💨 Fast Happy Ghasts

The harness colour is your ghast's throttle. A tiny, self-contained datapack for Minecraft 26.3. No mods, no resource pack, no new items to craft: put a harness on a happy ghast and the colour you dyed it decides how fast it flies.

🎨 The harness colour is the throttle

Warm and bright is fast, cool and dark is gentle. Every harnessed ghast is faster than vanilla:

🧭 Fast while it wears a harness

A harnessed happy ghast flies at its harness speed, ridden or parked. Without a harness it is always plain vanilla. While you are flying it, it also drops to plain vanilla speed (1×) when:

• it is on a lead, or towing something on a lead
• more than one player is aboard
• a rider is holding a ghast tear in their hotbar or offhand - your brake

🧪 Splash it, feed it

• Splash Potion of Swiftness - vanilla happy ghasts ignore Speed. Here they don't: +50% of vanilla for Swiftness I, +100% for II, for as long as the potion lasts.
• Snowballs - feed a harnessed ghast a snowball for 60 seconds of extra speed (+100% of vanilla). Feeds stack up to five minutes, one snowball each.

Stack it all - red harness, Swiftness II and a fresh snowball, flying solo - and you top out at 4.5× vanilla. A harness this version has stamped never slows a ghast below vanilla, in any combination.

🪶 Built to stay out of the way

No new items, no recipes, no advancement tree, no chat spam. It reacts to what you do - equipping a harness, mounting, feeding a snowball - rather than scanning the world every tick. A parked ghast costs literally nothing.

The harness speed isn't even running code: it rides on the item itself, so the game applies and removes it for you.

📦 Installing

Drop the zip into your world's datapacks folder (or your server's) and /reload. It works on existing worlds. Upgrading from 2.0.x: ghasts without a harness go back to vanilla speed (they used to be permanently 2×), and harnessed ghasts pick up the new colour speeds within thirty seconds of their chunk loading. A harness kept in a chest picks them up the first time it is worn. Going back to 2.0.x? Run the uninstall below first, then switch 2.0.x on again with /scoreboard players set #enabled fhg_cfg 1.

🧹 Removing it

Run this before deleting the pack:

/function fast_happy_ghasts:admin/uninstall

Speed is stored on the ghasts and on their harnesses, so deleting the datapack alone would leave them fast. The uninstall reaches every ghast in a loaded chunk - if you have ghasts parked far away, load them and run it again. A harness stored in a chest keeps its speed until it is worn and the uninstall is run again - and if you upgraded from 2.0.x, put each stored harness on a ghast once before uninstalling, so it carries this version's speeds.

Requires: Minecraft 26.3. Vanilla - no mods, no loaders, server-side only.