15 Useful Minecraft Commands You Should Be Using

Commands are Minecraft's built-in cheat codes, and calling them cheats honestly undersells them. They teleport you across the world, hand you any item, copy entire buildings and rewrite the rules your world runs on. There are well over a hundred of them, but a small core set does almost all of the useful work. Here are the fifteen worth memorising.

Before You Start: Enabling Commands

Commands only work when cheats are allowed. In a new Java world, switch "Allow Cheats" on during world creation; in an existing world, open to LAN and enable cheats from there. On Bedrock, toggle "Activate Cheats" in the world settings — note that this disables achievements for that world. Once enabled, press T, type the command starting with a slash, and hit enter. Many commands also accept target selectors: @s targets yourself, @p the nearest player, @a all players, @r a random player and @e every entity.

The 15 Most Useful Minecraft Commands

The Ones You Will Use Constantly

/tp and /locate are a pair. Locate hands you the coordinates of the nearest ancient city, mansion or stronghold; teleport takes you there in a second. Together they remove hours of blind exploring when you are testing a world or running a server.

/fill is the builder's best friend. It places thousands of blocks in one go — walls, floors, hollow shells, even regions of air to carve out caves. Its partner /clone duplicates finished work, so one perfect house becomes a street of them.

/gamerule quietly fixes annoyances. Setting keepInventory to true ends the graveyard run after a silly death, while randomTickSpeed controls how fast crops grow and leaves decay. Read the rule list carefully, though — some changes are effectively permanent for that world.

/give and /enchant handle gear. Give can produce items creative mode hides, like command blocks, and any stack size you ask for. Enchant skips the enchanting table's randomness and can push some enchantments past their survival caps.

Start with the teleport-and-locate combo and the fill command; they cover the majority of everyday needs. The rest are there when a build, a server event or a stubborn Warden demands them.