How do I change the difficulty of my Minecraft server?

The difficulty decides how dangerous your server is: how much damage mobs deal, whether hunger can kill you, whether zombies break down doors and whether hostile mobs spawn at all. There are four levels, and you set them either permanently in server.properties or on the fly with a command.

The four levels

• Peaceful: no hostile mobs at all, health regenerates quickly and hunger does not drain to the point of damage. Suitable for building and for very young players.
• Easy: hostile mobs spawn but deal less damage; hunger cannot kill you (it stops at 5 hearts); cave spiders do not poison and zombies do not break doors.
• Normal: the default. Hunger can bring you down to half a heart; zombies can break doors; villagers turn into zombie villagers half the time.
• Hard: mobs deal more damage, hunger can kill you, zombies always break doors and always convert villagers, spiders can spawn with effects and the game gets noticeably tougher. Hardcore mode is hard plus permanent death.

Changing it with a command

1. Go to the game panel and click your server.
2. Open the Console tab.
3. Type difficulty hard (or peaceful, easy, normal) and press Enter.

The change applies immediately and is saved in the world; a restart is not needed. In-game, /difficulty hard works for operators. Typing difficulty without a value shows the current level.

Changing it in server.properties

Open the Properties page in the panel and set DIFFICULTY to the level you want, or edit difficulty=normal in server.properties through File Manager, then restart. This value is used when a world does not have its own setting yet, and after a command it is written to the world as well. In practice: the command is the quickest, the file is the place to set the default for a fresh world.

Per world

Difficulty is stored per world in level.dat. With several worlds (Multiverse), set it per world with /mv modify set difficulty hard in the world concerned, or with the difficulty command while you are in that world. On Paper you can also configure it per world in the world's configuration.

Locking the difficulty

In single-player a difficulty can be locked; on a server it cannot be changed by regular players anyway, only by operators and from the console. If you want to make sure nobody, not even staff, changes it, remove the minecraft.command.difficulty permission through LuckPerms.

Peaceful does not remove mobs

Switching to peaceful removes existing hostile mobs immediately, but a switch back to a higher level lets them return with the next spawn cycle. Peaceful also affects a few neutral mobs: endermen, spiders and zombie piglins no longer spawn. Passive mobs (cows, sheep) are unaffected.

Related settings

• hardcore=true in server.properties for permanent death.
• Mob griefing to stop mobs from damaging blocks, independent of the difficulty.
• keepInventory if death should be less punishing on hard.

Stuck? Open a ticket and mention which server software and version you run.