Corpse: Recovering Your Items After Death
Corpse changes what happens when you die: instead of items scattering and despawning, they are stored safely in a corpse. This guide covers how it works.
Your death corpse
When you die, a corpse spawns at your location containing every item you were carrying. It even takes on your player skin, so it is easy to recognize. Right-click the corpse to access its inventory and reclaim your items; once you have taken everything out, the corpse disappears.
Safe storage
The corpse is far safer than dropped items. It holds an infinite amount, cannot fall into the void or burn in lava, and floats in liquids like water and lava — so a death in a dangerous place no longer means losing everything. After one hour it turns into a skeleton to show it has existed a while, but your items remain retrievable.
Why use it
Corpse removes the worst frustration of dying in Minecraft — losing a full inventory to a lava death or a despawn timer. With it installed, death becomes a recoverable setback: find your corpse, right-click, and take your gear back.
A mod with no content at all
Corpse is worth describing by what it does not contain. It registers no items, no blocks, no recipes and no worldgen structures — nothing to craft, nothing to place, nothing to find.
That is not a limitation, it is the whole design. The mod replaces one vanilla behaviour and adds nothing else, which makes it about as light as a mod can be. There is no tech tree to learn, no bench to build and no material to gather before it starts working.
It is on from the first death
Because there is nothing to unlock, the mod is already active the moment a world loads. You do not prepare for it, and there is no state you can be in where it has not started yet.
Why that matters for a pack
A mod with no registry entries cannot conflict with another mod's items, cannot occupy an ID, and cannot change any recipe. Adding it to an existing world is safe, and removing it later leaves nothing behind to clean up — the usual worry with death-handling mods, which often store your inventory inside a block they registered.
Two builds, same behaviour
The builds are 1.1.13 on 1.21.1 and 1.0.23 on 1.20.1. Neither registers anything, so there is no version difference to account for and no migration to plan.
What to actually do
Nothing, before you die. The useful preparation is knowing your coordinates when you do — the mod holds your inventory for you, but it cannot tell you where you left it.