How to Set a Default Difficulty Without Locking It

Vanilla Minecraft starts the world creation screen on Normal difficulty, which can catch players off guard in Peaceful building profiles or tough survival modpacks. You can automatically apply a custom starting difficulty to new worlds while still letting players change it later.

Setting an Unlocked Default

1. Go to the config folder in your Minecraft directory and open the Difficulty Lock Mod configuration file.

2. Check forceHardcoreMode first and make sure it is disabled, since Hardcore mode overrides all other difficulty settings and locks the world.

3. Find the prioritized difficulty options: forcePeaceful, forceEasy, forceNormal, and forceHard. Enable the one you want as your starting default and disable the remaining three.

4. Locate shouldLockDifficulty and set it to disabled.

5. Save the configuration file and restart your game.

Testing on a New World

Create a brand-new world from the Singleplayer menu and load into the game. Open the pause menu and select Options to verify the result.

Your world will automatically start on the difficulty you enabled in the configuration file, saving you from having to set it manually during world creation. Because shouldLockDifficulty is turned off, the difficulty button in the pause menu stays unlocked whenever you want to adjust the challenge mid-game.