Dead Heads

• Death drops become a head: when a player dies (and would normally lose their inventory), their dropped items are stored inside a placed player head at the death location instead of scattering on the ground
• Temporary ownership lock: for a configurable duration after death, only the original owner can retrieve the head's contents; other players are told whose head it is and how long until it unlocks
• Auto-unlock: after the lock duration elapses, the head unlocks for anyone, visually turning into a skeleton skull, and the original owner is notified
• Retrieve by right-click: right-clicking an unlocked (or owned) head empties its stored items into the player's inventory (dropping any that don't fit) and removes the head; a non-owner also receives a head item bearing the original owner's identity
• Breaking preserves items: breaking someone else's locked head is blocked; breaking an unlocked/owned head (or one whose block is otherwise removed) drops its stored items as normal item drops instead of losing them
• Persists across restarts: death head data is saved periodically and on shutdown, and reloaded on server start, so heads and their contents survive a server restart
• Respects keepInventory: does nothing if the player is in creative/spectator mode or the keepInventory game rule is on
• Configurable lock duration: dead-heads.properties controls how many minutes a head stays locked to its owner (0 disables locking entirely)

Mob heads

Off by default. Turn it on per world with /gamerule dead-heads:mob_heads true, or change the starting value for new worlds in dead-heads.properties.

• One head instead of a pile of drops: a mob killed by a player leaves a head block at the spot it fell, holding everything it would have dropped
• Player kills only: a mob that drowns, burns, falls, or is killed by another mob behaves exactly as vanilla, which is also how vanilla already gates most loot
• The head matches the mob where vanilla has one (zombie, creeper, piglin, skeleton, wither skeleton); every other mob gets a plain skeleton skull. No custom skins are involved, so nothing is needed client-side
• Experience is untouched: XP orbs still drop and behave normally
• Nothing dropped means no head: a mob that had no drops leaves nothing behind
• Bosses are excluded: the wither and the ender dragon keep their vanilla drops, since a unique drop on a decay timer is a bad trade
• Anyone can claim it: mob heads have no owner and no lock, exactly like the item entities they replace. Right-click to take the contents, or break the head to pop them out as ordinary drops
• Heads rot: an unclaimed mob head disappears after a while. Its contents are consumed rather than dropped, and the ground around it gets a bonemeal growth instead, scaled to how much was inside. Take the kill before it turns, or feed the garden
• Configurable decay: mob_head_decay_seconds in dead-heads.properties, defaulting to twice the vanilla item despawn time (0 keeps mob heads forever). The timer is wall-clock, so heads also age while the server is offline

Player death heads are unaffected by any of this: they keep their own lock, retrieval, and persistence rules and never rot.