Minecraft Game Modes Explained: All Five and How to Switch

Minecraft has four game modes, Survival, Creative, Adventure and Spectator, plus Hardcore, which is Survival with one life. You choose a mode when you create a world, and if cheats are on you can change it later with the /gamemode command.

Survival

This is the game most people mean by “Minecraft.” You have health and hunger, monsters spawn in the dark, and everything you build you gather first. Survival has the progression: wood tools, then stone, iron, diamond and netherite, then the Nether, the End and the ender dragon. If this is your first world, our beginner’s guide to playing Minecraft starts here.

Survival runs on four difficulties: Peaceful (no hostile mobs, hunger doesn’t hurt you), Easy, Normal and Hard.

Creative

You can fly, you can’t die (except by falling into the void or using /kill), and every block and item is in your inventory for free. Blocks break instantly. Creative is for building, testing redstone, and planning a big project before you do it in survival.

Adventure

Adventure is made for custom maps. You can fight, trade, use buttons and levers, but you can’t break or place blocks unless the map maker has given an item permission to do so. That stops players from digging around a puzzle. You’ll mostly meet it in downloaded adventure maps.

Spectator

You’re invisible, you fly through walls, and you can’t touch anything. It’s for watching: looking at a build from inside, checking a cave system, or watching friends play.

The editions differ here. On Java, you can click a mob to see through its eyes, see other spectators, and (since Java 26.3) use portals to travel between dimensions. On Bedrock, Spectator became a normal option in 1.19.50, but you can’t take over a mob’s view, and you switch into it from the settings or a command rather than the F3 shortcuts Java has.

Hardcore

Survival on Hard difficulty with one life. When you die you can’t respawn: you either look around the world in Spectator mode or leave to the title screen. The difficulty can’t be changed.

Hardcore was Java-only for years. Bedrock got it in Preview builds in 2024, and it reached full releases with Bedrock 1.21.40. You turn it on when creating the world, and you can’t turn it on later.

How to switch modes

• In world settings: pick the mode on the world creation screen. Bedrock also lets you change the default mode in an existing world’s settings.
• With a command: /gamemode creative, /gamemode survival, /gamemode adventure or /gamemode spectator. You need cheats on or operator rights. On Java you can enable cheats in a survival world for one session by opening it to LAN with “Allow Commands” on.
• Java shortcut: with cheats on, F3+F4 opens a mode switcher, and F3+N flips between your last mode and Spectator.

On Bedrock, turning on cheats (which you need for /gamemode) permanently disables achievements in that world. Our page on Minecraft cheat codes explains what else changes when you enable cheats.