Minecraft Commands: A Guide to Giving XP

In Minecraft, XP (experience points) is a crucial resource necessary for a variety of activities, such as enchanting items and utilizing the anvil for repairs, renames, and merging enchantments. Therefore, accumulating as many XP levels as possible is always advantageous. Although you can gather XP through various structures like mob farms, it is also possible to award yourself or other players experience points and levels through specific commands.

When cheats are enabled in your world or server, you can leverage the /experience or /xp commands to bestow experience points on a player or increase their XP levels. Additionally, you can set the current number of XP levels for any player.

If you’re in need of XP on the fly, it’s beneficial to understand how to utilize commands for this purpose in Minecraft.

How to Award XP to Yourself or Others in Minecraft Using Commands

The experience commands in Minecraft are quite simple to use (Image via Mojang) — The experience commands in Minecraft are user-friendly (Image via Mojang)

Prior to using the /xp or /experience commands in Minecraft, you need to ensure that cheats are enabled for your world or server, or that you hold operator/admin privileges on a specific server. Otherwise, commands entered into the chat console will not execute. This limitation also applies to command blocks, which cannot be obtained in the vanilla game without using commands.

The basic syntax for the two experience commands in Minecraft 1.21 is as follows:

To Add Experience to a Player: /experience add <targets> <amount> [levels|points] or /xp add <targets> <amount> [levels|points]
To Set the Experience of a Player: /experience set <targets> <amount> [levels|points] or /xp set <targets> <amount> [levels|points]

Next, you will need to designate the target player or entity for whom you will add or set experience points/levels and specify the desired amount of experience. This is where target selectors come into play, identified by an @ symbol, which allows for the selection of which players/entities a command will affect.

The complete list of target selectors includes:

@p: Selects the nearest player from the command’s execution.
@n (Java Edition only): Selects the nearest entity from the command’s execution.
@r: Selects a random player.
@a: Selects all players.
@e: Selects all living entities in the loaded chunks.
@s: Selects the entity that executed the command, regardless of their state.
@c (Education Edition only): Selects the player’s agent mob.
@v (Education Edition only): Selects all agent mobs.
@initiator (Bedrock Edition only): Selects the player interacting with a button while engaging in NPC dialogue.

After this preparation, you can determine how much experience you wish to allocate to a player in your Minecraft world/server.

Once ready, enable cheats, open your in-game chat window, and input commands like the examples below to give experience to players:

Grant yourself 50,000 XP: /xp add @s 50000 or /experience add @s 50000
Grant the nearest player 50,000 XP: /xp add @p 50000 or /experience add @p 50000
Grant all players 50,000 XP: /xp add @a 50000 or /experience add @a 50000
Set your XP to 100,000: /xp set @s 100000 or /experience set @s 100000
Set the nearest player’s XP to 100,000: /xp set @p 100000 or /experience set @p 100000
Set all players’ XP to 100,000: /xp set @a 100000 or /experience set @a 100000

You can add additional descriptions to this Minecraft command for fine-tuned control (Image via Mojang) — You can further customize this Minecraft command for precise control (Image via Mojang)

Lastly, when utilizing these commands in Minecraft, you can choose whether to gain experience points or levels by adding either “points”or “levels”at the end of your command.

Additionally, you have the option to replace the target selector with a player’s username (including your own) to specify your target. The final choice is up to you.

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