Change Minecraft Server Difficulty

Difficulty is a setting in Minecraft, which affects how much damage you take in game, how many and how often hostile mobs spawn, how much damage hostile mobs deal to you. It also influences how fast your health regenerates and how fast your hunger depletes. Choosing a higher difficulty will impact all of these variables. In this guide, we will step-by-step show you how to change the difficulty of your Minecraft server.

Difficulty Levels

For a comprehensive write up on the differences in difficulty levels, visit this Minecraft wiki page.

There are mainly four difficulty levels in Minecraft - Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and Hard.
The difficulty level can be changed either from the Console, in-game as a player, or by editing a file on your server.

Changing difficulty via Overview tab

Login to the Dashboard

See our login instructions guide over here.

Navigate to your server’s Overview tab

From your Dashboard, go to the Inventory tab.
Scroll down to your servers, and click on the Manage button of the server you wish to edit.

Set Difficulty value

Scroll down to the World section and click the dropdown menu Difficulty to select Peaceful, Easy, Normal, or Hard according to your preference.
Then click the Save button in the lower right corner to apply your settings.

Restart the server

Scroll back to the top of the page.
Then, click on the Restart button.

Changing difficulty via console

Navigate to the console of your server

From your Dashboard, go to the Inventory tab.
Scroll down to one of your servers, and click on the Manage button.
Then, choose the Console tab from the top navigation panel.

Use the difficulty change command

In the Type a command text box at the bottom, input the following command: difficulty <difficulty_level>.
Then press Enter.
For example, to change the difficulty to hard mode, you can execute the following command: difficulty hard.

Changing difficulty in-game

To use this method, you must be a level 2 operator on your server. See How to OP yourself on your Minecraft server!

Connect to your Minecraft server

See our guide on the same over here.

Open the chat

This can be done using the “T” key on your keyboard on a PC, or the right D-pad button on a controller.

Issue the command to change difficulty

Type in /difficulty <difficulty_level>, and then press Enter.
For example, input /difficulty easy to set the difficulty to Easy.

Changing difficulty via File Manager

Login to the Dashboard

See our login instructions guide over here.
Go to your Inventory.
Once in your inventory you will see your list of servers.

Select your Minecraft server

Click the Manage button of your Minecraft server that you wish to set the difficulty for.

Stop your Minecraft server

Click the Stop button for your Minecraft server before making any edits.

Load your Minecraft server’s File Manager

Select the File Manager link from the menu bar.

Edit the server.properties file

Open server.properties for editing by clicking on it.
1 Update the difficulty= field to any one of peaceful, easy, normal, hard.
2 Then, click on Save File.

Start your Minecraft server

Finally, go back to the top of the page and start the server.

If you require further assistance, you can open a support ticket here!

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