How to Stop Mobs From Destroying Blocks

“Mob griefing” covers anything a mob does that changes the world itself, rather than just fighting players — a creeper crater in a wall, an enderman walking off with a block, a ravager flattening a fence. The mobGriefing gamerule turns all of it off in one switch.

Disabling It

bash

gamerule mobGriefing false

Run that from the panel’s Terminal tab — no / needed. In-game it’s /gamerule mobGriefing false, and needs operator permission.

With it off:

Creeper, ghast, and wither explosions no longer destroy blocks (they still damage players and entities)
Endermen stop picking up and placing blocks
Ravagers stop destroying blocks as they charge

Note

mobGriefing doesn’t touch TNT — TNT always explodes and destroys blocks in vanilla regardless of this setting. If TNT griefing is the actual problem, you’d need a plugin like WorldGuard to restrict it in specific regions.

Warning

mobGriefing is all-or-nothing — there’s no vanilla gamerule that disables explosion damage to blocks while leaving the rest of the list above untouched. Paper servers can get finer-grained control (e.g. disabling only enderman griefing) through paper-world-defaults.yml.