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Although Minecraft is best-known for its sandbox survival gameplay, there are in fact multiple ways to experience Mojang's ever-popular crafting game. This is a huge boon for the game, which has become more and more versatile over the years, appealing to a wide audience of players.
Whether fans enjoy crafting, surviving, building, exploring, or playing through community-made adventure maps, there's a perfect game mode for everyone out there. For those still confused about what each of these game modes does, this guide will go through everything a player should know about Minecraft's game modes.
How Many Game Modes Are There In Minecraft?
Minecraft has a total of four game modes that can be accessed: survival mode, creative mode, adventure mode, and spectator mode. Each game mode comes with unique rules and limitations and defines how the player will be able to interact with the world around them.
In the Create New World tab in the Minecraft launcher, however, players will only be able to access survival mode, creative mode, and hardcore mode. For the sake of simplicity, this guide will consider hardcore mode a modified version of survival mode, and not its own game mode.
Adventure mode and spectator mode can be accessed when the player has loaded up a world. They then need to type in the /gamemode command in the chat and choose either adventure or spectator to apply it. Spectator mode also becomes available at the end of a hardcore mode run, if the player dies.
Survival Mode – The Bread And Butter Of Minecraft
Most players will be familiar with survival mode since it's considered the primary game mode of Minecraft and the default way of experiencing the game. In Minecraft's survival mode, players can take damage and die, their hunger bar will deplete and they have to acquire resources by gathering them. Moreover, to gather these resources, players will need the right tools, and each block will take some time to harvest.
Survival mode comes in a few different flavors, or difficulties:
- Peaceful – Hostile and neutral mobs will not spawn. In Bedrock Edition, there are some exceptions to this rule.
- Easy – Players take reduced damage.
- Normal – Players take the default amount of damage.
- Hard – Players take increased damage.
- Hardcore – A separate game mode on the launcher where the player only has one life and cannot respawn.
The goal of survival mode is to simply survive and thrive. Players spawn with nothing at all and must craft tools, acquire materials, and build a shelter eventually they can choose to explore the world and beat the Ender Dragon, which is considered the final boss of Minecraft. That said, the game has no official ending and can be played indefinitely.
Creative Mode – Infinite Resources
The creative mode of Minecraft is easily just as popular as its survival mode. In this mode, players do not spawn with a health bar or hunger bar. They can fly around freely and when opening their inventory they have unlimited access to almost every block and item in the game. This makes creative mode the perfect mode for building and experimenting.
While in creative mode, there are a few key quality of life changes compared to survival mode. Players can reach further when placing and breaking blocks, and they can also break any block in the world by just hitting it once. Players also don't need to have stacks upon stacks of a specific item in their inventory. Just one copy of a cobblestone block will last them an infinity when placed down.
Adventure Mode – Ideal For Adventure Maps
As Minecraft has grown over the years, so has the community around it, which has given birth to a variety of adventure maps with full-blown stories that use the assets of Minecraft. To support these adventure maps, adventure mode has been implemented into the game, which significantly limits the way the player can interact with the world.
Players won't be able to break just any block while in this game mode so that the adventure map's limits can be respected and the map isn't broken or griefed. Some objects, like levers, buttons, and chests can still be interacted with, but not all blocks can be destroyed, even if the player has the right tool in their hand.
Adventure mode can be accessed through the command /gamemode adventure.
Spectator Mode – Discover The World Seamlessly
If players simply want to observe what's happening in their world, spectator mode is the way to go. Players become invisible in this game mode and are able to fly around freely, even phasing through walls and the ground. They can also spectate other players with the help of commands.
That said, spectators aren't god-like beings. They have limited abilities when it comes to interacting with the world. They can't interact with chests or inventories, and if players are in a single-player world in spectator mode, they won't be able to open any loot chests as the loot inside hasn't been generated yet. When players die in a hardcore world, they can choose to spectate their world before it's forever destroyed.
To access spectator mode, players can type in the command /gamemode spectator in chat.
Minecraft is available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and many other devices.