Beginner's Guide to WorldEdit

WorldEdit is the most powerful building tool ever created for Minecraft. It lets you select regions of your world and copy, paste, fill, replace, move, rotate, or mirror them in seconds. Tasks that would take an hour of manual block-placing — filling a large area with water, replacing all stone in a mountain with granite, copying a large structure to a new location — take a single command. Here is how to actually use it.

Installing WorldEdit

WorldEdit works on both Fabric and Forge. Download the appropriate version from the official CurseForge or Modrinth page — make sure to get the version that matches your mod loader and Minecraft version. Place the .jar in your mods folder. WorldEdit requires no configuration to use for single-player; on a server, you need to assign yourself permissions using the server's permission system (or use it in operator mode).

The Most Important Concepts

The Wand: Type //wand in chat to receive a wooden axe. Left-clicking a block with this axe sets your first selection corner (Position 1). Right-clicking a different block sets your second corner (Position 2). WorldEdit selects everything between these two corners as a cuboid region.

Position selection: You can also use //pos1 and //pos2 to set your positions to wherever you are currently standing, without needing to click a block.

The clipboard: WorldEdit has an internal clipboard. You copy a selection into it, and paste it elsewhere. The clipboard remembers the position relative to where you were standing when you copied.

Essential Commands

• //set stone — Fills your entire selection with stone (or any block you specify).
• //replace grass_block dirt — Replaces all grass blocks in your selection with dirt.
• //copy — Copies your selection to the clipboard.
• //paste — Pastes your clipboard at your current position.
• //rotate 90 — Rotates the contents of your clipboard 90 degrees before pasting.
• //undo — Undoes your last WorldEdit action. Lifesaver for mistakes.
• //sphere stone 10 — Generates a stone sphere with a radius of 10 blocks centered on you.

Important Caution

WorldEdit operates directly on your world file. There is no "are you sure?" prompt when you fill 10,000 blocks with lava, replace your entire base with air, or paste a structure over your spawn point. Always use //undo immediately if you make a mistake, and make regular world backups before doing large WorldEdit operations. The undo history only goes back a limited number of steps per session.