Death
Death is partial. You keep your gear and half your experience. You lose your bonus hearts.
What you keep
Your worn armor. All four pieces, always.
Your tools and weapons, anywhere in the inventory: swords, axes, pickaxes, shovels, hoes, spears, anything bow, crossbow, trident or mace enchantable, shields, shears, flint and steel, fishing rods, brushes, any bucket, anything with a glider component, carrot on a stick and warped fungus on a stick.
Maps, filled maps and recovery compasses. Plus the Map Book, if Exploration Reloaded is installed.
Half your experience. You cannot get back more than you actually lost.
Everything comes back in its original inventory slot, so you do not respawn to a scrambled hotbar.
keepInventory gamerule is off. Turning vanilla keepInventory on disables the whole system, because at that point nothing is being dropped anyway.What you lose
Everything else drops normally: blocks, food, ores, potions, arrows, the shulker box you were carrying.
And every bonus heart.
Bonus hearts
A Tidal Draught permanently adds one heart to your maximum health and heals you to full. You can hold five, for twenty-two hearts total.
Brewing: Thick Potion + Heart of the Sea.
Getting Hearts of the Sea: buried treasure, and fishing. There is a 4% chance of one attached to any fishing treasure catch, in addition to the normal treasure item, which makes bonus hearts renewable.
Splash and Lingering Tidal Draughts exist, and so do Arrows of the Tides. The effect grants a heart to any player it lands on, so you can give hearts to teammates.
Bonus hearts render as deep navy hearts at the end of your health bar, with a slow wave travelling along the row. They persist across relogs and come back full. You do not see other players' bonus hearts.
Why bonus hearts are the penalty
Dropping your gear punishes the hours you spent enchanting it. keepInventory punishes nothing. Bonus hearts punish a specific, renewable, measurable amount of effort: five Hearts of the Sea worth of fishing.
You lose something real, you can get it back, and losing it never sets you back to zero.
Read the reasoning in Why death keeps tools but removes bonus hearts.
Server settings
| Setting | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
partial_keep_inventory | true | Master switch for the whole system |
death_xp_keep_percent | 50 | Percentage of experience returned, 0 to 100 |
death_xp_drop_cap | 1000 | Maximum experience dropped on death |
keepEquippedArmor | true | Keep the four worn pieces |
keepToolsAndWeapons | true | Keep tools and weapons anywhere in the inventory |
keepOnDeathAllowlist | Map Book | Extra item IDs to protect |
bonusHeartsMax | 5 | Maximum bonus hearts |
deathPenaltyEnabled | false | Optional respawn debuff, off by default |
Datapacks can extend the protected set through the fairlands:keep_on_death item tag.