The gamerules worth changing — and the defaults people get wrong
There are over 40 gamerules and most guides list them without saying which matter. Here are the ones that change how a world plays, with their real default values.
/gamerule has grown past forty entries. Most are debug switches nobody touches. A handful genuinely change how a world feels, and a few have defaults that surprise people.
The ones that change a world
| Gamerule | Default | Why you would change it |
|---|---|---|
keep_inventory | false | The single most-changed rule on private servers |
advance_time | true | Freeze at noon for building |
advance_weather | true | Stop rain ruining a build session |
mob_griefing | true | Creepers stop cratering your base; also stops villagers farming |
fire_spread_radius_around_player | 128 | Fire stops spreading — set 0 before a nether build |
random_tick_speed | 3 | Crop growth speed. 0 freezes growth entirely |
players_sleeping_percentage | 100 | Set to 1 so one player can skip the night |
respawn_radius | 10 | Tighten the world-spawn scatter |
These are the current names. Every rule was renamed to lower case with underscores — keepInventory is now keep_inventory, doDaylightCycle is advance_time — and /gamerule accepts only the new ids, so a command copied from an older guide fails. doFireTick did not just change case: it became a radius, and 0 is the old false.
Defaults people assume wrong
random_tick_speedis 3, not 1. Cranking it to 1000 to speed up crops also accelerates leaf decay, ice melting and every other random-tick process, and will tank server TPS.mob_griefingcovers more than creepers. Turning it off also stops villagers picking up and planting seeds, enderman block placement, and sheep eating grass. Iron farms and villager farms quietly break.spawn_phantomsis on by default — that is what spawns phantoms. Turn it off rather than fighting them.immediate_respawnexists and isfalse; setting ittrueskips the death screen entirely.command_block_outputistrue, which is why a redstone contraption spams admin chat. Almost every server sets itfalse.
Integer versus boolean
Gamerules are typed, and the command rejects a wrong type with a parse error. random_tick_speed, respawn_radius, max_entity_cramming, players_sleeping_percentage, max_command_sequence_length, max_block_modifications and fire_spread_radius_around_player are among the rules that take numbers; the rest are true/false.
/gamerule <rule> with no value reads the current setting instead of changing it — useful for checking what a downloaded map has already altered.
They are per-world, not per-server
Gamerules live in the world folder (data/minecraft/game_rules.dat), so they travel with the world and do not apply to other worlds on the same server. A multiverse setup needs them set per world.
Pick any rule and get the command with the right type already applied in the Player Command Builder, which also covers teleport, gamemode, xp, time and weather from the same form.