Cheats in Minecraft Bedrock: how to turn them on

4 September 2026 · 7 min read

Vitalij Pobereznik · how we check facts

Cheats in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition are switched on with a single toggle — Activate Cheats, in the world settings. You can set it when creating the world, or later, by opening the settings of a world you’ve already created. The cost is fixed: turning on cheats disables achievements for that world.

This isn’t a punishment or a bug, it’s a documented rule. The official documentation mentions it in the same paragraph that explains commands won’t work at all without cheats turned on. So the choice is made before you type a single command into chat: either this world counts towards your achievements, or commands work in it.

You turned on cheats — what changed

Exactly two things change, and it’s worth not mixing them up.

First: command actions become possible in the world. Before that, chat is just chat.

Second: achievements for that world are disabled. Not for the account, not for the game as a whole — for the specific world where you flipped the toggle. Your other worlds aren’t affected.

The practical takeaway for a newcomer is simple: if you’re collecting achievements, keep a separate world for experimenting with commands. Create one, turn on cheats, do what you need — then go back to your main world.

How a command is structured: slash, name, arguments

Every command starts with a slash. Next comes the command name, followed by arguments — the specifics of what to do and to whom.

In the documentation, arguments are written inside brackets, and those brackets aren’t part of the command itself. They mark the argument’s status:

• angle brackets — the argument is required; without it, the command won’t run;
• square brackets — the argument is optional; you can skip it, and the game will use a default value (for example, yourself as the target).

You never type the brackets themselves into chat. When you see a description with brackets, you substitute a real value in their place.

The second thing that trips up newcomers: many arguments can be written two ways — as a word or as a number. Difficulty can be set either as a word or as a whole number from 0 to 3. So /difficulty hard and /difficulty 3 do the same thing. Game mode works the same way: a whole number from 0 to 2 corresponds to a mode, so /gamemode survival PlayerName is equivalent to /gamemode 0 PlayerName.

These aren’t two different mechanisms — they’re two ways of writing the same thing. Pick whichever is easier to remember; the game doesn’t distinguish between them.

Notice PlayerName in the example above. That’s the target argument: the name of the player the command applies to. Skip it, and the command applies to the default target.

Permission levels, and why there’s a separate “operator commands”

Cheats being turned on is a condition at the world level. The right to actually run commands is granted separately, at the player level: the player menu has an “operator commands” permission. The logic behind the split becomes obvious the moment a second person joins the world. A world can have cheats on, but not everyone in it should be able to hand out items or teleport everyone around.

That’s why the command reference lists two separate markers next to each command: a permission level and a Requires Cheats Enabled column. These are different things, and they don’t always line up.

The levels are: Any, Game Directors, Admin, Host, Owner. Any is the lowest, Owner the highest.

A few commands to illustrate how this looks in the reference table:

Look closely at the first pair of rows. /op and /deop are Admin-level commands, and their cheats column reads No. In other words, “command” and “cheat” aren’t synonyms: granting or removing operator rights doesn’t depend on the Activate Cheats toggle. /give, /kill and /teleport, on the other hand, require both Game Directors level and cheats turned on at the same time.

The highest level is Owner. It covers server commands: /stop, /allowlist, /save, /changesetting. The documentation states outright that these are meant for a dedicated server. On a regular world on your device, there’s simply nothing for them to stop or save on a schedule — they’re server-admin tools, not player tools. If you’re interested in the server side specifically, see the material on Realms.

When the answer looks different

The toggle in the world settings is the answer for the “my world, my device” case. Beyond that, things vary.

The world already exists. You don’t need to recreate it: cheats can be turned on when editing an existing world too. The effect on achievements is the same either way — it’s tied to the moment cheats are turned on, not to the moment the world was created.

You’re not the world’s owner. If you’ve joined someone else’s world as a guest, the Activate Cheats toggle isn’t available to you — it lives in the world settings, not in your client. The most that’s possible is for the owner to grant you the “operator commands” permission in the player menu. The Admin level on /op and /deop exists for exactly this scenario.

The command needs a level you don’t have. Cheats being on won’t help here. Level and cheats are checked separately — the table above shows this as two distinct columns. An Owner-level command won’t start working just because you flipped the toggle in the world.

You’re looking at instructions for the wrong version of the game. This is the most common reason for “I did everything right, and it still doesn’t work.” Everything above applies to Bedrock Edition. The difference between editions is a separate topic, covered in the material on Java and Bedrock. Syntax, parameter names, and even the list of available commands aren’t guaranteed to match between editions, so check which edition a guide is written for before copying a command from it.

What we aren’t claiming

Here are the limits of what the official documentation actually shows. Beyond this point is guesswork, and we don’t do that.

Whether achievements come back if you turn cheats off again. The documentation only states the consequence of turning cheats on: achievements for that world get disabled. It says nothing about the reverse — what happens if you flip the toggle back to its original position. We’re not claiming they return, and we’re not claiming the change is permanent either.

The exact look and location of the toggle on your device. Bedrock runs on multiple platforms, and we can’t derive the menu’s appearance from the command documentation. Your reference point is the name Activate Cheats in the world settings, not a specific tab or screen coordinates. There’s a separate guide on menus and access in general.

Exactly who can grant the “operator commands” permission in every configuration. That the permission exists in the player menu, and that the Admin level on /op and /deop doesn’t require cheats, comes from the documentation. A full matrix of who can raise whose level under which conditions isn’t described in the sources we have, and we’re not going to invent one.

The full list of commands and their levels. We deliberately picked a few rows to illustrate the principle, not to reproduce the whole reference. Always check the reference itself for the level and cheat requirement of a specific command — those two columns sit right next to every entry there.

Third-party cheat programs. That’s not what this material is about. It covers only the built-in mechanism Mojang has documented: the toggle in the world, the permission in the player menu, and commands in chat.