moving them around like piece by piece and editing stuff is so much easier when you have a a a happy girl. And I'm wondering if honestly these were developed.

uh around the community discussion when the crab was in the mob vote and they were suggesting like we give builders more reach this way. And I think a lot of people's response to that was, you know, we could just move closer to the object.

instead of, you know, getting an additional block's worth of range with this extendable crab claw and only being able to use that for building What if we just have something that helps us get slightly closer to what it is we're trying to interact with and still have the the possibility of mining as well as building and you know all of the other stuff you can do with that kind of reach range?

And it feels like a a good solution to stuff like that because it allows you to get closer to the object instead of having to finagle another tool in your inventory just so you can reach slightly further away. I think it's a really good compromise for builders.

Yeah, I'm not looking forward to having to get used to the controls. Like I feel like I'm like you gonna be pressing shift and dismounting accidentally for quite some time and uh wanting to have more um traditional video game controls I think for for the hovering aspect of it. Uh I can see that being being problematic. I I know that I've seen some I guess feedback on when you are moving the gas around and then you are stopping it to then dismount and then do some building. Is there

Anything that you have to say about like the glide to a stop or like any kind of a adjustment that it makes, like you get it right where you want it, but then the gas like readjusts to the primary directions. Like do you find any of that kind of off putting or annoying or or like the gas adjusting to like almost where you put it as opposed to exactly where you put it. Yeah, I think the main issue I have interacting with them right now is that that pathfinding range that they have.

uh makes it difficult to remount them unless you already have stuff like elytra. Like I find myself flying to mount it more than I find myself clicking onto it from the ground. And there's some stuff you can do to adjust that. Um they'll float closer to you if they aren't harnessed and you're holding the harness in your hand, but you don't typically take the harness off to dismount it, right? Like so there's there's nobody a a whole lot you can do about that

Um snowballs are the thing that you tempt them with, but I find the problem with that is half the time they get close enough that if you're holding the snowball in your hand and you right-click on them, you can mount the ghast, or you have to maybe jump a little bit and then you can mount the ghast. But if they don't get close enough, it's difficult to tell whether or not they're close enough and you just throw the snowball directly at them.

Uh which doesn't cause any kind of panic movement. Uh they've specifically not programmed them in with the panic behaviour uh if they get hit with a snowball and it doesn't damage them'cause snowballs don't. But it does then feel a bit like, you know, oh, I've wanted to help this thing and I've accidentally just thrown this thing in its face. It doesn't feel good to do. Right. I would really like it if they added snow block.

as a tempt item for ghasts as well as snowballs because I think that would prevent that kind of mishap from happening. It you'd at least feel less like you were, you know, accidentally doing something that you didn't intend to do. Um Regardless of how you feel about the ghast's feelings on the subject. But I do think the um the the interaction with them is a little difficult because they don't stay low enough to the ground sometimes.

If you take the snowballs out of your hand so you don't throw one at them, then a lot of the time they lose interest and move away faster than you can catch up with them. So maybe there's a bit of fine-tuning with regards to them wanting to be around the player.

I recognize they don't want to have them around the player all the time because these things are four by four blocks and you end up with a like a it's like the wandering trader taken to the extreme where they kind of get under your feet and in your way. Uh you don't want to be looking at a wall half the time.

But um yeah, like I I think if they if they touch down for a little bit longer, if they stayed closer to those blocks for a little bit longer before they turn around and drift off again, it would really help. So maybe a little bit of fine-tuning.

Um, but I I was wondering also, maybe that's why we need a grappling hook in Minecraft after all. Because I can imagine a happy ghost becoming something a bit like the um This is a weird pull, but the uh the Metal Gear Solid 5 Fulton extraction system where you basically if you want to grab something from a battlefield and send it back home to your base, you just attach it to a balloon and it just gets shot up into the air.

And like imagining being able to like And maybe even with that crab claw, like leash yourself to a happy ghast that's like at a maybe a ten block range and like yoink yourself up to it would be really fun to do and could also lead to some really interesting like parkour challenges and stuff like that. It would obviously have to then lead to well, how can we use the grappling hook for other functionality in the game beyond just using it to mount the happy ghast? And obviously there'd be less

to work out there. But thinking about the grappling hook they added in the poisonous potato update for April Fools a couple of years ago, and using a hook like that to get up onto a happy ghast would feel really fun.

Um it it it's sort of it's not something you can do with my standard grappling hook item in Minecraft, which is a bucket of water. You can't pour water on a gus'cause you can't attach blocks to it in any shape or form. So I do think it'd be really fun to have a means to get to it from Further down like s if if it's floating a few blocks off the ground and outside of the player's reach.

