Simple Graves

When a player dies, their inventory and experience are stored in a grave block at the death location instead of scattering across the ground. The grave is protected so only the owner (and optionally ops) can open it until it expires or its protection window runs out.

Unique feature: server admins can exclude specific players from ever getting a grave. Excluded players either drop items normally on death (vanilla behavior) or, if configured, lose their items entirely.

Features

• Grave placed at the death location (with fallback search if the spot is unsuitable — inside terrain, in a wall, etc.)
• Stores all main inventory, armor, offhand items, and (optionally) XP
• Grave is protected: only the owner can open it for a configurable number of seconds (or forever, or never — fully configurable)
• Ops can optionally bypass protection
• Graves auto-expire after a configurable time and spill their contents on the ground
• Ambient soul particles, configurable sounds on creation/claim
• Death-location chat message to the owner; optional nearby-player announcement
• Grave Compass: on death, the player receives a compass that points toward their grave (vanilla lodestone-tracker needle behavior), lets them check the grave's remaining contents and protection status with a right-click, and — sneak + right-click — remotely removes the grave's protection so anyone can loot it (handy if you want a friend to grab your stuff without having to find/share coordinates)
• Per-player exclusion list — chosen players never get a grave
• In-game /graves command to manage the exclusion list and view config without editing files
• Practically indestructible by mining (50 hardness / 1200 blast resistance) — it's removed only by being claimed or expiring

The Grave Compass

When giveGraveCompass is enabled (default), dying with a grave gives you a compass item that:

• Points toward your grave, using the same needle behavior as a vanilla lodestone compass.
• Right-click the compass to see the grave's remaining contents, distance, and protection status in chat.
• Sneak + right-click the compass to remove the grave's protection remotely — after this, anyone can loot the grave, not just you. Useful if you want a friend to recover your items for you.
• If the grave has already been claimed or has expired, using the compass tells you it's gone instead of pointing at nothing.

The compass works across dimensions (it'll tell you if the grave's dimension isn't currently loaded) and stores its target using the item's own data, so it keeps working even if you log out and back in.

Excluding players from graves

Add a player's name (or UUID, for name-change safety) to excludedPlayers, either by editing the JSON directly or via command:

/graves exclude add Notch
/graves exclude remove Notch
/graves exclude list

When excludedPlayersDropItemsNormally is true (default), excluded players just get vanilla item-scatter behavior on death — no grave at all. If set to false, their items are removed entirely on death instead (use with care — this is permanent item loss).

Other admin commands

/graves list      — list tracked grave positions in the current world
/graves reload    — reload simplegraves.json from disk without restarting

All /graves subcommands require permission level 2 (op).

Notes on design choices

• Item capture happens on Fabric API's ServerLivingEntityEvents.ALLOW_DEATH, which fires before vanilla's dropInventory() runs, so the player's inventory is copied into the grave and cleared before vanilla has a chance to scatter it on the ground.
• The grave block is set to dropsNothing() with very high hardness/blast resistance so it can't realistically be mined away — the only ways to remove it are right-clicking as an authorized player, or letting it expire.
• A lightweight in-memory GraveManager registry tracks grave positions per world purely for the /graves list convenience command; the actual grave data lives in the block entity's NBT and persists fine across restarts even though this registry doesn't (it's just rebuilt as new graves are created during that session).

Known limitations / possible follow-ups

• The placeholder grave texture/model is a simple procedurally generated stone-ish block — swap in your own texture/model if you want something fancier.
• /graves list only shows graves created during the current server session (see note above); it doesn't scan the world for older ones.
• There's no GUI; everything is config-file + command driven.