I've been playing Minecraft for a couple months now. I've certainly discovered that I really am most interested in digging and amassing a bunch of raw material for building mega-complexes. Furthermore, I don't mind killing and hunting mobs except when I need to but that's not why I play the game.
I started my first level on the most difficult setting of MC. The problem that I have run into is I have dug a HUGE hole straight to black stone and have expanded my mine from the bottom layer. I hit a sizable cavern with tons of Iron, Diamond, Red Stone, etc.– everything that you would want. Since I maxed out the difficulty of the game, I keep getting killed as soon as I turn my back away from the massive hole and toward the goodies in the ground because there are so many friggin mobs in their.
Is there away that I can modify my current save state to set it to the easiest difficulty level with mobs? I've done a lot of work on this level and I'd rather not have to start all over again but I'm afraid that is what I will need to do. My torches (which I tried to place everywhere that I can reach) aren't keeping the mobs away.
Best Answer
Minecraft's difficulty setting is an option; it's not reliant on your saved game.
When you load Minecraft and you're presented with the options to load Singleplayer or Multiplayer, click on Options.... Then, click on the Difficulty option until it cycles back to "Peaceful".
When you load your world, all the hostile monsters will disappear. If you later want to increase the difficulty, do the same thing, but cycle the difficulty to "Easy" or higher.
You can also do this after the world is loaded by pressing Esc to pause the game and clicking on Options... When setting the difficulty to "Peaceful" in-game, hostile mobs will instantly disappear when you return.