Minecraft, but Death Leaves a Grave

One tick after you die, the pack sweeps up every item lying at the spot and writes them, components and enchantments intact, into a chest placed at the first block a chest may legally stand in above where you fell. The coordinates arrive in chat, a soul flame plume marks the chest until you empty it, and /trigger bdg_grave reprints the spot any time. Void deaths are clamped to a safe height, lava and fire are skipped when picking the block, a second chest goes on top of the first when 27 slots is not enough (or at the next free block above it, with those coordinates sent too), and your experience levels are handed back on respawn. All plain vanilla commands.

Built for Java Edition 26.3 only. Older versions read loot tables, predicates and advancements in a different format, so they list the pack as made for a newer version, and it will not work there.

How it works

• A tick loop watches the vanilla deathCount criterion, so the grave is built the tick after you die while a dead player is still standing on the exact block they fell on. Die with nothing to drop and no chest is placed.
• Every item entity within three blocks is tagged, copied into command storage, given its slot number there and appended to the chest's Items list, and removed only once the chest holds it, so enchantments, durability and custom names all survive the move. When two players die in the same tick, each drop goes to the death it lies nearest to, so each gets their own grave.
• The pack searches upward from the death point for the first block a chest may legally occupy, skipping lava and fire, so a grave never lands inside a lava lake and rarely eats one of your own blocks.
• Void and roof deaths are clamped to a safe height per dimension with location_check predicates, so falling out of the End still leaves a recoverable chest instead of nothing at all.
• A full inventory is 41 stacks and a chest holds 27, so when the first chest fills a second one is placed above it: directly on top when that block is free, otherwise at the next free block up the same column, and its coordinates are sent in chat as well. Two chests hold 54 stacks, so going past that takes loot from the fight lying in the same spot; whatever is left over stays on the ground as ordinary drops and the chat message says so.
• Levels are sampled every tick, the orbs you drop are cleared, and the exact level count is handed back the moment you respawn. Run /trigger bdg_grave to reprint your last grave coordinates.

Installing it

1. 1.Download the zip below. Do not unzip it — Minecraft reads the zip directly.
2. 2.In Minecraft, click your world, then Edit, then Open World Folder.
3. 3.Drop the zip into the datapacks folder inside that world.
4. 4.Load the world. Run /datapack list to confirm it is enabled.

First time? How to install Minecraft data packs

Written by MineSpecs and released under CC0 — public domain. Use it, change it, ship it in a modpack, no attribution required. Pairs well with our mods, shaders and resource packs.