Death's Due

Keep your inventory. Death still takes its due.

Death’s Due adds a cost to dying without making you run back for an entire inventory of scattered gear. Built for worlds that use keepInventory, it gives death a chance to cost you a few belongings, then offers a way to buy eligible losses back through the Adventurer’s Guild.

A scavenger might help themselves to your sword after a bad landing. Your pack might catch on a ledge above the lava, only for someone else to carry it away. How you died shapes the story of what happened to your items.

Make the Guild your first stop

By default, speaking to a Guild Agent unlocks recovery for future stolen items. When you lose something afterward, return to an Agent, review your claims, and choose what is worth buying back.

Theft can happen before your first visit. Those earlier losses are permanent; joining the Guild does not recover them retroactively.

The Guild keeps up to five outstanding claims per player by default. If another claim pushes you over the limit, the oldest is lost permanently.

Servers can also limit buybacks per visit. Reaching that limit recycles any remaining claims, with a confirmation warning before the final purchase.

Choose how much death should cost

• Configure eligible hotbar, armor, and optional Curios slots, with separate theft chances for each category.
• Allow up to three independent theft attempts per death.
• Remove a whole selected stack or just one item.
• Use recoverable theft, or switch to permanent destruction for a harsher experience.
• Protect particular items or entire mod namespaces with a blacklist.
• Adjust claim limits, recovery costs, dimension multipliers, and repeated-death discounts.

Recovery uses emeralds by default. Optional Create: Numismatics integration charges the player’s account and adds item-value pricing, quantity scaling, item/tag overrides, and a configurable balance-based cost cap. Cheap materials do not automatically cost the same as valuable equipment.

Protect your favorite gear

Deathward is a treasure enchantment that protects an item from both theft and destruction. Deathward books can appear in Ancient City chests.

A configurable enchantment-protection list also supports registered Soulbound enchantments, including Ender IO’s Soulbound by default. Other mods’ custom NBT or capability-based protection systems are not automatically covered.

Every loss has a story

Death’s Due includes 279 loss narratives across 31 categories, covering all vanilla Minecraft 1.20.1 damage types. Each category has separate variants for recoverable losses, destruction, and losses before Guild enrollment.

Lava and void recovery messages explain how the belongings escaped the hazard. Immediate-repeat avoidance helps keep familiar deaths from producing the same line every time. Item names, attacker names, chat messages, and actionbar messages are configurable.

These stories do not spawn thieves or physical loot trails. Recovery happens through the Guild’s claim interface, not a corpse or grave block.

For servers and modpacks

Choose automatic access, first-visit enrollment, or an external unlock controlled through operator commands. Grant, revoke, and query commands let pack authors connect Guild access to their own quest rewards or server progression without requiring a scripting mod.

Guild setup is currently manual. The Adventurer’s Guild Desk is a Creative/command-only workstation with no crafting recipe or survival drops. Place one where an eligible unemployed villager can claim it to establish a Guild Agent.

Speak to the Agent to open recovery; the desk itself does not open the menu. Guild buildings do not generate naturally in this release.

Installation and compatibility

• Minecraft Java 1.20.1 / Forge / Java 17
• Required on both client and server.
• Enable keepInventory; the mod only processes deaths with it enabled by default.
• Curios and Create: Numismatics integrations are optional. Neither is required for emerald recovery.
• If using Create: Numismatics, use its Forge 1.20.1 version 1.1.0 or newer. Version 1.1.0 is the tested integration baseline.

Server settings are stored in:

<world>/serverconfig/deaths_due-server.toml