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Rules and Edge Cases

Divesh Gupta edited this page Jul 31, 2026 · 4 revisions

Rules and Edge Cases

The exact rules, and the situations that surprise people. If something did not come back and you want to know why, it is almost certainly on this page.

The rule, slot by slot

For each inventory, armour, offhand and accessory slot, in this order:

Situation What happens
Slot was empty at death Nothing
Item has Curse of Vanishing Destroyed, as in vanilla
Item has Curse of Binding Kept exactly as it was at death
You slept with nothing in that slot All of it drops; it is new loot
Item is damageable Kept if it is the same item, at its death durability
Anything else Keep min(slept, at death), drop the remainder

Modified items are different items

Matching is exact on item type and components. Change a component and it is no longer the item you slept with, so it drops instead of coming back:

  • Enchanting or renaming a tool on an anvil after sleeping
  • Writing in a book you slept with
  • Dyeing armour

The item is not destroyed; it drops at your death site like any other new loot. But it will not be in your hands when you respawn.

Durability is the deliberate exception: a damaged tool still matches, and comes back damaged.

Shulker boxes and bundles

These get special handling, because otherwise putting one torch in the shulker you slept with would forfeit the whole shulker.

With containerAwareMatching on (the default), a container comes back holding the intersection of what it held in the dream and what it still held at death. Anything added since drops.

  • Slept with a shulker holding 32 diamonds, added 16 more, died → you get the box back with 32, and 16 drop.
  • Slept with a shulker holding 64 diamonds, took them all out and put them in a chest, died → you get an empty box back. The diamonds are in your chest; they are not duplicated.

Turn the setting off and any container whose contents changed at all is forfeited whole.

Deaths where the loot cannot survive

If you die in lava or the void, the forfeited items burn or vanish exactly as they would in vanilla. Your snapshot gear is unaffected; it never entered the world. This is the case the mod protects you from best.

XP

You keep min(slept, at death) XP, so spending XP after sleeping does not hand it back. The rest drops as orbs.

experienceLossPercent takes a further cut of what you would otherwise keep, as a difficulty dial. At 0 you keep all of it; at 100, none.

Repeat deaths

By default the snapshot survives being used, so you can die twice and get the same loadout both times. Servers that want a checkpoint to be single-use can set clearSnapshotOnRespawn=true, which makes you sleep again after every death.

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