Skip to content
Block Atlas

Guide

Four modes, and one difficulty slider people confuse with them.

Mode decides whether the world can hurt you. Difficulty decides how much. They are not the same switch.

Survival

Survival is the default story people mean by “playing Minecraft”. You gather, you get hungry, you take damage, and the night spawns things that want the food you just cooked. Tools break. Death drops your inventory unless the world turned on keep-inventory.

Hardcore is Survival with one life. Die, and the world locks to Spectator. It began on Java and is now a world option on Bedrock too. It is not a fifth mode in the pause menu of a normal world — you choose it when the world is created.

Creative

Creative hands you every block, flight, and no damage from mobs or falls. Inventories stop mattering. It is the mode for architecture, film sets, classrooms and “I want to see if this farm design works before I grind the iron”. You can still switch a Creative world back, but anything you spawned while flying around is now sitting in a Survival world.

Adventure

Adventure mode is for custom maps. Players cannot punch the scenery apart. Breaking and placing is gated by tools that have the right tags, or by commands the map author set. If a download says “do not play this in Survival”, this is why: the puzzle is the doors, not the gravel.

Spectator

Spectator lets you fly through blocks and clip into mobs to watch them. No inventory, no building. Useful for filming, for refereeing a minigame, and as the afterlife of a Hardcore death. You are invisible to survival players.

Difficulty is separate

  • Peaceful — hostile mobs do not spawn, health regenerates, and hunger does not drain. Bosses and a few features still expect a fight.
  • Easy, Normal, Hard — more damage, harsher hunger, and on Hard a few extra cruelties (zombies can break wooden doors). Starvation can kill on Hard; on Easy it stops at a low health.

You can change mode and difficulty from the game rules if cheats are on, with /gamemode and /difficulty, or from the world edit screen on Bedrock. On a server, only operators can. Turning on cheats to flip into Creative, then pretending the dragon kill was legitimate, is how friendships end. The player rules cover that. The loop those modes wrap is the survival page.