Everything new in the Minecraft Chase the Skies update
By Ryan Woodrow
The smaller Minecraft updates continue to roll on, with the Chase the Skies update being the next content drop coming later this month. We don’t have an exact date yet, but with the promises June 2025 release date fast approaching, it’s fair to assume that we now have a complete list of features that are being added in this update.
We have some big and flashy new features added alongside a few smaller changes that some fans have been asking for since before Minecraft hit 1.0.
Ridable Ghasts
This is the main feature that gives this update its name, as you can now tame and ride Ghasts across the skies of your world. If you obtain a Dried Ghast – either by finding one in a Soul Valley biome in the Nether or crafting one – you can place it in water, and after a while, it’ll grow into a Ghastling.
Wait for the Ghastling to grow (a process that can be sped up by feeding it Snowballs) and you’ll get a Happy Ghast. Once you have one, you can craft a Harness from leather, glass, and wool to fly on its head.
As well as being useful for navigating your world, you can actually stand on their heads, letting you easily place blocks high in the sky without the need for complicated scaffold structures.
Craftable Saddles
Given how many rideable mobs there are in Minecraft, it’s always been weird that the Saddle is still such a tricky item to get a hold of, only spawning in chests in certain structures like Dungeons and Villages, but all that has finally changed. After over a decade of begging, Saddles are finally craftable with three Leather and one Iron Ingot.
Lead changes
The Lead is also now a lot easier to craft, as well as getting some changes to how it works. You no longer need a Slimeball to craft one, as just five string will do the trick, making them much easier to obtain. This is useful because now you can use them to leash mobs together in a big chain, rather than always needing to hold one or tie them to a fencepost. It’s not just animals either, as you can also leash things to boats and Happy Ghasts, making transporting many mobs at a time much easier.
New music disk
Several new tracks have been added to the game in this update, but only one of them has a music disk, meaning all of you who collect them in your world have one more to track down. This one is relatively simple, though, as they now drop when you kill a Ghast by bouncing its own Fireball back at it. Doing this already gets you the Return to Sender achievement, and now you get an extra reward along with it.
Vibrant Visuals
This Bedrock Edition-only feature makes a huge change to Minecraft’s lighting system, essentially adding shaders to the game as an official feature. While Java Edition players can do this quite easily with mods, those who play on consoles will now be able to have this great new lighting technology illuminate their worlds.
Player locator bar
Tracking down your friends in multiplayer worlds is now a lot easier, as you can now show a locator bar on top of your inventory, in place of the XP bar. This will show dots on it, indicating where other players are in your world. This does make it harder to hide, though you can remove yourself from the bar by sneaking, going invisible, or wearing a carved pumpkin/mob head.
Cloud and fog changes
Minecraft’s skies will look a little different from now on, as the way the game’s clouds spawn has been reworked, helping them look a little more realistic while still keeping to Minecraft’s iconic style. There’s even an easter egg in there, as there’s a very rare chance for a Creeper-face to appear in one of the clouds.
In Java Edition, the fog system has also been reworked, adding a bit of fog to the distance in the overworld, which gets more pronounced during rain and thunderstorms. It’s not loved by everyone, but it does add a nice bit of atmosphere to the weather in the game and will no doubt look great when combined with shaders.