Dead Heads

Vanilla scatters your inventory across the ground and starts a five-minute timer on it. Everything about that is hostile: the pile drifts, half of it is in lava, and the clock runs whether or not you know where you are.

Here your things go into your head — a real player head, wearing your face, placed at the spot. Nothing despawns. Nothing scatters. The head sits there until somebody empties it, and for the first few minutes that somebody can only be you.

You also respawn holding a compass pointed at it, because knowing your things are safe is not the same as knowing where they are.

Optionally, mobs do the same: one killed by a player leaves its drops in a head at the spot it fell, and that head rots if nobody claims it.

Getting Your Things Back

Right-click the head. It empties and disappears.

Back where they were, not into the first free square. The helmet goes on your head, the shield to your offhand, the pickaxe under the key it was under. Handed back as a heap — everything present, none of it anywhere — recovery would start with two minutes of putting your own kit on again.

Only ever into a slot that is empty. If you died naked, ran back in borrowed armour and picked up your head, the borrowed set is not swapped out from under you; anything whose place is taken goes into the pack instead, the way it always did.

Where Chest Utils is installed, your pack is sorted afterwards — with your hotbar lock honoured, because that mod holds your answer to what tidy means. Only when you collect your own head. Looting a stranger's skull does not rummage through your pack.

The Death Compass

You respawn with a compass aimed at your head. It is an ordinary compass carrying a lodestone target, so there is no new item, no model, and nothing client-side.

It is pinned to one head, not to your last death. Vanilla's recovery compass forgets the body you were walking to the moment you die again on the way. This one does not: a second death hands you a second compass and the first still points where it pointed.

It is spent when its head is gone — harvested by you, looted by somebody else, broken, blown up, or rotted where it stood. That is the moment it stops pointing at anything worth walking to, and it is the same moment for everyone carrying one. You are told when it happens.

Walking to the place is not enough. Arriving and not picking the head up is a thing people do — hands full, wrong tools, coming back with a shulker — and the compass that got you there should still be there for the second trip.

The one exception is a death that left no head at all: you died with nothing on you, or somewhere there was no room for one. That compass points at bare ground nothing will ever harvest, so arriving is the only end it can have.

Being handed your first one earns Retracing Your Steps.

Where The Compass Lives

It is put somewhere you will look rather than a square in the pack: Map++'s compass slot if you have that mod, otherwise your offhand, then the pack, then the floor. An ordinary compass already in the slot is moved down into the pack rather than thrown away.

It is also lifted out of that slot when you die, because the slot's store is inventory like any other and a compass buried in the head it points at is no compass at all.

Whose Head It Is

For a configurable while after you die, only you can empty it. Anybody else is told whose head it is and how long is left.

Another mod can give a place a lock time of its own, and PvP Dimensions does, so each arena can have its own: none at all, where anything dropped is fair game at once, or longer than the server's.

After that it unlocks for anyone, and visibly: it turns into a skeleton skull, and you are told it has. Somebody who empties a head that is not theirs also gets a player head bearing the owner's face, which is the only consolation this mod offers and about the right amount.

Breaking a locked head is refused, and an explosion leaves it standing. Breaking an unlocked one pops its contents out as ordinary drops rather than losing them, and so does anything else that removes the block.

Soulbound

One enchantment, one level, on anything that takes an enchantment: what carries it does not go in the head. It is still in your hands when you stand back up, in the slot it was in - or in the pack, for something out of a slot another mod added, since that slot does not outlive the respawn.

Curse of Vanishing outranks it. A cursed item is gone at death, as vanilla has it, rather than kept safe in the head or carried across - soulbound or not.

Treasure, on the same terms as Mending: found in chests, bought from librarians, never made at a table. The head-and-compass deal is the right one for nearly everything you own; this is for the few things you would rather not have to walk back for.

It is kept through the body rather than through this mod's own files. A dead player still has an inventory and the game saves it like any other, so a server that restarts while you are on the death screen has lost nothing.

Dead Reckoning

A potion that takes you back to where you died. Brew a chorus fruit onto a potion of healing - plain or strong - and that is what comes out, with the healing landing as you do. The compass tells you the way; this is for when the way is the problem.

Each bottle is one jump, and the jumps run in the order you would want them:

1. Your newest head. Then, bottle by bottle, each older head of yours.
2. Somebody else's head, once you have stood at all of your own. A player's that has come unlocked or a mob's, chosen at random, which is what the skulls scattered around a server are for.
3. Nowhere. Past all of those the potion has one place left to take you, and it kills you. The head that death leaves is unlocked from the start. You are told before the swallow.