Um outside of that you've got Elytra, you've got jump boost, you know, you've got wind charges. There's a few things like that I don't typically carry with me. Um but yeah, I've been flying myself up to them with Elytra, landing on them and then mounting or just right clicking them quickly midair if I can to to get back onto them. But a little bit of fine tuning needed, I think, maybe for the the average player experience.

When you're standing and watching a gas go through its range, like you you're not on it, it's free to roam, even though it's going to stay roughly close to where you left it. Does it move faster in that situation than it does when you're on it? Difficult to say. Like I can't really tell because when you're on it you're part of its motion and so you can't really track like how fast it's moving. I'd really have to like test that in empirical conditions.

Uh anecdotally it feels like they kind of float around and they change direction quite quickly. So maybe that can feel like part of it, whereas when you're flying on one, it's really difficult to see it moving in any direction other than forward.

Um yeah, like I I'd I'd have a hard time saying if that was just it looks like they're moving faster, but they're not. Um but yeah, I'd I'd have to maybe compare side by side with a player riding one and a a free roaming happy ghost to see if there was a difference. I bring it up'cause I wonder if that comparison, whether it's perceptive or actual, is also contributing to players seeing these things move around, then getting on them and going like, Well, why is it so slow?

Like if they think it's gonna be faster as an um even if it's just an impression before they get on, I can see that being something that adds to the disappointment of like this thing is really not that fast. And and again, like I know it's not supposed to be, but I feel like um we've had uh you know other ideas coming into the inbox about like ways to speed it up. Peace people sometimes have

uh a thought to speed it up permanently, but other people compare it to like the camel's dash ability. Like if if there was a way to temporarily increase the speed of the gas with some sort of feature like that. Some sort of giddy up, essentially, is what I I feel like the community is looking for.

So it's not like a permanent buff, it's more like something else. And we've also I think last week we had someone talk about like enchanting harnesses and like stuff like that that would be again added gameplay, not just like make it better natively. But just like, well here's what it is out of the box. if you want it to go faster or if you want a fast one and a slow one.

I say fast, faster relatively speaking, then like these would be the methods that you have to do to to get it. And it um involves more gameplay, like more exploration or more, you know, um resources or something. And I think that could be an interesting way to to increase it. Um I do like the idea of

Sort of like non traditional uses for the happy gas. Like yes, we can use it to build a pie and we can do that s kind of stuff, but I I like all the stuff that you've mentioned about, you know, using them as just aesthetic, you know, roaming features of a build, uh color coding their harnesses with builds, uh using them to transport mobs as like a as a main thing or in your case with your garage transport resources with a drop off point. Like I kind of wonder

combined with an alay, like is I mean, is it gonna be faster and more efficient? Probably not. But is it also cooler and maybe better looking than just a water stream of moving items? And yeah, like you you could also have things be moving around in different ways and I think that that's gives more player choice.

to the kind of things. And I've I've certainly heard uh Tango mention this on on his streams where, you know, he's building an iron farm for like the hundredth time. It's like, is this the most efficient way to do this? No. Is it the most fun right now? Yes.

And I think that that's something that the Happigast does offer. Is that like it's it's an alternative to some things that people might be able to do more efficiently, but it's more fun and it's it's got some more whimsy to it and it allows them to explore

some of the new mechanics from the leashes and I'm curious as to what other things are gonna come out of that. Like, you know, you mentioned attaching a leash to a cow, then a ghast, and then the reverse. I wonder what other explorations or discoveries are gonna come out of the happy ghast that then might Be applied to Minecraft outside of the happy gas? Like what could we do in other farms or other situations? You know, people use.

um, leashes and and chickens all the time if they want to have a leash permanently attached to the fence posts and they they hide the chicken underground somewhere. Like I'm wondering if there's things that you could do with

like two animals that are hidden behind walls but are leashed together and as you're looking down a tunnel you're seeing this leash that's constantly moving. Like I I just th that kind of stuff in Minecraft could be really, really interesting. I'm not sure exactly what the contexts would be because I've not messed around with it, but like there's some possibilities there that are kind of springing out of uh the happy gas and the leash interaction potential.

