I have a private server with a bunch of friends and I was thinking, since spectator mode is a thing now, to open it to public and have the default gamemode be spectator mode so guests can snoop around without the risk of them doing anything bad.

This would - of course - only work if people couldn't do anything bad, like disturb people, cause lag or destroy things.

I did a quick google search and I couldn't find any known bugs or exploits

Can I assume it's secure (on the current stable release - as of writing this 1.8) then?

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2 Answers

I believe spectator mode is safe, the only lag that might possibly come from spectator mode is chunk loading and also just having many players on the server. IIRC spectators can chat though...

EDIT: In 1.9, there is a gamerule called spectatorsGenerateChunks that will assist with the chunk loading.

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A seen on the spectator mode wiki page (), players can in spectator mode:

fly, clip through blocks and entities, and view invisible players.

It is also mentioned that they cannot interact with GUIs and they can take the POV of a non-player mob. If you don't want your players doing this, I'd recommend not giving your players specator mode. Spectator mode does not have any known exploits at the moment that would allow players to interrupt the game, however.