Charon's Echo

Death, reimagined. When you die, your items don't scatter — Charon takes them. A soul-fire portal rises where you fell, and your ghost must cross into Charon's Echo, an endless dusk-lit graveyard dimension, to stand at your own grave and settle with the Ferryman. Every death digs a headstone. The graveyard is the history of your server.

Built for the CurseForge Minecraft ModJam 2026 — "Echoes of the Past."

The death loop

1. You die. Your body lies in state for a minute — friends can kneel and lay a Charon's Obol on you to pay your fare.
2. You rise as a ghost — invisible but for a wisp of soul-fire, tethered to where you fell, until you walk into the portal.
3. You arrive at your own grave in Charon's Echo, and touch the stone. Charon offers three ways back:
   • Pay the fare — one Charon's Obol (craft: echo shard + gold + soul sand, soul-bound through death; or buy from the Broker's orchard, below).
   • Pay the toll — a cut of your XP.
   • Take the oath — enlist in the War Below the Moon and pay with time.
4. Resurrection at the stone — items, XP, and a portal home to where you fell. Beds never mattered.

The world of the dead

• Server-side only — vanilla Java clients and Bedrock players (via Geyser) join with no client mod and no resource pack.
• A unique graveyard per world — monochrome hills seeded from your world: pale moss, gravel scree, sculk vales, a winding river, hand-built withered trees, and grave fields that spiral outward as the dead accumulate, each behind its own lych gate with a living ledger sign.
• The church on the plateau: the Broker sells Stygian Seeds, the Scrivener hands out free books so the dead can write their stories, and the Book of the Dead rests on the lectern.
• The crypt grows with the dead — beneath the church, seven day-shelves hold a rolling week of the fallen, and the first death of every month breaks the seal and carves that month's hall. A year-old server has a corridor twelve halls deep.
• Grave books and flower tributes — the Scrivener hands out free books; write your death story into your stone. The living shift-click flowers onto graves (one per mourner — the only color in this world), and the most-mourned soul is crowned Death of the Week.
• Memorials, not lists — everywhere the dead are recorded, they appear as their own head, with their date, cause, grave location, and flowers. Every ledger turns its pages — 45 souls a screen, however long your server lives — and a spyglass seeks any name in the roll. Click a memorial to read their story, or (from within the graveyard) walk straight to their stone.

The Stygian Orchard

Buy a Stygian Seed from the Broker and plant it in the overworld. It grows (in its own time) into a withered tree that hangs Tollfruit from its chains — sculk seals each fruit, then it ripens into glowing amber. Four Tollfruit craft one obol. The tree drops nothing else, ever: felling it (netherite axe, a slow ritual) returns only its seed. Wild elders in the graveyard bear fruit too — the one thing the living may take from the dead's world. And some trees are more than they seem.

The War Below the Moon

An eternal three-sided war, fought at the newest grave field: twin iron golem groundskeepers and creaking Keepers hold the yards, the risen Restless tear at them — risen armed with their grave goods, mismatched pieces of chain, iron, and buried gold, swords up front and bows behind (nothing they carry ever drops) — and the Hollow Wind raids both. The war cannot see the living — walk through it untouched. Only the enlisted dead are real to it: take the oath, receive a loaned kit, fight (enemies downed shave your sentence), and serve out your clock for a free resurrection. Enlisted players of opposing banners can fight each other — defeat costs service time, never items. Filled fields become settled ground; the front marches on.

In the works / coming soon

• The hand-built crypt — the current stairwell and halls are carved by code; a full hand-built crypt kit (stairwell, week room, month halls, seals) will replace them piece by piece.
• Fences and ruins — hand-built fence sections will replace the plain pale-oak fence around grave fields (the system is already wired), and ruins of the folk who came before will join the scattered wilds.
• The war leaves marks — contested ground will show who holds it: sculk creeping over Restless-held yards, Keepers cleansing it — and when a field fills, its final state freezes as the war's permanent record.
• A moonlit sky — an optional skybox with real moon phases over the eternal night.
• More of everything — headstones, trees, gates, and whole style families (sets) grow over time; server builders can author their own in the Studio today.
• A Minecraft 26.1.2 build and formal Bedrock/Geyser verification.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2 (Fabric)
• Fabric API — that's it; sgui is bundled inside the jar

Every timer, price, cap, and war knob lives in config/charons-echo.properties, written as a documented manual.

For builders: the Studio

All landmark builds (headstones, trees, gates, the church, crypt pieces) are hand-built structure templates, authored in the Studio — a flat builders-only world:

• /charon studio — enter (gamemasters and rostered gravekeepers only; add builders with /charon builder add <player>)
• Build inside a plot outline; your build's front faces its label sign. You may dig below grade — coffins, roots, floors, and foundations ship.
• /charon plot new <category> <name> stakes a plot, /charon export [name] captures it, /charon place <name> reviews it.
• Sets (style families): /charon set new <name> [size], with a trust/approve/reopen lifecycle. Each graveyard region draws from ONE set.

EXPORT = SAVE. Studio builds are just blocks; templates are forever. The Studio self-restores every exported build at server start.

License

MIT