Taking Inventory: Ghast Tear

It should not be a surprise to learn that you can get ghast tears from ghasts, but I have good and bad news related to that. The good news is that you don’t need to climb up to one of the huge, creepy, flying, fireball-spitting beasts and scrape a tear off their face. The bad news is that you’ll have to defeat one (or more) of them in combat instead.

Every time you slay a ghast, there’s a chance that a ghast tear will drop – and that chance increases with every level of Looting enchantment on your weapon. At maximum, you’ve got the chance of collecting four ghast tears at once from a particularly sad ghast. The Looting enchantment also works when you defeat a ghast by deflecting one of its fireballs with an enchanted weapon.

But be careful because the tear will drop below where the ghast perished. Quite often in the Nether, that means over a big lake of lava – and if the tear falls in there, you’re unlikely to be getting it out without roasting yourself to a crisp in the process. Try to defeat a ghast when it’s flying over land instead.

Why would you even go to all the trouble of dueling with a ghast anyway? Well, it turns out that ghast tears are a vital ingredient in one of the most useful potions in the game. Combine a ghast tear with an awkward potion in a brewing stand, and you’ll get yourself a potion of regeneration, which will slowly but surely restore your hearts over time. It’s a great way of keeping your health topped up during a long fight.

The other thing you can do with a ghast tear is to combine it with glass and an eye of ender in a crafting table to create an End crystal. These dangerously unstable crystals are the only way to respawn the Ender Dragon after it has been defeated, if for some reason that’s a thing you want to do. Craft four of them, and place them on top of the flat sides of the exit portal to resurrect the dragon.

My advice? Opt for a healthy lifestyle, let sleeping dragons lie, and stick to the potions of regeneration instead.