Fireball

A fireball is an explosive projectile expelled from a ghast as its method of attack.

Behavior
Fireballs have a straight trajectory unaffected by gravity and a theoretically infinite range, although they despawn after 1 minute. Fireballs do not track their target once fired and can be deflected if hit with a projectile or melee attack.

At close range, it is one of the most powerful mob attacks in Minecraft; a direct hit deals projectile damage from the impact, and up to, , or  explosion damage from the blast, depending on difficulty. A fireball deals damage to a ghast if the fireball was rebounded by a player. If an entity has the fire resistance effect, it will not get damaged by the fireball, though this is not consistent unlike with blaze fireballs.

When two fireballs collide, one is deflected to a random direction while the other explodes upon impact. Blocks are also set on fire by the explosion.

If a ghast is killed, any remaining fireballs launched by that ghast disappear.

The minimum blast resistance required to absorb all blast force of a fireball is 4.034 (about the equivalent of basalt, which is 4.2). However, blocks with resistance as low as 3.5 survive if hit.

When a player hits a fireball, only the projectile damage dealt by the fireball counts as the player's kill.

Sounds
Fireballs use the Friendly Creatures sound category for entity-dependent sound events.



ID




Entity data


Fireballs have entity data associated with them that contains various properties.


 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.
 * See Bedrock Edition level format/Entity format.

Trivia

 * If a player hits a fireball using an item with the Looting enchantment, any mob killed by that fireball has its drops affected by the enchantment as though the mob was killed by directly using the item.