Death Forensics

The vanilla death message says "you blew up." This says what blew you up, where, from which direction, with how many hostiles around — automatically, the instant you die.

"I died and have no idea what hit me" is one of the most common Minecraft frustrations — admins on r/admincraft chasing mystery deaths, players on r/feedthebeast killed by something off-screen with nothing to learn from. The vanilla message is too vague to act on. Death Forensics turns each death into a short, plain-language post-mortem you can actually use.

• 🔎 Auto-posted on death — no command needed; a color-coded report lands in chat
• 🧭 Exact coords + dimension + in-world day, the killer's type, distance and 8-wind direction
• 🌐 Cause text reuses Minecraft's own death message, so it shows in each player's own language automatically
• ✅ Only certain vanilla facts — it never guesses

What it does / Usage

When you die, this is posted to chat automatically:

Death Forensics — your last death:
 ┃ Cause: Slain by Zombie
 ┃ Died at (210, 64, -88) in overworld, on day 12.
 ┃ Zombie was about 8 blocks to the Northeast.
 ┃ 14 hostile mob(s) were within 16 blocks at the time.

/howdididie (alias /deathreport) re-shows your last death any time. /howdididie <player> is op-only.

Supported loaders / versions

Forge / Fabric / 1.20.1 ports are planned; this release is NeoForge 1.21.1.

Dependencies

None.

Compatibility & scope

Server-side, read-only: it only listens to vanilla LivingDeathEvent and reports. No mixin, no registered blocks/items, no passive tick task — it cannot conflict with other mods. Works with any mod's damage sources (cause text comes from vanilla's own death message).

Known limitations

v0.1 keeps only your last death in memory (cleared on server stop). The persistent multi-death history is a separate mod (Death Log) by design, so the two don't overlap. /howdididie <player> (op) only resolves players who are currently online.

Install

1. Install NeoForge for Minecraft 1.21.1.
2. Drop deathforensics-0.1.0.jar into mods/. Server-side (clients don't need it).

• Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge · JDK 21

Languages

Output localized in 9 languages (machine-baseline; native-speaker PRs welcome).

License

MIT — modpack inclusion welcome, no credit required.

Author: KURONAMI