Changing Your Minecraft Game Mode

Minecraft servers have 5 game modes to choose from: Survival, Creative, Hardcore, and Spectator.

Here’s a brief summary of each difficulty level and the differences between them:

    • Survival: In this mode, players have to gather all their materials to build, craft items and tools and gain experience points. Players also have a health and hunger bar that they have to manage, creating a true survival experience.
    • Creative: The player has access to an infinite amount of almost all blocks and items available, and can destroy them instantly. Players are invulnerable and also have the ability to fly.
    • Adventure: Players can interact with objects such as levers and buttons, and can interact with mobs. However, they can break blocks only with tools having a CanDestroy data tag, and place blocks only if the block they are holding has a CanPlaceOn data tag, making this mode good for adventure maps.
    • Hardcore: In this mode, which plays in the same way as Survival mode, the difficulty level is permanently set to "Hard", and when the player dies, they are sent permanently into spectator mode. Enabling this for you players is a slightly different process, and a related article on how to do that can be found here
    • Spectator: When in spectator mode, players can clip through blocks, enter the perspective of other entities by left-clicking on them, and are invisible to all players and mobs except for other spectators. The player can't interact with blocks, entities or their inventory. When in third-person mode, they look like a transparent, floating head with no body. The player can use the scroll wheel to adjust the speed at which they are flying, unlike flying in Creative mode. 
Please note: Hardcore Mode and Spectator Mode have not yet been released for Bedrock Edition servers, and as such are only available on Java Edition server types.

You can change your server’s game mode very easily. Below are the ways to do this:


Changing Your Game Mode via Server Settings

Please note that you will only be able to change your game mode to 'Spectator' via command, as this cannot be done through the server settings.

  1. Before making any changes to your server configuration, it is very important to stop your server
  2. On your Multicraft Panel (http://mc.shockbyte.com/), navigate to Files > Config Files

    server config
  3. On the Config Files page, select Server Settings

    How to access your 'server settings' file
  4. Locate the option called Game Mode, and select your preferred game mode from the drop-down menu

    Selecting your game mode
  5. After you have set that, save the settings by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking on the blue Save button
  6. Restart your Minecraft Server for the changes to be applied

Changing Your Game Mode via Command

You are also able to change your player’s individual game mode both through the server console and through the in-game chat.

Console Command

Make sure that any players whose game mode you want to change are currently logged on to the server.

  • gamemode [gamemode_type] [player_name]: Changes the game mode for a specific player. Eg. gamemode survival mcolegrady

Changing game mode through your console

In-game

Please note that only Server Operators (OP) will be able to change the game mode in-game. If you're playing on Bedrock Edition, you will also need to enable cheats.

  • /gamemode [gamemode_type]: Change the game mode for the player using the command. Eg. /gamemode survival
  • /gamemode [gamemode_type] [player_name]: Change the game mode for the player username specified. Eg. /gamemode survival mcolegrady

    Changing game mode in-game
If you require any further assistance, please contact our support at: https://shockbyte.com/billing/submitticket.php

Mitchell Smith

Managing Director @ Shockbyte

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