You're standing there. Just staring. You planted a massive field of pumpkins three days ago and honestly, it feels like watching paint dry in a rainstorm. We’ve all been there, waiting for that one sugar cane to grow so we can finally craft enough paper for an enchantment table. It’s frustrating. But Minecraft Java Edition gives you a weird amount of power over the flow of time itself, provided you know which buttons to mash.
The secret lies in the randomTickSpeed game rule. Basically, Minecraft doesn't update every single block in your world at once because your CPU would probably explode. Instead, it chooses blocks at random to "tick." This is why one wheat stalk might pop up while the one next to it stays a tiny green nub for ten more minutes.
📖 Related: Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie Is Still The Greatest Video Game Film Ever Made
If you want to speed up your farm or see how a forest fire spreads in fast-forward, you need to know how to change tick speed in Minecraft Java without breaking your game.
The Command That Controls Time
Let's get straight to the point. You aren't here for a history lesson on Mojang's coding choices. You want the command. To change the speed at which things grow, decay, or spread, you’ll use the /gamerule command.
Open your chat (press T) and type:/gamerule randomTickSpeed 3
That "3" is the default setting for Java Edition. If you change it to 100, your plants will start leaping out of the ground. Change it to 1000, and you’ll see trees grow almost instantly. But be careful. If you set it to something like 1,000,000, you are going to see your frames per second drop to zero faster than a Creeper can hiss.
Wait, Why Isn't It Working?
If you're typing that command and getting an error message that says you don't have permission, it’s because cheats are disabled. This happens a lot. Maybe you started the world in a "pure" survival mode and now you're regretting it because your cactus farm is a total snooze-fest.
There's a workaround. You don't have to restart your whole world.
- Hit Esc to open the menu.
- Click Open to LAN.
- Toggle Allow Cheats: ON.
- Click Start LAN World.
Boom. You’re a god now. You can change the tick speed until you exit the world. Just keep in mind that once you close the game and come back later, you’ll have to do the LAN trick again if cheats weren't enabled in the original world save settings.
👉 See also: Why Pokemon Ultra Sun Island Scan Still Beats Modern Raids
Random Tick Speed vs. TPS: Don't Mix Them Up
This is where people get confused. I see it on Reddit all the time. Someone says "my game is laggy, I need to lower the tick speed," and they end up making their crops grow slower while the lag stays exactly the same.
There are two types of "ticks" in Minecraft:
- Game Ticks (TPS): The game runs at 20 ticks per second. This is the heartbeat of the game. If this slows down, your character moves in slow motion, and the world feels "laggy."
- Random Ticks: This is a subset of those game ticks that specifically handles "random" events like crop growth, leaf decay, and fire spreading.
When you learn how to change tick speed in Minecraft Java, you are almost always talking about the Random Tick Speed. You aren't actually making the game run faster; you're just telling the game to pick more blocks to update during every single one of those 20 game ticks.
The Danger Zone: High Values
I once set my tick speed to 50,000 just to see what would happen to a massive wool structure I set on fire. It was cool for about four seconds. Then my game froze.
The problem is that every "tick" takes a tiny bit of processing power. If you tell the game to update 50,000 blocks every 1/20th of a second, your computer is going to scream. For most people, a setting between 50 and 100 is plenty for fast farming without causing a total system meltdown.
Real-World Uses for Tick Speed Tweaks
Why would you actually do this? Beyond just being impatient?
Testing Farm Efficiency
If you're a technical player building a complex iron farm or a villager-based crop farm, you don't want to wait three hours to see if the collection system works. You crank that tick speed up to 500, watch the items flow for five minutes, and then set it back to 3 once you're sure nothing is clogging.
Cleaning Up After a Build
You ever chop down a massive jungle tree and the leaves just... hang there? It takes forever for them to decay. If you're tired of floating leaf syndrome, kick the tick speed up to 100 for a minute. The leaves will vanish in a satisfying poof, and your sky will be clear again.
Landscaping and Grass Spreading
Building a custom island and want the grass to cover the dirt quickly? Instead of bone-mealing every square inch like a madman, just bump the random tick speed. It’ll look natural in seconds.
How to Reset to Default
If you’ve messed around and everything is growing way too fast and it feels like cheating (because, well, it is), you can always go back.
Just type /gamerule randomTickSpeed 3.
That’s the magic number for Java. If you were playing Bedrock Edition, the default would be 1, but for Java, it’s 3. Don't ask me why Mojang made them different; it’s just one of those quirks of the two different engines.
✨ Don't miss: PS3 System Software Update: Why Sony is Still Patching a 20-Year-Old Console
Technical Nuances for Server Owners
If you're running a server—maybe a small one for friends on Aternos or a dedicated box—changing the tick speed can be a bit more "expensive" for the hardware. If you have ten people all in different loaded chunks, and you set the tick speed to 100, the server has to calculate that increased growth for everyone.
This can lead to "Can't keep up!" errors in your server console. If you see those, dial it back. Also, certain mods and plugins might override these settings or behave strangely when the random tick speed is high. For example, some "fast leaf decay" mods might become redundant or even conflict with a high tick speed setting.
Nuance: Does it affect mobs?
Nope. A common misconception is that changing the tick speed will make mobs walk faster or spawners work quicker. It won't. Mobs are tied to the 20 TPS game clock, not the random tick clock. If you want faster mob spawns, you need to look into light levels and local difficulty, not tick speed.
Practical Steps to Master Your World
If you’re ready to take control of your Minecraft environment, here is how you should approach it:
- Check your current speed first: You can just type
/gamerule randomTickSpeedwithout a number, and the game will tell you what it’s currently set to. - Incremental changes: Don't go from 3 to 3000. Try 50. See how it feels. If your PC handles it fine, go higher.
- The "Clean Up" Rule: Only keep high tick speeds active for as long as you need them. Constant high tick speeds can lead to "ghost" lag where blocks you break reappear because the server is struggling to keep up with the growth calculations.
- Automation Testing: Use high speeds to find the "bottlenecks" in your automatic farms. If the hoppers can't keep up when the tick speed is at 50, they might struggle during a localized lag spike at normal speeds too.
Managing your world is about balance. Use these commands to bypass the boring parts of the game—like waiting for pumpkins—so you can get back to the actual adventuring. Just remember that the default is 3, and your CPU is a finite resource. Use it wisely.
Actionable Next Step: Open your Minecraft world, enable LAN cheats if necessary, and try setting your tick speed to 100. Observe a patch of grass or a farm for 60 seconds to see the immediate difference in growth patterns, then decide if you need to scale up or return to the default 3.