The newest Minecraft snapshot makes A Minecraft Movie's giant Ghast airships into an in-game reality
A Minecraft Movie pleasantly surprised me with its mostly accurate depictions of how people play Minecraft, though some of its antics understandably stretched beyond what's currently possible in the game. One of those impossible antics is now very much possible in Minecraft's Java's latest snapshot updates: Ghast airships are real, and they have a lot of potential.
It started with April 8's snapshot, a preview of features coming to all Minecraft versions this summer, which introduced friendly flying Ghast mounts. Happy Ghasts are nifty: You grow one by leaving a Ghast fossil in water for a while. Then it hydrates enough to become a baby Ghastling, and eventually grows into a full-sized smiling Ghast that serves as your personal taxi. Happy Ghasts can be equipped with a harness that seats four players.
A flying mount is already one of the biggest additions to vanilla Minecraft in years, but yesterday's snapshot added a cherry on top: upgraded leashes. Now, leashes can bind two creatures together (Just Cause grapple hook-style) and suspend them in the air. You can also leash a Happy Ghast to a boat to create an airship—a setup that looks very similar to that part in A Minecraft Movie where Piglin soldiers chase Jack Black and friends across the skies suspended on platforms under Ghasts.
As players are discovering, the combination of Happy Ghasts and leashes is useful for moving animals over a large distance, taking chests full of goodies with you without fiddling with minecarts, and generally looking extremely cool. Leashed entities can freely dangle from each other while attached to a Happy Ghast, which already has players experimenting with their air cargo capabilities.
"This is 20 villagers... you can carry way way more if you wanted to," YouTuber Prowl8413 wrote on X under an image of a Ghast boatship daisy-chained to 15 other boats in what now qualifies as the most precarious transportation method in all of Minecraft.
"Minecraft has peaked, you can't get better than this," wrote user silentwisperer_ after dangling a family of helpless pigs and cows over an 80-foot drop.
X user Bobicraft shared an extreme example of the Happy Ghasts passenger flexibility, hoisting what appears to be 20 to 30 boats and chests with upgraded leashes (though it's possible console commands intervened to make this one possible).
Leashes that don't break whenever you stretch them two feet longer than you're supposed to have other knock-on benefits, like the ability to chain boats together into a sea convoy—no more trying and failing to keep the group together on a multi-day sea voyage.
There's just one omission that players are already asking Mojang to remedy: Minecarts cannot be leashed together in the same way as boats or mobs, so the dream of functional trains in vanilla Minecraft is still just that for now.