Clear a player's inventory or ender chest

How you remove items depends on two things: whether the player is online, and whether the items are in their inventory or their ender chest. The panel and the Console cover an online player's inventory. The ender chest and offline players need one of the routes further down.

Checked against Minecraft 26.3 and Paper 26.3, October 2026.

Look at what they carry

Open the Players tab under Essentials and click the player's row. Their profile opens with Inventory and Ender chest tabs that show the items, and it also reads a player who is offline. Opening a profile needs both the Console & commands and File manager permissions, so a Moderator invite from the Team tab cannot open it.

Empty an online player's inventory

1. In the player's profile, open the Inventory tab.
2. Press Clear inventory, at the bottom right.
3. In the box "Clear 's inventory?", press Clear inventory again.

This deletes everything they carry, armour included. It does not touch their ender chest. The button is greyed out if the player has left, and its tooltip says "They need to be online". When the server is stopped, the profile says "Start the server to use these."

The panel sends the clear <name> command for you.

Remove one kind of item

Type this in the Console tab, without a slash:

clear Steve minecraft:tnt

The second part is the item's ID. Add a number at the end to remove at most that many, as in clear Steve minecraft:tnt 16. A 0 at the end removes nothing and reports how many the player holds, which makes a safe check before you remove them. The player has to be online. The Minecraft Wiki lists clear as permission level 2, so operators can run it in game too.

Empty an ender chest

clear does not reach the ender chest, and neither does Clear inventory. To empty one, use one of the options in the next section.

Offline players and whole ender chests

• OpenInv. This plugin opens any player's inventory or ender chest as a chest screen, and its Modrinth page says that includes offline players. It has /clearinv and /clearender commands, which need the openinv.clear.other permission. The OpenInv wiki does not say whether they work on an offline player, but the 5.3.5 source loads an offline player who has joined before, unless the sender lacks the openinv.access.offline permission or settings.disable-offline-access is true in OpenInv's config. Set up OpenInv shows the install.
• Edit the player's file. Minecraft stores the inventory in a list called Inventory and the ender chest in a list called EnderItems. Edit NBT, level.dat and player data shows how, with the server stopped.
• Reset the player. If the whole character should start again, Reset a player's data deletes their file.

If the player can log in, the simplest option is often to ask them to join, then use Clear inventory or clear.

If it did not work

• Clear inventory is greyed out. The player must be online and the server running. Start the server from the Console tab and have them join.
• The ender chest is still full. The Clear inventory button and clear do not touch it. Use the options above.
• You cleared the wrong player. Restore the backup from the Backups tab.