Moody Ghasts

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

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

👻 The Mood System

Happy Ghasts are no longer endlessly smiling. They have a dynamic mood that shifts based on how you treat them — and it has real consequences.

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

What affects mood?

What does mood do?

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

🎯 Aerial Combat

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

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

🧊 The Ice Charge

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

On direct hit:

• Deals damage and applies Slowness
• Transforms Skeletons into Strays

Area effects on impact:

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

In the Nether:

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

🍪 New Cookies

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

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

🌶️ Spicy Cookie

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

❄️ Frosted Cookie

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

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

⚙️ Configuration

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

Tunable via datapack:

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

Requires a companion mod:

• New projectile entity types → implement GhastProjectileFactory
• New shooting behaviours → implement ShootingBehaviourFactory

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

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

🗺️ Roadmap

Things coming post-1.0:

• Inevitable Bugs and Bugfixes
• Balancing changes

Later:

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