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 |
|---|---|---|
keepInventory | false | The single most-changed rule on private servers |
doDaylightCycle | true | Freeze at noon for building |
doWeatherCycle | true | Stop rain ruining a build session |
mobGriefing | true | Creepers stop cratering your base; also stops villagers farming |
doFireTick | true | Fire stops spreading — set false before a nether build |
randomTickSpeed | 3 | Crop growth speed. 0 freezes growth entirely |
playersSleepingPercentage | 100 | Set to 1 so one player can skip the night |
spawnRadius | 10 | Tighten the world-spawn scatter |
Defaults people assume wrong
randomTickSpeedis 3, not 1. Cranking it to 1000 to speed up crops also
accelerates leaf decay, fire spread and ice melting, and will tank server TPS.
mobGriefingcovers 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.
doInsomniais on by default — that is what spawns phantoms. Turn it off rather
than fighting them.
doImmediateRespawnexists and isfalse; setting ittrueskips the death
screen entirely.
commandBlockOutputistrue, which is why a redstone contraption spams admin
chat. Almost every server sets it false.
Integer versus boolean
Gamerules are typed, and the command silently rejects a wrong type rather than explaining. randomTickSpeed, spawnRadius, maxEntityCramming, playersSleepingPercentage and maxCommandChainLength take numbers; everything else is 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 level.dat, so they travel with the world folder 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.