How to change difficulty in Minecraft

The Minecraft world is a limitless realm of creativity and discovery. It's a space where players can sculpt, build, and explore diverse landscapes while interacting with blocks, creatures, and endless opportunities. During the world creation process, an important detail to consider is the world difficulty setting. Each world comes with its own setup, including elements like difficulty and game mode.

When players adjust the difficulty, it leads to various changes. These adjustments affect many aspects, like the spawning of mobs, their health, and the damage they deal. Understanding the selected difficulty setting is crucial because it directly influences how different game features behave.

In this article, we will delve into the methods for altering the world difficulty in Minecraft.

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Guide to change Minecraft difficulty

Changing world difficulty (Image via Mojang)

While the game offers a command for adjusting this setting, it only functions if cheats were enabled during world creation.

To alter the world difficulty, players need to open the chat window and type "/difficulty <difficulty>". The four options available are peaceful, easy, normal, and hard.

For players who initially created their world without cheats, here's a method to temporarily enable cheats and use any command:

• Step 1: Launch Minecraft and load your world.
• Step 2: Press the escape button to open the pause menu.
• Step 3: Choose the Open To LAN option.
• Step 4: Enable the allow cheats setting and click on the Start LAN World option.

This approach allows players to employ commands until they exit the world. It's worth noting that this can only be done in the Java Edition.

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Changing world difficulty for servers

The method for altering the world difficulty in Minecraft differs between the singleplayer and multiplayer game modes. This distinction arises due to the fact that many Minecraft server hosts provide their own online control panel accessible to the server owner.

When it comes to adjusting different settings of the world, such as the game mode and difficulty, authorized players need to navigate the host's webpage. This can be done after shutting down the server.

If attempting this process independently proves unsuccessful, the advisable course of action would be to get in touch with the server administrators.

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Main differences between the difficulties

World creation screen (Image via Mojang)

The majority of Minecraft players aiming to zombify and cure traders look to increase their world difficulty. This change allows them to convert villagers into zombies and then cure them, leading to reduced trade prices.

Here are the noteworthy features of each difficulty:

Peaceful:

• No hostile mobs spawn in this mode.
• Health and hunger do not deplete.
• Players can still take fall damage or be hurt by other means.

Easy:

• Hostile mobs spawn, but they deal less damage.
• Hunger depletes slowly.
• Players can regenerate health if their hunger bar is sufficiently full.

Normal:

• Hostile mobs are more dangerous and deal regular damage.
• Hunger depletes at a regular rate.
• Health regeneration only occurs when the player's hunger bar is nearly full.

Hard:

• Hostile mobs are very dangerous and deal more damage.
• Hunger depletes quickly.
• Health regeneration does not occur naturally, requiring the use of healing items like food or potions.

In higher difficulties, players sustain more damage from explosions, status effects, and starvation.