How to Enable Keep Inventory in Minecraft

Enabling the keepInventory / Keep Inventory system in Minecraft can make survival worlds feel a lot less punishing, especially when not playing with other mods that help make up for your losses when you die.

The exact method for doing this can vary depending on your game version, but we'll break down the steps of how you can do this for each below!

Permissions Required

Prior to running any commands or trying to enable Keep Inventory, you'll want to make sure you have the permissions required to actually make the change. This is typically referred to as "op" on a server, or "cheats" in the case of singleplayer Minecraft.

For singleplayer, this is a setting you would enable when creating your world originally. For multiplayer servers, however, you may need to grant yourself op status manually.

To do this, you'll want to access your server console (in the case of Kinetic Hosting, we make this super simple with our Minecraft panel's Console tab!). From there, you'll want to enter "op USERNAME" while substituting your actual in-game name for "USERNAME," such as:

op KineticHosting

If a more visual guide would be helpful, we actually also have a great guide on that process here!

NOTE: Versions prior to 1.4.2 do not support the Keep Inventory gamerule, and are not possible to enable this on directly.

Minecraft 1.4.2 - 1.21.10

The bulk of previous Minecraft releases used a formatting style for gamerules known as camelCase, which relies on capitalizing the first letter of later words in the gamerule, but leaving the first word uncapitalized.

For these versions, the command you will use to enable keepInventory is: /gamerule keepInventory true

Minecraft 1.21.11 & Beyond

The Minecraft 1.21.11 release changed the formatting for gamerules to instead use a certain underscore format. For this version and other newer releases, the gamerule would instead be keep_inventory.

For these releases, you'll want to use the command: /gamerule keep_inventory true

Bedrock Edition

For Bedrock Edition players, rather than granting yourself op permissions, you'd want to make sure you have "Cheats" enabled on your world or server. For singleplayer worlds, this is done during world creation or your world settings menu. For multiplayer, though, you'll want to enable the Allow Cheats option in your server settings.

Once you have cheats enabled, you can more simply use the following command to enable Keep Inventory:

/gamerule keepinventory true