How to Change Gamemode and Difficulty

Gamemode decides whether players survive or build freely, and difficulty decides how hard the world hits back. Both have a server wide default and a per player override, and knowing which one you are setting saves a lot of confusion.

1Set the Server Defaults

• Log in to your game panel and click your Minecraft server.
• Open Files and edit server.properties in the root folder.
• gamemode=survival is what new players start in. The options are survival, creative, adventure and spectator.
• difficulty=easy sets the world difficulty. The options are peaceful, easy, normal and hard.
• hardcore=false is worth leaving alone unless you mean it. With hardcore on, death is permanent and difficulty is locked to hard.
• Save the file, then go to Console and press Restart.

2Change It Live Instead

If you are an operator you can change both from in game without a restart.

• Press T for chat and run /gamemode creative to change your own mode, or /gamemode survival PlayerName for someone else.
• Run /difficulty hard to change the world difficulty for everyone.
• These are live changes. The values in server.properties are what the server falls back to on the next start.

3Make the Default Stick

• By default a player keeps whatever gamemode they last had, so someone put into creative stays there.
• Setting force-gamemode=true in server.properties puts every player back into the default gamemode each time they join.
• That is what you want on a survival server where an operator occasionally switches to creative to build something.

Good to Know

• Peaceful removes hostile mobs entirely. It also stops players losing hunger. If your players say nothing is spawning, check the difficulty before looking for anything else.
• Difficulty is not the same as PvP. Difficulty governs mobs and hunger. Whether players can hurt each other is separate. See enabling and disabling PvP.
• Hardcore cannot be undone for a dead player. Once someone dies on a hardcore world they are locked to spectator. Do not switch it on as an experiment.

Finished

Your server plays the way you want it to. For everything else in server.properties, and for the settings that need a fresh world, see how to start a fresh world.