Your own death starts the tour over from the newest head, which is the one that death just made.

You land on the nearest place with room to stand and ground underfoot, found by walking out through open space from the head, so it is in the head's own cave rather than a nearer one on the far side of a wall. On top of the head wins a tie. Never in lava or fire. A head sealed in rock gets the nearest such spot through the rock instead. Landing under water gives you 45 seconds of water breathing, enough to empty the head and swim up.

It is brewed by an ordinary datapack recipe into an ordinary potion carrying a colour, an effect, a name and a mark, rather than a new entry in the potion registry. To a player the two are the same bottle; the difference is that a registry entry would have to be on every client, and this mod's promise is that a vanilla client needs nothing.

Brewing one takes a chorus fruit, which takes the End, which is a long way from the first death that needs one. So the chests of the places people die in carry a bottle now and then: dungeons, mineshafts, strongholds, temples, igloos, outposts, woodland mansions, shipwrecks, buried treasure, ruined portals, fortresses, bastions, end cities, ancient cities and trial chambers, one chest in five, one bottle. A find, not a supply.

Commands

For ops, when the compass and the potion are not enough.

Command
/deadheads tp [player]	Sends the player (yourself if none is named) back to where they last died
/deadheads where [player]	Says where that is

"Where they last died" is the game's own record of the last death, which is written whether or not a head was left; where a head of theirs stands in that column, it is the head. The newest head stands in when there is no record. The landing is the potion's: the nearest place to stand, with water breathing under water.

Mob Heads

Off by default. /gamerule dead-heads:mob_heads true per world, or mob_heads_default in the config for new ones.

• Player kills only. A mob that drowns, burns, falls, or is killed by another mob behaves exactly as vanilla, which is how vanilla already gates most loot.
• The head matches the mob where vanilla has one — zombie, creeper, piglin, skeleton, wither skeleton — and everything else gets a plain skeleton skull. No custom skins, so nothing is needed client-side.
• No owner and no lock, exactly like the item entities they replace.
• Nothing dropped means no head.
• Bosses are excluded. A unique drop on a decay timer is a bad trade.
• Experience is untouched. XP orbs drop and behave normally.
• They rot. An unclaimed mob head disappears after a while and its contents are consumed rather than dropped — the ground around it gets a bonemeal growth instead, scaled to how much was inside. Take the kill before it turns, or feed the garden.

Player death heads never rot, and none of this touches them.

Details Worth Knowing

• It respects keepInventory. Creative, spectator, or the game rule on, and this mod does nothing at all.
• A death in water leaves the head on the bottom beneath you, and water and lava flow around a player's head instead of washing it away. Mob heads are not held dry: at a farm that would dam the stream carrying the drops.
• Out of the fluid otherwise. Anywhere else the head goes at the death spot or the first open block above it that is not fluid, so it climbs out of a lava pool onto its surface. Where nothing within ten blocks up will do, it goes where you died, lava or not, rather than your inventory going into it.
• Two deaths cannot share a spot. A tracked head is never a candidate position for the next one, which is rare for players and routine at a mob grinder.
• Extra inventory slots come too. Slots other mods add to the inventory screen are emptied into the head with everything else, and put back on recovery. Left alone they would be neither dropped nor kept: the store behind them is not carried across a respawn, and an equipped map would simply stop existing.
• Heads in unloaded chunks are still heads. The record, not the world, is what a compass asks — so a compass does not expire because its owner walked away.
• It survives restarts. Head data is saved periodically and on shutdown, and reloaded on start.
• Older heads still open. Ones written before this mod recorded slots hand their contents back the way they always did, in the first free square.

Configuration

With Pandorical installed, all three are on the Dead Heads page of the mod menu, for ops. The file is where they are kept, config/dead-heads.properties:

Key	Default
lock_duration_minutes	5	How long a head stays yours. 0 disables locking
mob_heads_default	false	Starting value of the game rule for new worlds
mob_head_decay_seconds	600	How long an unclaimed mob head lasts. 0 keeps them forever

The decay timer is wall-clock, so mob heads age while the server is offline.

Pandorical

Dead Heads runs server-side and works on a vanilla client. Pandorical is optional, and used for two things: the settings page above, and telling the client that a right-click on a player head is the server's to answer. Without that the client predicts a block placement, the server opens the head instead, and the skull flickers in and out with the stack count briefly wrong. The extra inventory slots other mods add are Pandorical's too, so without it there are none to empty.

Map++ and Chest Utils integrations are likewise optional and guarded — absent, their features simply are not there.