How to Change Difficulty on Your Minecraft Bedrock Server

Switch between Peaceful, Easy, Normal, and Hard on your Bedrock dedicated server and understand what each difficulty level changes.

Difficulty controls hostile mob behavior, hunger drain, and damage dealt to players. You can change it without regenerating the world.

Change Difficulty

In the XGamingServer Panel, click Startup in the sidebar.

Find the Difficulty variable and choose from the dropdown: peaceful, easy, normal, or hard.

Restart from Console for the change to take effect.

In Files, open server.properties and change:

difficulty=hard

Save and restart.

If cheats are enabled, change difficulty instantly without restarting:

difficulty hard

This takes effect immediately for all players.

Difficulty	Hostile Mobs	Hunger	Damage	Special Effects
Peaceful	No hostile mobs spawn. Existing ones despawn	Hunger bar never depletes. Health regenerates constantly	None from mobs	Caves of spiders and skeletons are safe. Wither cannot be summoned
Easy	Spawn normally	Hunger depletes slowly. Cannot starve below 5 hearts	Low damage from mobs	Zombies cannot break doors. Vindicators deal less damage
Normal	Spawn normally	Standard depletion. Starvation stops at half a heart	Standard damage	Zombies have a chance to break wooden doors
Hard	Spawn more frequently	Hunger depletes faster. Starvation can kill	Maximum damage	Zombies can break doors. Spiders can spawn with potion effects. Villagers killed by zombies always convert

Bedrock Edition does not have a true Hardcore mode like Java Edition. However, you can simulate it: