Item Despawn Flash

Vanilla Minecraft removes a dropped item five minutes after it appeared and gives you no warning: you look away, the diamond is gone. Item Despawn Flash tells you it is about to go.

For the last 30 seconds of an item's life it is drawn on and off, slowly. For the last 10 seconds it blinks fast. Every item has its own timer, and an item you just dropped is never touched. Only the item's picture is hidden on the dark frames; its small shadow stays.

- Single player and LAN host: exact. The game's own server runs inside the game, so the mod copies each item's true age from it. Merged stacks, items that come back into view (your own death drops), a lagging tick rate and the Wither's nether star are all handled correctly
- Multiplayer: the mod counts the age itself, from the moment your game first sees the item (see the limitations below)
- Nothing to configure: it works as soon as it is installed
- Client-side only: only the picture of the item is changed. Nothing is sent to the server, nothing on the server is changed, and it shows nothing the client does not already have
- Requires Fabric Loader 0.19.5+ and Java 25, for Minecraft 26.3. Fabric API is not needed
- Checked by an automated client test on 26.3 (screenshots in the gallery): items in the last 30 s and last 10 s are missing on the off frames and drawn on the on frames, each of two items judged separately; young items and items past the vanilla time are always drawn; in single player the server's age wins over the client's count (including a nether-star-style long lifetime and an item that came back from 400 blocks away); a small stack merged into an old pile gives the pile the younger age, in single player and in the multiplayer mode

Known limitations on multiplayer (single player is exact):
- Your own death drops: if you respawn far away and walk back, your game sees the items as new and they will not blink before they vanish. The same goes for any item that was already old when it came into view, or that you left and came back to: its warning comes late or not at all.
- Merged stacks: the mod applies vanilla's rule (the kept stack takes the younger age) when it sees a stack grow while a same item within 3 blocks vanishes or shrinks. If it sees the growth without the other item, or the other item was itself uncertain, it cannot tell the new age and stops blinking that stack. If someone picks up the same item right next to a pile at the moment it merges, the pile may be counted too young and warn late or not at all.
- Nether stars (from the Wither, the only vanilla item with a longer lifetime) last ten minutes. The client cannot know, so it blinks at 4.5 minutes, stops, and the star vanishes silently at 10 minutes.
- Laggy servers: the client counts 20 ticks a second, a slow server fewer. Blinking continues for 30 seconds past the vanilla time, which covers a server running at 18 ticks per second or better; on a worse server the blinking can stop before the item vanishes. A server whose simulation distance is shorter than the item tracking range does the same for far items. Servers that change the despawn time make the warning early or late, and items that never despawn there blink for about 70 seconds and then stop.
- Not tested on a dedicated server, on Linux or macOS, or with other rendering or item-display mods.

Disclosure: this mod was developed with AI assistance (Claude). It does not reuse code or assets from other mods. It does not collect or transmit any data.