Minecraft is all about freedom and creativity, so a little cheating isn't going to do any harm. If you're running the game on PC, there's a ton of useful console commands you can play with to tune the game just to your liking.
Cheats have largely become a thing of the past for most games, but the PC is the one platform where they are still going strong. That is if you know how to access them. Rather than inputting specific codes, completing specific requirements in the game, or exploiting any glitches, most cheats come in the form of inputting specific phrases and text in the console commands. Minecraft has a ton of these that can take what is already a sandbox experience and give you even more control and options. If you want to know the most useful console commands there are, and how to use them, let's dig into it.
Best Minecraft Console Commands And How To Use Them
Just as a reminder, console commands are only available on the PC. If you're playing Minecraft on a console or mobile device, you won't be able to pull up the console and input any of these codes and phrases. You also need to start a new single player world with cheats enabled, or enable them on an existing world by starting the game in LAN mode and enabling cheats, or none of these will work.
How To Use Console Commands In Minecraft
The first step in using console commands is to bring up the console itself. To do this while playing Minecraft, all you need to do is hit the "/" key and a window will appear where you can type in your commands. A few useful trick you can use with this window is cycling through previously typed commands with the arrow keys. By pressing up and down you can easily find and reuse commands you already entered to save time typing them out again. You can also start typing a command and hit tab to cycle through all the possible commands that start with whatever you typed.
There are also a bunch of shortcuts for targeting players that don't require you to fully type out player names to target them:
@p = the nearest player to you
@r = a random player
@a = all players in the world
@e = all entities in the world
@s = you
Best Minecraft Commands
/kill [player] - For when you just want to instantly kill any player, or even yourself, on the server.
/experience add <player> <amount> - If you don't feel like grinding levels fighting mobs and mining, just give yourself or friends as much as you need.
/time set <value> - This will instantly change the time of day to whatever you like, where the value of 0 is sunrise, 6,000 is noon, and 12,000 is sunset.
/gamerule doDaylightCycle false - This will stop the time of day from moving if you want to play in a world of perpetual day, night, dusk, or dawn. Use the same code but replace "false" with "true" to restart the flow of time.
/weather <type> - Make it rain, thunder, or clear whenever you want by replacing "type" with any of those weather types.
/summon <entity> - Summons whatever you put in the "entity" slot wherever are. This can be any of dozens of mobs and animals in the game. If their name has two words in it, such as the iron golem or polar bear, just remember to type their name with an underscore rather than the space.