Enabling experiments and Beta APIs on Bedrock

The reliable way to turn on experimental features or Beta APIs for your Bedrock world: flip the toggle in your own Minecraft client, then upload the world back to your server.

3 min read · Updated Sep 24, 2026 · By GuavaHost Team

Some addons, especially ones that use scripting, need experimental toggles or the Beta APIs turned on for the world. A Bedrock server has no in game settings screen to flip these, so the easiest dependable path is to change them in your own Minecraft Bedrock client and put the updated world back on the server.

Back up first

Experiments can make a world unstable or, in rare cases, corrupt it, and once a feature is switched on for a world you often cannot cleanly switch it back off. So take a backup before you touch anything.

1. Open the Backups page in your server menu and click Create backup, or download the world folder from the Files tab and keep a copy somewhere safe. The Backups page shows how many backup slots your server has.

The reliable method: toggle it in your own client

1. Stop the server with the Stop button at the top of the page.
2. Open the Files tab, go into worlds/, open the menu next to your world folder and choose Download as an archive. The panel packs the folder into a .tar.gz and gives you a Download link. (Over SFTP you can download the folder as it is instead.)
3. On your computer, extract the download, then zip up the contents of the world folder so level.dat sits at the top of the zip. Rename that zip to .mcworld and open it, which imports it into your own Minecraft Bedrock client. Keep a spare copy of the original in case you need to start over.
4. In the client, go to the world and open its settings, then find the experiments or Beta APIs toggles. Turn on the ones your addon needs. The game will warn you that experiments cannot be removed once enabled. That is expected.
5. Play into the world once, or just save and exit, so the game writes the change into the world files.
6. Export the world from the client back out to a .mcworld or .zip file.
7. On the Files tab, replace the old world folder with the updated one. A clean way to do this: in worlds/, rename the old world folder to something like Bedrock level_old, click New folder and give it the original name, and open it. Rename your exported .mcworld to .zip, click Upload files to upload it there, then press Unpack so the world files land in that folder. Delete the .zip afterwards.
8. Start the server with the Start button and confirm the addon or Beta API feature now works.

The reason this works is that the experiment flags live inside the world data itself, so once your client writes them in, the server just reads them from the uploaded world.

Advanced: editing the world NBT directly

If you would rather not round trip through the client, you can edit the world's NBT data (the binary save format Minecraft uses) to flip the experiment flags by hand. This is fiddlier and easier to get wrong, so only do it if you are comfortable with binary world editing. The full write up is here: Enabling experiments via NBT.

Troubleshooting

• The feature still is not on after re-upload. Make sure the server is actually loading the world you edited. Check that the world folder name matches the level-name in server.properties, and that you replaced the right folder.
• Client would not import the download. Confirm the file is renamed to .mcworld and that the zip contains the world files at the top level, not nested inside an extra folder.
• World will not load or looks corrupted. Restore the backup you took at the start. This is exactly why the backup step comes first.
• Toggle greyed out in the client. Some experiments depend on your client version. Update your Bedrock client to a version that matches or is newer than the server, then try again.

Still stuck? Jump into our Discord at discord.gg/GuavaHost and the team will help you out.

• bedrock
• experiments
• beta-apis
• world
• scripting

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