GraveBound

Gravebound is a vanilla-plus quality-of-life mod for Minecraft 1.21.1 on both Fabric and NeoForge. It transforms death from a punishment into a short recovery quest: when you die, a glowing Gravestone spawns where you fell, quietly preserving everything you'd otherwise lose.

What happens when you die? A gravestone is placed at your death spot (it searches for free space and faces your death direction). Your dropped items are swept safely inside, and your experience is captured and stored — no loss, no duplication. With the keep-inventory gamerule on, your inventory is moved into the grave instead. You're told exactly where it rests.

Getting your stuff back: The grave is protected against other players (owner-only, timed, or public — your choice), so only you or your teammates can reclaim it. Break it to recover your items, get your experience back as orbs, and receive a brief Absorption + Regeneration soul buff for the trouble. Graves are explosion-resistant and can't be moved by pistons.

Finding it again: Craft a Grave Compass (compass + 4 bones) and right-click it to get your grave's coordinates, distance, and dimension — even across dimensions and after restarts, thanks to a persistent grave registry.

A whole death-themed world:

Soul Vials siphon experience out of graves so you can carry and release it later (or buy pre-filled ones). Graveyard structures generate in the world with buried treasure and a Gravekeeper villager, who trades compasses and soul vials in exchange for the detritus of the dead. Modpack-friendly and configurable: Everything toggles via a single config/gravebound.json — master switch, keep-inventory behavior, XP storage, soul buff, protection mode and timing, despawn timer, sweep radius, soul vial capacity, and team access. One tiny mixin, no invasive changes.

Death, but kinder.