Yeah, I think even on the Minecraft Reddit a little while ago I'd have to go and look up the post, it's been a a few weeks now. But it when they changed the leash mechanics to be a bit more robust in the snapshot

I'm pretty sure it only took about twenty four hours for somebody to have leashed a bunch of happy ghosts in minecarts together and it became like a bullet train that a ton of people could ride because they were all like saddled and so you could have like, you know, tons of people one minecart at the front goes and instead of leashing the minecarts themselves together, the mobs themselves are leash together, so they all sort of fall in line physics wise and it becomes like a

a moving train. So the there's a bunch of potential things like that that aren't even necessarily to do with the happy ghost, but it serves as the the turning point for leash mechanics and and various other things. Even just having a mob in a minecart Moving along a fairly discrete rail somewhere, with a happy ghast leash to it. Their leash range is about ten blocks.

So you could have something like a happy ghost balloon that's like travelling around a circuit of some kind around a city. Right. And it could just be on patrol like that. Um you could set up things like that for sure. You just have to make sure that they were robust enough that they didn't break when chunks loaded and unloaded and that kind of thing.

I'm sure people will be looking into ways to do that in the near future. The community response to the Happy Ghast overall, just to kind of have some concluding thoughts here, has been largely very positive from what I've seen.

And I've seen a predictable amount of like Nay saying about oh this doesn't really fit with Minecraft and I always find that stuff a little bit strange considering that ghasts have been in the game for so long. Um I l I looked it up on the Minecraft wiki, it was like Alpha one point two, so it's so early, like twenty ten.

um in in terms of Minecraft's development. So obviously the fact that there's a happy ghast now feels like, sure, a little bit late to the party, but it's a party nonetheless, now that this thing is here.

Um, I I haven't seen many examples of people using the multiplayer functionality yet, but that's also I think just the circles that I run in, like a lot of the people I uh follow online play solo or like they have their own projects distinct from what other people are doing on their server and I think like the general feedback seems to be that the ghast is a fairly slow Travel option and what you'd want to do typically with four players on top of this thing is travel as a group.

So I imagine there will be ways people again, with the train idea and stuff like that, people might be able to uh find ways of making that faster. But in the meantime, I think it's as a single player experience still has a lot to offer.

Um I've definitely seen people anecdotally say they've spent a very peaceful time roaming around the End Islands with them. Um it's slow and steady but it's safe in that regard. And uh yeah, I think there are there are a lot of ways that this can be explored and used in future, so

Yeah, we're I'm I'm looking forward to seeing how people continue to use the happy ghast, if any more innovations come that way from Mojang or if the feature is just out there for people to do what they will with at this point. Before we wrap up, we have some breaking news. Uh as is a tradition sometimes on the show, uh 1.21.7 has been released.

Uh June 30th today. Of course it has. The uh the features are the same as release candidate two, so we don't have to rehash those. There do look to be some additional bugs, and they're gonna be in the article on Minecraft.net. We'll have that linked in our show notes. at the spawn trunks.com in addition to release candidate one and two we'll have the release article up there as well.

Yeah, I I I don't see the point in uh waiting a week for people to get a newsread that's basically the same as this one, but uh Yes, enjoy your lava chicken music discs out there if you're updating right away. I know I will be, although uh I'm more interested in having an extra painting in my world. Let's uh wrap things up there though folks, so thank you so much.

For listening to this episode of The Spawn Chunks. You can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we've talked about today over at thespawnchunks.com. The music for the show was composed by me, and the Spawn Chunks is proud as ever to be a listener supported podcast. If you're getting some value out of the show, consider putting some value back in.

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My name is Johnny, but on Line of Guide by Pixel Rifs, you can find most of what I do at youtube.com slash Pixelriffs where the Minecraft survival guide is currently in its third season and I am working on a misadventures video sooner or later.

I also stream three days a week on Twitch, where I do behind the scenes work for my YouTube series. I'm the voice of the unofficial Hermitcraft recap, which you can find through a quick YouTube search, and aside from that, I'm at Pixelriffs on both Blue Sky and Instagram. Joel, where can people find you online?

I will point everyone towards the Citadel Cafe, my other podcast about sci fi and fantasy entertainment. Uh Steven and I talked about Killer of Killers, the Predator animation series or where I guess anthology film. on Disney Plus uh this past week. That's in the editing hopper right now. And that show is actually edited in the or animated in the same way as uh Spiderverse. Like it's got that motion on two that I was talking about earlier. So it's kind of a fun stylistic version of uh Predator.

to uh to just enjoy. It's it's all the things that you would expect. So it was really fun conversation. Uh I'm also on social media at Joel Duggan wherever you like to hang your social media hat. And I stream Tuesday through Saturday on Twitch. And that is twitch.tv slash you guessed it, Joel Duggan. Thanks for visiting the Spawn Chunks. The world outside is infinite, but we'll get there slowly.