The next Minecraft update brings the Happy Ghast to the game alongside a helpful tool to locate your friends

Next Minecraft Update 1.21.6 Release Date And Contents

The next Minecraft update brings the Happy Ghast to the game alongside a helpful tool to locate your friends

Next Minecraft release date

The next Minecraft update could be released in June 2025. The 1.21.5 update arrived in March, and with four updates a year promised by Mojang, that puts their frequency at around every three months.

For players using the game's Snapshots feature, where you can try out new additions in beta form, you may already be familiar with the update's contents.

New Minecraft update features

There are limited details available on the next Minecraft update, but we do know it includes the arrival of the rideable Happy Ghast, as well as an improvement to the way you can tell where your friends are in your world.

Happy Ghast

The Minecraft Happy Ghast is coming in the next update. This adorable passive version of the existing hostile Minecraft mob that lives in the Nether is set to become one of the cutest in the game. You'll need to seek out a Dried Ghast in the Nether and take it home to rehydrate it, where it will become a Ghastling. After waiting for your Ghastling to mature for a short while, it'll turn into a Happy Ghast which can be harnessed and ridden.

The Happy Ghast can transport up to four players, with the player at the front controlling its direction. Happy Ghasts will even stay still when a player is standing on them, making construction at great heights easier than ever.

Minecraft friend locator

We've all been there. You're running around your world in search of the various biomes and valuable resources, when suddenly you notice the sun is setting, you haven't brought a bed or a compass on your adventures, and you're about to get inundated with mobs. If you're playing with friends, there's still hope for you yet. Minecraft is introducing a friend locator which will appear in place of the experience bar at the bottom of the UI.

The experience bar will still appear if you're actively earning XP, but in its place will be the locator bar. Server admins can turn that locator bar off, so for PvP servers or if you simply don't want people knowing player locations in your server, fear not. There are still ways to hide from other players if you want to remain undetected. You can crouch, wear a mask such as a carved pumpkin, drink an invisibility potion, or approach other players from behind.

Combat accuracy

Alongside these two main additions is a tweak to the way that projectiles shoot at close distances. Formerly, items fired had a block tolerance margin of 0.3. That means you could be less accurate at short ranges, as projectiles would begin to stray from 0.3 blocks away. That's pretty close! In the next update, Minecraft projectiles will have no tolerance margin for the first 0.1 seconds, increasing by 0.1 per 0.1 seconds until it reaches the 0.3 block margin. In short terms, this means that your projectile accuracy will be greater in the initial moments after it is released. Enemies that are close by should be a bit more afraid. Not a lot, but a bit.

Atmospheric changes

Mojang has also promised some atmosphere improvements. While raining, your world will become foggier, and that fog has been visually tweaked to look better in the game. Fog is now split into environmental and render distance-based, where they were both previously mixed together. Environmental fog represents the fogginess of the environment you're in, whether that's lava, water, or just the normal atmosphere. Render distance fog exists to obscure the border of visible terrain.

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This story originally appeared on: GameSpot - Author:UK GAG